BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE by Trent Dalton

Incredible piece of writing, I devoured this. Life through the eyes of Eli, a 13 year old boy, in a family about as dysfunctional and tortured as you could expect. The one abiding thing though that holds him together, that stops him taking the same dangerous, hopeless and failing path as the adults  around him is knowing that he is loved - by his drug addict mother, his heart broken and absent father, his adored step father, his ex-con babysitter, and his mute brother August. He makes an interesting observation that people end up on this hopeless downward spiral because they have terrible fathers - men who abuse them as children, violent to their mums, abandon their families, are drunks, addicts, generally hopeless, passing the burden to mothers, who often themselves have had bad fathers. It is a generalisation, yes, but in the eyes of a 13 year old boy, pretty insightful. 

Apparently the characters of Eli and August are based on the author and his brothers, and his own difficult childhood in Brisbane during the 1980s. Are we living inside Trent Daltons's head while reading this? Who cares, it's amazing regardless how much of it is real. 

Eli is a wonderful character - really just a little boy, trying to do the best he can in his troubled world. As the story unfolds the extent of the traumas that August and Eli have been through is told, we ooze sympathy for these two kids. Eli, it would seem, has mostly moved on, note the word mostly, not feeling sorry for himself and not giving up, to the next stage of making things better. His adult goal is to be a journalist, so he knows the importance of observation - watching and listening, and it is these great qualities that enable him to navigate all the drama around him. And there is plenty of it, revolving around local drug king Tytus Broz - cross him at your peril. 

At times horribly violent and brutal, but still magnificent and terrific.