Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder (Kerryn Mayne, Bantam)

In the lush, comforting Dandenongs, east of Melbourne, primary school teacher Lenny Marks is living a very organised life. She rides her bike to work, has dutifully polite conversations with her colleagues, buys groceries at McKnight’s General Store, pretends to know the TV shows that handsome Ned at the checkout talks about, and her sole weekend interaction is with the driver that delivers her chicken pad Thai on Saturdays. Once a fortnight, she visits her foster mother. And Lenny absolutely, resolutely, does not think about what happened in her childhood—until the day a letter from the parole board arrives. What this unleashes in Lenny will be her undoing, unless—with the help of those she doesn’t yet realise she can count on—it will be a liberation. Lenny is an occasionally frustrating, entirely endearing unreliable narrator, one to root for with almost painful force. The reader does not get the full picture of what happened to Lenny Marks back when she was Helena Winters, but the ripples of her childhood pain are still being felt as she grapples with every social interaction and finding the right people to trust. Lenny’s journey is both harrowing and a balm. It is for those who loved the emotional resonance of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine or the suburban Australian beauty and darkness of Holly Throsby’s Clarke—and don’t mind a little canine thievery on the side.

Fiona Hardy is a children’s author and a bookseller at Readings. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews