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Friday Brown
Friday Brown is the breathtaking second novel from the author of the award-winning All I Ever Wanted.
Children's Book Council of Australia Honour Book, 2013
Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is on the run, running to escape memories of her mother and of the family curse. And of a grandfather who'd like her to stay.
She's lost, alone and afraid. Silence, a street kid, finds Friday and she joins him in a gang led by beautiful, charismatic Arden. When Silence is involved in a crime, the gang escapes to a ghost town in the outback.
In Murungal Creek, the town of never leaving, Friday must face the ghosts of her past. She will learn that sometimes you have to stay to finish what you started - and often, before you can find out who you are, you have to become someone you were never meant to be.
Vikki Wakefield lives in the Adelaide foothills with her husband and young family. All I Ever Wanted was shortlisted for the Inky Awards, 2011, and was the winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award, Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, 2012.
textpublishing.com.au
'I don't know whether it was icy weather or the sheer emotional tension of the story, but the night I stayed up to finish Friday Brown I was shivering. Every single character in this book is utterly fascinating, and their tangled relationships create so much force...Set against an Australian landscape brimming with the gothic, and full of elegaic beauty and intelligent insights into the human mind, this is a stunning contribution to young-adult fiction, and one that will rate as highly memorable among both mature young-adult readers and adults.' Australian Bookseller & Publisher
'Each time I read a Vikki Wakefield novel I get this tiny ache in my heart because I'm already missing her gutsy characters.' Melina Marchetta
'Every single character in this book is utterly fascinating. And their tangled relationships create so much force.' Australian Bookseller & Publisher
'[Vikki Wakefield] definitely brings something vital and individual to the genre - writing about tough but lonely girls, the friendships that save them and the past that haunts them...I loved this book from the bottom of my heart to the tips of my toes.' Alpha Reader
'Wakefield's first novel, All I Ever Wanted, revealed her as an important voice in Australian literature. This beautiful, brave book cements that position. Written for a teenage audience, it has the scope for a broader appeal.' Readings Monthly
'That she's a new shining star for Australian YA is a given. But her explorations in Friday Brown are urban and fantastical, coming-of-age mixed with thriller. This is a hard novel, and that's partly what makes it so good, but there's something magic here too...What's also unmistakeable is that Vikki Wakefield writes the tough stuff...Her characters are so vivid and endearing, or vicious and infuriating that she makes you feel everything down to your bones. 5/5' Alpha Reader
251 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 246 reviews
October 18, 2012
”On the night of my eleventh birthday, Vivienne told me that I was cursed. It was her gift, she said. When she was gone the Brown women’s curse would pass to me and, if I ever knew which way death would come, I could run hard in the other direction.”
Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is a runner. Her whole life has revolved around escape: moving from town to town with her Mother, never staying too long in one place, abandoning the past and trying to outpace a cursed future. After befriending a strange boy called Silence, Friday falls in with a group of street kids lead by charismatic matriarchal figure, Arden. When they end up in an outback ghost town, Friday must challenge everything she believes to be true about family, and fate.
Friday Brown was easily my most anticipated release of 2012. It will also likely be my favourite. I had high expectations, and Vikki Wakefield exceeded them. As much as I loved All I Ever Wanted, in Friday Brown Wakefield’s style has developed and deepened, resulting in a novel that is thematically resonant and complex.
Something Wakefield does beautifully, with both All I Ever Wanted and Friday Brown, is write perceptively about the concept of identity and its fluid state in young adulthood. Mim (of All I Ever Wanted) and Friday are both teenage girls who question and redefine themselves – Mim through the challenging of her rigid system of rules, Friday through the stripping away of everything she believes has given her life context. Without her mother, without the stories she has grown up with – who is she? When the only family she has ever known is taken away, does she know herself at all?
This idea of discovery, of identity as evolving rather than static, overarches the narrative. Friday, who eschews forming relationships due to the accompanying responsibility, is also a vulnerable character who has an inherent need to belong. Initially reluctant to forge meaningful connections with others, she is drawn to the sense of envelopment in Arden’s patchwork family. However, as the full extent of Arden’s manipulative nature is gradually exposed, Friday begins to reclaim herself and determine her own path.
There is a recurring motif of duality and comparison threaded through the Friday Brown; the novel itself is broken into two sections, ‘The City’ and ‘The Dust’, to form the whole of Friday’s journey. This tendency to contrast is repeated in various forms: the mother-figures of Vivienne and Arden, the fug of stale, recycled air in a car and the first breath taken in the outback. Vengeance and mercy, harshness and love. The truth versus a truth. And ultimately, good and evil. The entire story builds to a moment of definition for Friday, a power struggle not just between characters but also within herself, a moment of choice with irrevocable consequences.
