Kyla by Frances Cherry published by Scholastic

- guest reviewer Maggie Rainey-Smith

I went to the launch of this young adult novel generously hosted by John McIntyre at the Children’s Book Shop in Kilbirnie a couple of weeks ago. Frances (pic right)was surrounded by a warm friendly crowd that included her good friends and family. Her daughter Caitlin Cherry honoured her mother at the launch by telling us that once she started the book (pointing out that she has many distractions with a young family), she couldn’t put it down and she read it in one sitting.

I waited for the Easter holidays and took ‘Kyla’ away with me for my road trip around the Forgotten World Highway. In the warm Taranaki sunshine, sipping coffee, I devoured this book. It is a compelling, page-turning read and Frances has an extraordinary ability to capture the innocence of the adolescent voice achieving an authentic tone without contrivance or trying too hard to be cool.
She is also very good at capturing the less than “nuclear” family with all its permutations (as she did in Flashpoint). We meet Kyla, ostensibly an orphan, at the moment of her awful grief and loss when her Grandmother Nora, with whom she lives, has died. Kyla is then expected to leave everything she knows and loves (her cat, her neighbours, her school friends) and move to Wellington to live in an apartment with her barely known Aunt Caroline (whom we find out did not get on with Kyla’s mother or with Nora).

The story has plenty of hooks to keep you turning the page, but more importantly, it takes you inside the head of a grief-struck adolescent, managing not only grief but momentous changes in her living circumstances including a new city and a new school. We inhabit her head as she conjures up a more palatable version of her life and proceeds to feed these stories to her new friends. Of course, it all unravels as secrets and lies always will, but it is in the everyday detail, the small details of comparison with her old life and new, that the writing really impresses.
“Back at the apartment, I open the door with the key Caroline gave me and go inside. It is so silent. No smell of cooking, no Nora to greet me and give me a hug, no cat to twist herself around my ankle.”
Kyla runs away. Of course she does! Doesn’t everyone want to at some stage in their lives, and isn’t adolescence the most perfect time to do this? And one could say, legitimate when your life has been so dramatically overturned. The running away is handled well, and the two different families she encounters on her escapade, are interesting in the contrast and the sense of menace and risk that hovers over one particular incident, adding another layer.

This young adult novel explores the wishful ideal that we all hope for in our families and that for some is dashed far earlier than others, but there is in all of this grief, always a sense of going forward, of action and of hope. There is an underlying theme throughout about the integrity of surviving failure. The idea that just success on its own, is not enough, if you want to fully grow. We’re on a journey with Kyla who is on the cusp of adulthood, struggling with grief, rebellious and tragic all at once, as she faces up to the truth about her family. And, there’s a satisfying, possibly romantic ending.

Maggie Rainey-Smith is a Wellington-based novelist/poet/part-time bookseller and occasional reviewer on this blog.