Illegal by Miriam Halahmy

You have no idea how pleased I was when Miriam Halahmy's Illegal dropped onto my doormat a couple of weeks ago. I've known Miriam for a few years now and I even attended one of her workshop sessions at a SCBWI conference back in 2010. So I knew that the writing in this novel would be superb. It was. But there was so much more too.

Illegal is the second of Miriam's three Hayling Island cycle books. Each of these novels stands on its own but a minor character in one appears as a major character in the next. For those of you who don't know it Hayling Island is a small Island off the south coast of England.

Miriam has been visiting Hayling with her family every summer for many years. She knows it well and that knowledge and understanding seeps through on every page of this book. But more of this anon. Let's talk about the story:

Fourteen year old Lindy carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. Since the death of her baby sister her already disfunctional parents have completely disintegrated. Her father is now incapable of bringing in enough money for the family to eat and her mother spends the day in her PJs. Lindy's brothers don't help either. The oldest two are in jail and the youngest, Sean, relies on Lindy for all aspects of his care. So when her cousin, Colin, offers her a gardening job she jumps at the opportunity. The only problem is that the garden in question is a cannabis farm and Lindy soon finds herself being drawn further and further into Colin's dangerous drug-dealing world.

With this set up, Lindy could easily be painted as a victim. That she isn't is a tribute to Miriam's skills. The clue to her combative nature comes early with the depiction of her fearsome 'spearnail.' And her initial and intermittently continual assumption that the mute Karl is a 'retard' shows she can be just as bitchy as any one of the girls who have bullied her. Watching her ability to fight the inevitable grow is part of the joy of this book. Watching the dawning realisation of just what a catch Karl might be, is most definitely the charm.

And what of the island?

I'm pretty sure that I've heard Miriam talking about using setting as a character at some time in the past. But whether I have or not, Miriam is certainly an expert. Hayling island permeates this book; the inlets, the water, the tides and the Langstone Bridge are all there. You can taste it, smell it, hear it and in the end it is the island itself that finally does for Colin.This is one of the best examples of setting as character I have come across in a long time. I knew I should expect something good from Miriam and she delivered.

I love this book. It's fast paced and exciting, a great story with great characters. The social issues that underpin the story: drug and alcohol abuse, self harm, violence, mutism, bullying to name a few, are handled with delicacy and honesty. There's no preaching here and you don't feel like you've been forced to 'learn' something. And that, if you ask me, is the way to do edgy fiction.

So, pace Miriam, but if you wouldn't mind getting off that beech and getting on with writing the third novel, we'd all be very grateful!

(Note: This is a second version of the original review that Blogger mysteriously lost for me. I hope it's captured the flavour of the original and many thanks to Miriam for copying a couple of sentences onto Facebook so that I at least had something to work around!)

As I said above, Miriam kindly sent me this review copy. If you would like to get your hands on your own copy, then please do so via the link below. Then Amazon will send a small contribution to the maintenance of this blog.