Somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted.

I loved Melina Marchetta's previous works, so when The Piper's Son was released a year ago in Australia with no US release date in sight, I preordered the book. 

I loved it. It took me a while to process; I reread it a few times. I finally wrote a review on Goodreads last July. I'm reposting it here – I stand by every word.

( Maybe she'd always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spend the rest of your life searching for them. )

"...And you know how it happens. One day you pass strangers by and think, I used to hang out with them." (The Piper's Son)

"I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself." (Saving Francesca)

"It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love." (Jellicoe Road)

‘You’re going to go on living. Because living is the challenge, Josie. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take you eighty years and you do something in that time, whether it’s giving birth to a baby or being a housewife or a barrister or a soldier. You’ve accomplished something. To throw that away at such a young age, to have no hope, is the biggest tragedy.’ (Looking for Alibrandi)

Recently, at a YA festival in Sydney I was asked to comment on this genre of YA and my readership. It gets too complicated sometimes, because audience is the last thing you’re thinking of when you write. But I just love that teenagers read my work. It’s a privileged place we hold in their lives. We have access to places that most people don’t. We’re in those bedrooms late at night; we’re in the very dark place of a young person who feels rage at the world; we’ve been told we make black holes a bit smaller. We try to make sense of a world that stopped making sense to even their parents. I don’t think for one moment, that’s our responsibility as writers, but I’m glad that it’s our reality.

I know some people have a thirty page rule. I wish they didn’t. I’d like to think there are so many wonderful surprises on page 31 of someone’s story. I’d like to think that the first line of a novel doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read the last.

My father took one hundred and thirty two minutes to die.

I counted.

It happened on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I’d ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-La. We were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because I wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, “What’s the difference between a trip and a journey?” and my father said, “Narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand,” and that was the last thing he ever said.

We heard her almost straight away. In the other car, wedged into ours so deep that you couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended. She told us her name was Tate and then she squeezed through the glass and the steel and climbed over her own dead – just to be with Webb and me; to give us her hand so we could clutch it with all our might. And then a kid called Fitz came riding by on a stolen bike and saved our lives.

Someone asked us later, “Didn’t you wonder why no one came across you sooner?”

Did I wonder?

When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they’re some kind of garbage, don’t you know?

Wonder dies.