Yet this is far from a simple novel. It’s complex and layered, unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of grief, homelessness and the abuse of power. The characters are flawed and contradictory, not always sympathetic. They are, however, compelling. It’s the relationships that fuel the tension of the novel - the shifting allegiances, fragile bonds of trust, sense of family and the undercurrent of manipulation. Wakefield crafts the relationships carefully, and it’s the authenticity of the connections, and the emotional investment in them that her writing inspires, that drives the novel to its powerful finale.
There’s an almost gothic element to Friday Brown, particularly in the second half of the story that unfolds in the ghost town of Murungal Creek. There’s a pervasive unease to the scenes that take place here, shadowed by Friday’s curse and the mounting tensions among the group, pared back both physically and emotionally. It’s also here that Wakefield’s imagery and use of the elements as symbolism come to the fore, in a tense, heart-wrenching conclusion.
Honestly, I’ve been intending to review this book for a long time, but each time I opened the document I end up just staring at a blinking cursor. I was overwhelmed by the desire to say everything, and not knowing how to express anything. I love this book that much. I still think about it. About Arden. About Silence. About Friday. About home and family and questioning everything you ever believed about yourself.
It’s beautiful and devastating, and I highly recommend it.
* * * * *
Speechless.
* * * * *
Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is a runner. Her whole life has revolved around escape: moving from town to town with her Mother, never staying too long in one place, abandoning the past and trying to outpace a cursed future. After befriending a strange boy called Silence, Friday falls in with a group of street kids lead by charismatic matriarchal figure, Arden. When they end up in an outback ghost town, Friday must challenge everything she believes to be true about family, and fate.
Friday Brown was easily my most anticipated release of 2012. It will also likely be my favourite. I had high expectations, and Vikki Wakefield exceeded them. As much as I loved All I Ever Wanted, in Friday Brown Wakefield’s style has developed and deepened, resulting in a novel that is thematically resonant and complex.
Something Wakefield does beautifully, with both All I Ever Wanted and Friday Brown, is write perceptively about the concept of identity and its fluid state in young adulthood. Mim (of All I Ever Wanted) and Friday are both teenage girls who question and redefine themselves – Mim through the challenging of her rigid system of rules, Friday through the stripping away of everything she believes has given her life context. Without her mother, without the stories she has grown up with – who is she? When the only family she has ever known is taken away, does she know herself at all?
This idea of discovery, of identity as evolving rather than static, overarches the narrative. Friday, who eschews forming relationships due to the accompanying responsibility, is also a vulnerable character who has an inherent need to belong. Initially reluctant to forge meaningful connections with others, she is drawn to the sense of envelopment in Arden’s patchwork family. However, as the full extent of Arden’s manipulative nature is gradually exposed, Friday begins to reclaim herself and determine her own path.
There is a recurring motif of duality and comparison threaded through the Friday Brown; the novel itself is broken into two sections, ‘The City’ and ‘The Dust’, to form the whole of Friday’s journey. This tendency to contrast is repeated in various forms: the mother-figures of Vivienne and Arden, the fug of stale, recycled air in a car and the first breath taken in the outback. Vengeance and mercy, harshness and love. The truth versus a truth. And ultimately, good and evil. The entire story builds to a moment of definition for Friday, a power struggle not just between characters but also within herself, a moment of choice with irrevocable consequences.
Yet this is far from a simple novel. It’s complex and layered, unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of grief, homelessness and the abuse of power. The characters are flawed and contradictory, not always sympathetic. They are, however, compelling. It’s the relationships that fuel the tension of the novel - the shifting allegiances, fragile bonds of trust, sense of family and the undercurrent of manipulation. Wakefield crafts the relationships carefully, and it’s the authenticity of the connections, and the emotional investment in them that her writing inspires, that drives the novel to its powerful finale.
There’s an almost gothic element to Friday Brown, particularly in the second half of the story that unfolds in the ghost town of Murungal Creek. There’s a pervasive unease to the scenes that take place here, shadowed by Friday’s curse and the mounting tensions among the group, pared back both physically and emotionally. It’s also here that Wakefield’s imagery and use of the elements as symbolism come to the fore, in a tense, heart-wrenching conclusion.
