RACHEL SOO THOW - 12 FEB 2021

“How come you left us?”

“I never left ya. I was always coming to get you," flashes back Loretta.

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but who are we kidding really? The neon yellow against a backdrop of concrete ash seems fitting for Romy Ash’s debut novel, a suspenseful and strangely dubious thriller set in the West Australian coast.

A simple tale, Floundering tells the story of Loretta, a mother who once abandoned her two sons Tom and Jordy and left them with their grandparents, returning to reclaim her lost years of motherhood by loading her children into a rundown yellow car en route to a remote caravan park on the coast. The journey becomes one of spontaneity and indecisiveness where instability ensues: anyone prone to anxiety caused by such moments of instability should take caution. Each action presents a ‘reaction’ and we are thrown into a world filled with hungry kids living on chips, creepy old men in caravan parks, blood that tastes like metal and a sticky back seat that ‘smells like orange juice’.

The difficulties within each page reflect the danger that lies within every turn for these kids. Ash manages to successfully provide an incisive and articulate representation of characters, and we are left feeling grimly hopeful for a turn of events. Beneath the drama and the glories of falling in and out of loss, the novel brings to light the hopeful love evident between the children and a mother who is incapable of stability and care. This is where Ash’s portrayal of emotion rings true: the narration as played out through Tom, the younger of the two, demonstrates a sense of naivety bursting through an unassuming exterior, and the treatment of the relationship between him and his sibling Jordy versus his relationship with his mother is a huge reminder of sibling bonds.

Through Floundering Ash successfully illustrates and chronicles the lives of a young family in the midst of survival and ‘life interrupted’, a depiction which plays out against a backdrop of nondescript highways under the scorching Australian sun. It is a truly impressive debut and it is no wonder that it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and Prime Minister’s Literary Award, amongst others. Think a hint of Jeanette Wall’s The Glass Castle and Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet: the irregularities of a family relationship that is as moving as it is frightening, and as heartbreaking as it is tender.

As a debut, Ash’s writing is increasingly observant and clearly brings to life the sometimes buried, moody gaze of childhood full of its undulations and sibling power struggles. Essentially, we are left ‘floundering’ within the unfamiliar, all-consuming turmoil of tested loyalties.