Hmmm. Well I thought I’d enjoyed Carry Me Down when I read it a couple of years ago but it looks like my memory is playing tricks on me from the looks of what I wrote at the time. Interesting. I did however really like this book.

Sixteen year old Lou moves from her own family in Sydney to somewhere near Chicago to stay with the Harding family as an exchange student at a local high school. She makes her own family out to be, on the whole, a pretty appalling bunch living in near squalor and the American family who take her in are very much in the well off, large house, tanned with perfect teeth mould. Lou is obviously clever but is clearly going to have real trouble fitting in here.

The first person narration means that we see how everything falls apart from inside Lou’s head. This makes it really compelling to read and you don’t end up agreeing with what others think of Lou (or at least I didn’t).

I was enjoying the book loads and preparing myself for being let down by the ending - mostly because I couldn’t figure out where the author was leading to at all. But I wasn’t let down - it was very well concluded.