Honestly, I’ve been intending to review this book for a long time, but each time I opened the document I end up just staring at a blinking cursor. I was overwhelmed by the desire to say everything, and not knowing how to express anything. I love this book that much. I still think about it. About Arden. About Silence. About Friday. About home and family and questioning everything you ever believed about yourself.
It’s beautiful and devastating, and I highly recommend it.
* * * * *
Speechless.
* * * * *
August 15, 2013
"They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on Saturday I will drown..."
Friday Brown's mother has frequently told tales of their female ancestors, who each acquired the Brown family curse that tragically all ended their life. Friday and her mother travel from to town in the outback desert as they attempt to elude the family curse, however fate leaves Friday alone after her mother's abrupt death.
"I am nothing. I feel like nothing. I want my life to matter. What if one day I'm gone and Nobody ever I knew existed."
Seventeen year old Friday makes a decision to continue her past lifestyle of traveling, and meets the lonely boy named Silence at the train station. He introduces her to a group of street kids, who she is able to relate to and become dependent on. It is on the other hand the charismatic Arden - the group leader who will challenge Friday more than she would she like.
Friday Brown came nothing close to what I envisaged, especially the end which had left me stunned. The book was split into two parts. I view the first part as being fundamental in providing the reader simply with the backgrounds of each of the the street kids. The second parts unravels each character and shows their true nature and growth, or how some of the characters have come to disintegrate as a human, and the transformation of all the characters can evidently be displayed by the change of setting in the book, from the city in part 1 to a ghostown in the outback in part 2.
^^Okay, I suppose that wasn't really review but more of analysis of the story. The novel comprised of simple little meanings found throughout the story, that it was attempting to convey, for instance a significant one I noticed was: "Appearance can be deceiving." I particularly loved how the book pointed out that lies told by the people we trust come to make us vitally who we are.
The characters as mentioned before, show more of their true nature in the second half of the book. The street kids are presented as lost and completely alone on their own, but with the guide of each other they are able to live almost happily. They each had a troubled life that has brought them together. Friday comes to describe them as being identical to the "lost boys" in Peter Pan. Friday forms a deeply strong and beautiful bond with Silence - the boy who found her all alone in the train station.
Friday Brown finds comfort with the street kids when she struggles to belong anywhere else. Her character is fiercely loyal and intellectual, but is at the same time heavily flawed, with her lack of confidence and her to inability to shrug of her past in order for self-realization to finally happen.
The romance isn't substantial part of the book. It actually only makes a very tiny fragment of the story. So be warned, don't expect teen angst or even much romance.
I did give this book four stars instead of five, due to how gloomy the ending left me. It was a perfect ending, but I could not find myself to love it. I do highly recommend Friday Brown of course!
“Maybe that was the thing about beginnings - they always seemed better than middles or endings. And if only I ever had beginnings and my past was so perfect, then the future would never measure up. I didn't want to live like that.”
April 29, 2017
3.5★
“She was so beautiful and always would be, but now I could see all her shades of crazy. How OFF she was. How nature made its most deadly creatures alluring precisely so they could lure their victims close.”
Not Friday. That’s something she learns later in the story. In the beginning, Friday Brown is cursed. Her mother, Vivienne, has told her the family stories of the women dying, always on a Saturday, because of water. Her name is supposed to protect and prepare her, as is her mother’s spontaneous ‘training’, pushing her head under water and holding her there. Tough love!
But Mum has died when we meet Friday, and only her grandfather is around. Of course he’s lost his wife in a swimming pool accident and now his daughter with lungs inexplicably full of water when she’s dying of cancer. Vivienne’s illness hit Friday hard.
“Watching someone you love die is like driving through fog. You know you’re headed somewhere but you can’t see your hand in front of your face; you’re so focused on steering without crashing that you never say the things you want to say.”
Friday decides to take off to Melbourne to try city life. She and Mum had trekked all around the country, camping, staying in small towns from time to time, and living by their wits. In the city, she remembers Vivienne’s rules about hitchhiking—Mum sure did what she could to prepare her for life on the road as well as possible drowning.
“Never get in with a man who makes his dog ride in the tray or has a crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror. She reckoned people who dangled a crucifix needed absolution for something more than everyday sin.”
She meets a strange boy in the train station who is unable or unwilling to speak, so she calls him Silence. I never really got used to his name, I'm afraid. Friday, I could deal with, but not Silence.
