Quickly it flowed into her body, driving away his hurt. When “adolescence came and stirred her body and tugged at her mind, Lola knew she was lonely.” She meets Brownie, weeping after a fight with his father, “and then her mouth found his. In fact, this magical novel-a true find-is simply a story about two people struggling to survive. Unfortunately, when it first appeared in 1962, this book was dismissed as yet another example of the (Marxist) social realist tradition: Brownie and Lola’s harmonious inner world, critics scoffed, existed only to underscore the grimness of the world outside. “You be the caveman,” Lola suggests, “and sleep across the mouth of the cave to keep away the evil spirits and the sabre toothed tigers.” Lola was joking, but the union between these two young Australians is so fundamental and mysterious that the mythic image applies. “I’ll make sure the Westerlies don’t blow cold on you,” Brownie tells Lola. The Delinquents, Criena Rohan (Penguin: $5.95).
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