Clare Strahan is a Melbourne writer who once rattled out a novel on a manual typewriter by candlelight. Her debut young adult novel, Cracked was shortlisted for the 2015 Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. She managed the fiction reading team at Overland journal for several years, was a peer selection panellist for Varuna, the National Writers House 2014-2016 and teaches creative writing for the PWE Associate Degree at RMIT. She is the creator of the Literary Rats cartoon and flutters about the twittersphere as @9fragments.
"With an absent mother, and a distant, potentially evil father,
Vanessa does her best to grapple alone with understanding desire,
consent, rape culture, sexual assault, and 'doing the right thing'.
This is smart, wickedly funny, and painfully relatable teenage
fiction that explores heavy topics with honesty and humour. Vanessa
is a wonderful protagonist, and invites the reader to sit with all
too familiar teenage discomfort, awkwardness and angst. Vanessa's
life is bog-standard teenage chaos, but she's got a lot of heart
and grit to get herself through. Amazingly, amidst all the drama
Vanessa never seems to forget to do her cello practice either.
Expect laughter, and more laughter again. It will be a definite hit
with those who love contemporary YA." --Readings
"A book that speaks directly to the concerns of older teenage
girls. It is a story that prioritises self-care and assertiveness
over politeness and likeability, that bucks the historic trend of
averting the gaze of teen readers away from female pleasure and
instead encourages readers (girls and boys) to acknowledge the
realities of female bodies. Strahan tackles questions of desire,
consent, autonomy and authority head-on via her cast of intensely
relatable characters. . . . It is a book that may change lives at
exactly the right moment. It is a book that says to young women
(and men), that respect is not based on how you dress, consent is
not a one-way street, and that women's voices are
important--and we should take care to listen." --Books +
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