A CHILD'S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME

I found Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime in the children’s book section of the Salvation Army second hand store in Smithfield, Cairns.  I decided to start reading it to the kids that night.

     It was a hard cover copy though it had lost its jacket so I wasn’t able to read the blurb usually found on the front inside flap.  At home I skimmed over the first chapter, in italics.  Yep, definitely written for kids; Kitty Koala ‘snuggled against Terence Tiger’s soft coat’.  I wasn’t sure if the kids would be interested in a book about native animals.

     The next chapter was in Roman font which I figured was the start of the real story.  I scanned the first few sentences.

     Woah!

     ‘I lifted my skirt … peeling off my pantyhose … Thomas liked the way primary-school teachers dress.’

     Hang on, I thought, I need to find that blurb.  It was there after all, stuck to the first page.   After peeling it apart, I realised this was definitely not a kids’ book, but one I would be keen to read considering it contained my favourite literary themes; crime, infidelity and characters who don’t have a handle on reality.

     Narrator Kate Byrne is 22 and has taken her first teaching position in a small Tasmanian town while she figures out if teaching is what she really wants to do.  She considers it fate when she begins an affair, ‘a sex apprenticeship,’ with Thomas, the father of her brightest year four student, Lucien.  Thomas’s wife, Veronica has just published a book, Murder at Black Swan Point, about the real-life stabbing death of a young adulteress in a nearby town twenty years earlier.

     Consumed by Murder at Black Swan Point and believing Veronica’s version, in which the young woman is murdered by her lover’s wife who then disappears, is not completely accurate, Kate starts to construct an alternative scenario. 

     Lucien begins to draw graphic images of himself maimed and Kate suspects he is deeply affected by his mother’s work.  Kate, to make the story of Murder at Black Swan Point palatable for children, creates her own version of the murder as a children’s story told in the third person using native animals such as Kitty Koala and Terence Tiger. But retelling a crime of passion as a children’s story can’t hide the cruel realities of the adult world Kate is struggling with.

     ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely,’ whispered Kitty Koala, ‘if there were some recipe to avoid becoming an adult.’

     Kate wants to end the affair, but she is under Thomas’s control.  At a school cricket match under the gaze of other fathers, Thomas asks her over a water bubbler, ‘Are you being a good girl?’ and ‘Did you want to make all the other kids’ dads hot?’

     By this time Kate has retreated so far into the story of Murder at Black Swan Point and her affair with Thomas she fails to become aware of her reputation in the small community or her tenuous grip on reality.  She starts receiving late-night anonymous phone calls and when someone cuts her brakes, she is convinced Veronica is trying to kill her and she will meet the same fate as the young adulteress in Murder at Black Swan Point.

     A Child’s Book of True Crime is an erotic and suspenseful account of a young woman resisting the responsibilities and conventions of adulthood.  We follow Kate as she retreats into her youth and the world of her students.  I kept cringing as Kate snowballed towards a life steeped in fantasy while all the signs of her mental fragility were screaming out to me.  I wanted to yell at her, ‘Get a grip.’  
     I read the novel in one sitting starting at 6 am.  When the kids woke, they had a couple of hours unrestricted access to any screen in the house providing they didn’t bother me unless there was an emergency.  I couldn’t put the book down except to hurriedly make cups of tea when hunger for breakfast gripped me. 

     My only criticism was the way Kate’s sophisticated vocabulary and thinking were at odds with her young age, 22.  In the early part of the novel, I assumed Kate was around 30.  However, this may have something to do with me not knowing many 22 year-old women.

     I finished reading A Child’s Book of True Crime three and a half hours after starting, delightfully unsettled and wishing the novel was longer.  However, I floated through the next 24 hours in Kate Byrne’s world thinking about her naivety, her doomed affair and wondering how a young and intelligent woman could become so detached from reality.
     Put A Child's Book of True Crime on your list of books to read this year.