Book 12 - Too Busy Screaming

Title: Too Much Lip

Author: Melissa Lucashenko

Genre: Australian domestic fiction

This is a tough read, but a damn good one.

Why? What makes it so tough? The obvious answer is that the slang is nearly impossible to decipher at times. You know that thing you do, where you unfocus your eyes and a ghostly twin of whatever you're looking at materializes until you snap your gaze back together? I have to do that with my brain to glean a general sense, an overall feeling, of what the characters are trying to say. If I pay too much attention to independent words, it all falls apart. Not that this is a bad challenge - not at all. It's like diving into any new literary universe. You flounder a bit, kick around and try to get your bearings straightened out, and then eventually learn how to swim. Or, in the case of this novel, learn how not to drown.

The less obvious answer to the question of why this is a tough book to swallow (mm, yum) is what feels like a general lack of direction. There are storylines, for sure, but what is it all leading towards? On the one hand, I don't see any of the big ah-HAH twists coming - so much so that more than once I'm left blinking dumbly and have to retrace the words to fully understand what's happened). On the other hand, they came so late in the story, and so fast and so all at once, that while they are incredible and make so much sense and think god I made it to them, I'm also left wondering what the hell the rest of it is all for. The pages and pages of the sitting around, the shooting of the shit, the drinking and chatting and bitching and struggling - why?

The answer, which I'm really only coming to know now, weeks after reading the damn thing, is that the ending bangs don't mean what they do without the rest of it. The world Lucashenko paints, and the stories within it, are painful, raw, and real - and they're stories I never even knew existed. Please hold while I check my privilege...but really. That's why this book is important. It's a gateway into this world I never knew existed, one that doesn't just exist between covers but is right here, in this timeline, on this planet. Lucashenko doesn't shy away from the truth nor its ugliness and yeah, it's cringey, and yeah, it's frustrating - but that's how things are.

Rating: 🍓🍓🍓