Elizabeth Reeder - Ramshackle

This is a first novel but you would never know it. The narrative voice, a sixteen year old American girl called Roe, is seductive, beguiling and honest. The story concerns the disappearance of her father and what Roe does over the period of a week to understand why he has gone. The sudden sense of freedom offers her opportunities and challenges which she exploits but also recoils from. In so doing, she starts to develop the self-awareness, self-reliance and self-discipline of adulthood. As she comes to understand who her father is, so she equally comes to understand herself.

This is a graceful, beautiful, cervine story.

Ramshackle by Elizabeth Reeder, Freight Books, 159 pp, £8.99, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9566135-7-8