Young or old, everyone in Jen's life has a story to tell, a story of heartache and uncertainty. Love can't always stay. Jen's first encounters leave her fractured, reckless, no longer Jen, but Jinx.

A most unusual book. If one were to recount the events of Australian author Margaret Wild's novel Jinx as a chronology, it might well resemble the storyboard for a week's episodes of Neighbours: high school friends with problems of appearance, personality, sexuality; one parent family with two teenage girls, one having Down's Syndrome, the other losing her first two boyfriends in quick succession (suicide, freak accident), becoming a stalker, mother fantasizing about relationships... T

he method of describing these events, however, lifts this book out of the province of soap into that of supreme artistic, emotional and technical achievement. The story is told episodically, each character advancing their own part of the action (either in person or reported) a page or two at a time, in a totally original format which seems to approach a fusion of blank verse with stream of consciousness. Jen's mental transition from Jen to Jinx, resulting from her perception of her own destructive influence on those she loves, totally involves the reader, the unusual style emphasizing the desperate intensity and loneliness of adolescent experience.

This is a rare book which offers boundless opportunities for Key Stage 3 and 4 study. The writing itself would provide entries into an examination of what is poetic, and why Wild devised her distinctive style; the content invites discussion of a gamut of teenage concerns. Through their experience as readers they are encouraged to confront their own contradictory emotions. A novel of immense potential.

2007-12-30