'Miss Kaye works at The Institute. A place for the damaged, the outliers, the not-quite rights. Everyone has different strategies to deal with the residents. Some bark orders. Some negotiate tirelessly. Miss Kaye found that simply being herself was mostly the right thing to do. She would try not to smile, but her eyes did.
'Susie was seven, and already she knew she'd had her fill of character building. She'd lie between her Holly Hobby sheets thinking how slowly birthdays come around, but how quickly change happens. One minute her Dad was saying that the family needed to move back to the city and then, shazam, they were there. Her mum didn't move to the new house with them. And she hated going to see her mum at the mind hospital. She never knew who her mum would be. Or who would be there. The older she gets, the louder the growing pile of unsaid things become.
'When their paths connect, Miss Kaye and Susie will learn that character building is just part of life and surviving requires patience.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Hilde Hinton’s début novel is character-driven storytelling at its best. Its narrator, Susie, is a perpetual outsider whose world comprises ‘her dad, her crazy sometimes-there mum and a house that didn’t look like the others’. Susie faces life’s brutal realities earlier than most: by Year Seven she has moved from the country to the city, taken up selling newspapers in Melbourne’s streets, where adventure lurks but so do ill-motivated men, and seen her mother drifting ‘in and out of the mind hospitals’.' (Introduction)
'Hilde Hinton’s début novel is character-driven storytelling at its best. Its narrator, Susie, is a perpetual outsider whose world comprises ‘her dad, her crazy sometimes-there mum and a house that didn’t look like the others’. Susie faces life’s brutal realities earlier than most: by Year Seven she has moved from the country to the city, taken up selling newspapers in Melbourne’s streets, where adventure lurks but so do ill-motivated men, and seen her mother drifting ‘in and out of the mind hospitals’.' (Introduction)
