Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Pages: 369
Source: Library
Violence | Sexual Content | Profanity
Book Tunes
My Rating
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| 4/5 |
My thoughts
I'm at a loss for words. I have literally just been typing words and erasing them, scratching my head as to what the heck I'm actually going to write. I didn't quite know what I was getting myself into when I picked this book up - all I knew was that it was set in 1990 and that was pretty cool. As I delved deeper in the story I grew more and more invested in its characters, and while I do think that it was a bit slow-going at times and some readers may be offended by the language used, I have to applaud the author for taking all the risks that she did because this story was a difficult one to tell, and painfully accurate as far as I'm concerned. And for that reason alone I had to bump this book up to a respectable 4 stars.
The Things We Promise follows Gemma Longrigg, an ordinary teenage girl living in Sydney, Australia in 1990, whose biggest worries are what she's going to wear to the upcoming Year 11 formal, and whether her crush since Year 7, Ralph, would ever fall for her, too. Her brother, Billy, who lives in NYC with his partner Saul, has promised Gemma that he will do her hair and makeup for the formal, even though it's months and months away, and in that amount of time anything can happen. Especially in the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
