Hayley Lawrence, What They Told Me, Scholastic Australia, February 2024, 360 pp., RRP $18.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781761291708
Elliot Gillespie is a girl who thinks she’s the luckiest in the world and that her family is also very lucky. She lives in a remote homestead with her mother, father and little brother, Lachy. The Crooked River that runs through the Gillespie property provides a place to swim as well as a means of getting across to her friend’s house.
However, the world and family she thought were idyllic are shattered when her mother announces she is leaving as she hasn’t been happy for a long time and that she and Elliot’s father no longer love each other.
There are chapters entitled The Gillespies that outline how the family lived and these, in the earlier stages, reflect what Elliott has called ‘the luckiest family’. However, as she begins to reflect on past events, she, and the reader, can see that things were not always perfect and that El’s mother, as she herself tried to explain to the family, was often far from happy.
The author employs first-person narrative to give a personal perspective on El’s trauma and pain as she faces potentially losing her house as well as her mother and, during all this, her old dog Snow, that has been part of the family since El was a toddler. There is a slow reconciliation with her mother and a compromise over the sale of the house. A new puppy arrives and gradually Elliott comes to terms with all the new aspects of her life.
The author, a solicitor who often works with families experiencing marriage breakdowns, says, in her acknowledgments, that she wanted readers to understand that parental separation can cause a deep grieving process for the children involved, particularly teenagers. This is why she wrote the book in the way she did, focusing the narrative through fifteen almost sixteen-year-old Elliott. Many young readers will no doubt identify with Elliott and her grief, as Lawrence tells us that fifty to sixty thousand young people experience the separation of their parents each year in Australia.
Reviewed by Margot Hillel