Where You Left Us (Rhiannon Wilde, UQP)
Rhiannon Wilde’s second YA novel, Where You Left Us, is as bewitching as her Glendower Award–winning debut Henry Hamlet’s Heart. It follows the two Prince sisters, Cinnamon and Scarlett, who have finished school but have not yet begun their adult lives. Scarlett returns to their ancestral home on the cliff, where Cinnamon has been living with their severely depressed former rock-star father. The long-standing conflict between the sisters is presented through dual perspectives of the two imperfect but exquisitely real characters. While Cinnamon both desires and fears intimacy with her new co-worker Daisy, Scarlett grows close to Cinnamon’s best friend and former boyfriend, Will. Threaded through the novel is Scarlett and Will’s investigation into the scandalous rumours about the sisters’ great aunt Sadie’s disappearance. The persistently crashing waves of Princes Beach below Halcyon House and the empty grave of Sadie, discovered in a storm, strongly evoke the mental health challenges faced by the Prince family. The sense of a family curse plaguing the notorious ‘Mad Princes’ knowingly draws on the Gothic tradition but the novel’s depiction of mental illnesses is entirely modern. Similarly, the novel’s representation of sexuality and sex is positive, direct and unequivocal. Wilde displays a talent for transforming the terror and intense emotion of the Gothic into a transformative novel for teens and adults. Recommended for fans of The Monster of Her Age by Danielle Binks, for readers aged 14 and up.
Ilona Urquhart is a children’s and youth services librarian on the Surf Coast and has a PhD in literary studies.
