Lazaros Zigomanis, This, MidnightSun Publishing, August 2023, 368 pp., RRP $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781922858146
This new YA novel from the experienced, prize-winning author, Lazaros Zigomanis, is his most autobiographical work to date—drawing on his experiences as a fifteen year old in 1989 experiencing the complications, uncertainties and challenges of the sudden onset of an overwhelming mental health crisis.
The narrator of the novel is a gifted Greek boy with a twenty-two year old sister and over-anxious, over-protective parents who only want to see their children quickly married and employed as doctors or something equally secure and prestigious within the tight-knit Greek migrant community. Neither of their children will oblige them, which leads to some very funny, dramatic and pressurised situations at home. The novel follows the course of Year 10 at High School as the best students in the class vie for an important scholarship. But of course there is a lot of drinking, smoking, talking in the toilets, sneaking down behind the sheds, tentative relationships with girls, boys’ fantasies about girls, teenagers’ prejudices and insights, the bullying and victimising among High School students, and even parents misbehaving with each other along the way.
Zigomanis has a particular strength in offering us the details of a world we can as readers come to inhabit and care about. His narrator suffers panic attacks as one symptom of a growing general anxiety disorder. It is a condition that can come upon a person without there necessarily being any obvious trauma or damaging experience to account for it. At first the narrator tries to deal with it by himself, but eventually his family, the local hospital and their psychiatrists become important to his chances of seeing a way through the terrors of his increasingly debilitating condition.
The novel is instructive in all sorts of ways about mental health, about truth-telling between friends, about mis-placed shame, and the role of a school (and its teachers) for the developing identities of young teenagers, as well as the shortcomings of medical care for those suffering mental health crises (at least as it was in 1989). While the focus is upon the unfolding story of a year in High School (the reader is compelled onwards, wanting to know what will happen), there is a pervasive compassion moving through the novel’s accounts of each child-adult character beginning to face the complications that come with life choices.
This is engrossing, authentic and important fiction. I hope it finds its many readers out there. Highly recommended for 12 to 17 year olds. And adults who might be parenting their offspring through these years. Teacher notes are available from the publisher’s website.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