He takes her to the squat used by a group (not really a gang) of street teens who earn money however they can—begging, stealing—to pay their leader, Arden, who covers living costs. She’s a dread-locked gorgeous creature who holds them all in thrall. The squat is dark and dank, although as one kid says “Better than getting pissed on while you’re sleeping in a doorway.”
Friday also shares a brief, chaste romantic interlude with Wish, an older fellow who says he loves Arden, which freaks Friday out, since she dare not get offside with Arden. I never got used to Wish's name either, but he disappears, and Arden decides they need to go bush. She gets a Toyota troop carrier, and piles the lot of them in to head to her secret place. Turns out it’s so secret there’s nobody living there anymore.
“There were signs everywhere. Keep Out. Trespassers Prosecuted. Private property. Tags too, garish and out of place. . . ‘There’s nobody here,’ Joe said. It looks like a godforsaken ghost town. . . what’s the point? There’s not even a pub.”
There are nine of them, all city kids, too terrified of the dark to go away from the campfire alone for a piddle. But Friday is in her element.
“I’d missed it—the way the outback lit up in dying light. The stillness, the colour. Out there, a quiet moment to yourself could feel like forever, but at the same time you were reminded that your entire life so far was barely a blink.”
Friday’s the only one who really knows how to do anything—light a fire or look for water. She finds a nearby river—whew!
The bickering begins, the infighting, trips to town for supplies. Friday worries about Silence, for whom she feels responsible and who is suffering more than she is. Arden seems unwilling to let him “escape” to find his missing sister.
And then the rains come. And they really come.
Friday thinks of the family curse as the river runs a banker and threatens to overflow. Then, suddenly, this isn’t a camping trip anymore. There are undertones of Deliverance or Lord of the Flies, although I'm not entirely sure why. But then, teens are teens and do weird things.
There are some hair-raising scenes and tragedy, with people wet, freezing, miserable. But she learns a lot about herself and thinks, as she’s missing her mum, who’d always meant “home” to her:
“And if home wasn’t a place, maybe it was a connection. Something woven from loose ends and mismatched threads that took time to knit together, like fractured bone. Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.”
I liked Friday’s voice and Wakefield’s writing. I’m partial to Aussie stories, so I'm glad to find a new author.
“She was so beautiful and always would be, but now I could see all her shades of crazy. How OFF she was. How nature made its most deadly creatures alluring precisely so they could lure their victims close.”
Not Friday. That’s something she learns later in the story. In the beginning, Friday Brown is cursed. Her mother, Vivienne, has told her the family stories of the women dying, always on a Saturday, because of water. Her name is supposed to protect and prepare her, as is her mother’s spontaneous ‘training’, pushing her head under water and holding her there. Tough love!
But Mum has died when we meet Friday, and only her grandfather is around. Of course he’s lost his wife in a swimming pool accident and now his daughter with lungs inexplicably full of water when she’s dying of cancer. Vivienne’s illness hit Friday hard.
“Watching someone you love die is like driving through fog. You know you’re headed somewhere but you can’t see your hand in front of your face; you’re so focused on steering without crashing that you never say the things you want to say.”
Friday decides to take off to Melbourne to try city life. She and Mum had trekked all around the country, camping, staying in small towns from time to time, and living by their wits. In the city, she remembers Vivienne’s rules about hitchhiking—Mum sure did what she could to prepare her for life on the road as well as possible drowning.
“Never get in with a man who makes his dog ride in the tray or has a crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror. She reckoned people who dangled a crucifix needed absolution for something more than everyday sin.”
She meets a strange boy in the train station who is unable or unwilling to speak, so she calls him Silence. I never really got used to his name, I'm afraid. Friday, I could deal with, but not Silence.
He takes her to the squat used by a group (not really a gang) of street teens who earn money however they can—begging, stealing—to pay their leader, Arden, who covers living costs. She’s a dread-locked gorgeous creature who holds them all in thrall. The squat is dark and dank, although as one kid says “Better than getting pissed on while you’re sleeping in a doorway.”
Friday also shares a brief, chaste romantic interlude with Wish, an older fellow who says he loves Arden, which freaks Friday out, since she dare not get offside with Arden. I never got used to Wish's name either, but he disappears, and Arden decides they need to go bush. She gets a Toyota troop carrier, and piles the lot of them in to head to her secret place. Turns out it’s so secret there’s nobody living there anymore.
“There were signs everywhere. Keep Out. Trespassers Prosecuted. Private property. Tags too, garish and out of place. . . ‘There’s nobody here,’ Joe said. It looks like a godforsaken ghost town. . . what’s the point? There’s not even a pub.”
