Description
The unpublished manuscript was the winner of the 2022 Tessa Duder Award: a powerful exploration of guilt, forgiveness, choice and personal responsibility.
Hannah Kemp is dealing with a traumatic accident for which she was responsible. Struggling to come to terms with her guilt, she is ostracized in a community that condemns her. She deals with this by rebelling and pushing away anyone that offers kindness or seeks to understand her. Crippled by her own guilt and anger, she comes across a mobile library bus where every book is the true story of someone’s life, and realizes that judgement of others is almost always shallow and uninformed. When she finds her own book … she also finds that her past can reshape her present.
Review
Hannah is adopted, and she feels rejected and left behind - wondering why her Mum has never come back for her. Her adoptive parents are OK, but it’s not the same…
On top of her family situation, Hannah is now also living a life of shame, cutting herself off from nearly everyone, as she doesn’t feel worthy after she was involved in a terrible accident that she blames herself for.
But then she discovers the magical mobile library - where the stories inside turn out to be true stories about the lives and secrets of people that she knows.
When she finds her own story, she quickly realizes that there are some things that you can’t find out before the event, and that we all have the opportunity to write our own story.
This is a powerful novel dealing with belonging, the opportunity to become your own person, the importance of family and also friendships. It contains a party scene where drugs are being used, which makes it best suited to those in middle to upper secondary.
Reviewed by Rob
