Almost a Mirror, by Kirsten Krauth

Teenage groupie Mona and her childhood sweetheart Jimmy live through the music of the 80s. Later Benat’s memories as an immigrant teen in the druggy Melbourne music scene are added to the mix. The action jumps back and forth in time between the 1980s and the 2010s, in a series of sometime confusing vignettes. It’s all sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, with a dash of child abuse and neglect thrown in for fun. Set in Castlemaine and grungy St Kilda, the integration of real musicians sits oddly amid the fictional; it should add authenticity but makes the fictional seem fake. Bold, evocative writing creates a strong sense of place and time, but there is little in the way of character development. Elliptical references in early chapters are fleshed out in rather too much detail later in the book, whereas some questions could use an answer. A classic 80s song, said by the author to have inspired it, heads each chapter. Some inspiration is clearer than others and similarly, some chapters work better than others. The best are knife-sharp, moving, evocative and heartbreaking; others are kind of meh. It seems Mona and Benat are survivors, able to eventually grow up, while Jimmy is not. Is the moral of the story that it is impossible to escape your origins and that we are destined to be the kind of parent we had? The title refers to matching incidents in 1984 and 2018, the only chapters written in first person, with Mona abused as a child and taking a kind of revenge as an adult. These sit oddly out of context with the rest of the book.