'Nat, Lise, and Sofia are best friends. This year, their last year of high school, none of them foresees the changes that will occur in their lives.
'This is the year that Nat—the go-between, the peacemaker—gets a job and meets a drop-dead gorgeous chef named Josh.
'This is the year that Lise—quiet, shy, and solitary Lise—decides to take control of her life by taking control of her weight.
'This is the year that Sofia—the ultimate guy magnet—gets her nose pierced and falls seriously in love for the first time in her life.
'This is the year that will change each of them forever.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Writing Disability in Australia
| Type of disability | Anorexia nervosa. |
| Type of character | Primary. |
| Point of view | Unconfirmed. |
McInally is concerned with fictional representations of eating disorders and uncovering any intersections between anorexia and girl-girl desire. McInally 'investigates this interface' in Killing Aurora (Barnes) and Leaving Jetty Road, (Burton) by drawing on the post-structuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari as a way of thinking beyond the binarised terms that shape and structure our lives and identities (168). For Deleuze and Guattari, 'desire is an affirmative mobile force that propels living things towards each other' (168) and it is this proposition that McInally utilises to critique hetero-normative cultural systems. She argues that anorexia is 'interrelated to the cultural insistence that girls move beyond intense, passionate and desirous relationships with each other, into normative heterosexuality', a sexuality that upholds western patriarchal capitalist paradigms that 'privilege lack over connection'(168). For McInally, Burton's novel follows this paradigm in its 'reductive and limiting ideologies regarding subjectivity, femininity and desire', while Barnes' novel offers a new and/or different way of reading desire which 'affirms its intense and connective potential outside binarised codifications' (172).
McInally is concerned with fictional representations of eating disorders and uncovering any intersections between anorexia and girl-girl desire. McInally 'investigates this interface' in Killing Aurora (Barnes) and Leaving Jetty Road, (Burton) by drawing on the post-structuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari as a way of thinking beyond the binarised terms that shape and structure our lives and identities (168). For Deleuze and Guattari, 'desire is an affirmative mobile force that propels living things towards each other' (168) and it is this proposition that McInally utilises to critique hetero-normative cultural systems. She argues that anorexia is 'interrelated to the cultural insistence that girls move beyond intense, passionate and desirous relationships with each other, into normative heterosexuality', a sexuality that upholds western patriarchal capitalist paradigms that 'privilege lack over connection'(168). For McInally, Burton's novel follows this paradigm in its 'reductive and limiting ideologies regarding subjectivity, femininity and desire', while Barnes' novel offers a new and/or different way of reading desire which 'affirms its intense and connective potential outside binarised codifications' (172).