There are nine of them, all city kids, too terrified of the dark to go away from the campfire alone for a piddle. But Friday is in her element.
“I’d missed it—the way the outback lit up in dying light. The stillness, the colour. Out there, a quiet moment to yourself could feel like forever, but at the same time you were reminded that your entire life so far was barely a blink.”
Friday’s the only one who really knows how to do anything—light a fire or look for water. She finds a nearby river—whew!
The bickering begins, the infighting, trips to town for supplies. Friday worries about Silence, for whom she feels responsible and who is suffering more than she is. Arden seems unwilling to let him “escape” to find his missing sister.
And then the rains come. And they really come.
Friday thinks of the family curse as the river runs a banker and threatens to overflow. Then, suddenly, this isn’t a camping trip anymore. There are undertones of Deliverance or Lord of the Flies, although I'm not entirely sure why. But then, teens are teens and do weird things.
There are some hair-raising scenes and tragedy, with people wet, freezing, miserable. But she learns a lot about herself and thinks, as she’s missing her mum, who’d always meant “home” to her:
“And if home wasn’t a place, maybe it was a connection. Something woven from loose ends and mismatched threads that took time to knit together, like fractured bone. Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.”
I liked Friday’s voice and Wakefield’s writing. I’m partial to Aussie stories, so I'm glad to find a new author.
September 5, 2013
I'm definitely in the minority here, standing out in a swarm of raving reviews. Don't get me wrong I did enjoy the book, it's a GOOD book, but I didn't love it as much as I expected. It's also a weird review to write because I can see what's so great about the book, I understand why it could even be a Printz prize winner, but it was just not the right book at the right time for me.
This book has gotten a lot of love from the Australian release under the name "Friday Brown" as it's an immensely gritty, literary read with layers of meaning and thought provoking themes. Our protagonist has gone to the streets after losing her mother to cancer. A mother who has told her stories about a curse that's been in her family for generations. A mother who has moved them around her whole life, never leaving time to form friendships, connections, or a feeling of belonging. Mostly, though, this story concentrates on the thick and thin of what's it's like to be a teenager on the streets, having to fend for yourself, but also how they come to build their own family, their own destiny. There is no sugar coating it. It's honest and ugly and emotionally conflicting, told in an achingly beautiful way.
Multi-layered with painful stories of their own, the characters really are part of a big family; unconventional, but all they have is each other. Silence is the one who came closest to my heart. With everything in his past, having lost his voice tragically, he still comes off as someone who loves life. The relationship that he and Friday form is a great dynamic in the book. I loved how she understood him in a profound way. Though most notably, Friday's voice is real. She shares her story in a painful, tragic manner, but also filling us with promise and hope.
It's evident that I recognize Friday Never Leaving as a powerful, beautifully written novel. Nevertheless, it's like its force whizzed right by me. Something kept jarring me back to reality. Maybe it was the oddity of the story - it bounced from cursed destiny to grief filled contemporary to B-rated horror movie, with a dash of romance, - or the sometimes too elaborate prose, or the characters who felt like strangers to me even at the end - though maybe that was the intention? Whatever it was, and with sadness, I failed to get emotionally invested. I think my head was not in the right place for such a challenging read at the time, but it's not one I'm likely to forget regardless. I do recommend it to those who enjoy meaningful, raw, literary reads.
--
An advance copy was provided by the publisher for review.
For more of my reviews, visit my blog at Xpresso Reads
This book has gotten a lot of love from the Australian release under the name "Friday Brown" as it's an immensely gritty, literary read with layers of meaning and thought provoking themes. Our protagonist has gone to the streets after losing her mother to cancer. A mother who has told her stories about a curse that's been in her family for generations. A mother who has moved them around her whole life, never leaving time to form friendships, connections, or a feeling of belonging. Mostly, though, this story concentrates on the thick and thin of what's it's like to be a teenager on the streets, having to fend for yourself, but also how they come to build their own family, their own destiny. There is no sugar coating it. It's honest and ugly and emotionally conflicting, told in an achingly beautiful way.
Multi-layered with painful stories of their own, the characters really are part of a big family; unconventional, but all they have is each other. Silence is the one who came closest to my heart. With everything in his past, having lost his voice tragically, he still comes off as someone who loves life. The relationship that he and Friday form is a great dynamic in the book. I loved how she understood him in a profound way. Though most notably, Friday's voice is real. She shares her story in a painful, tragic manner, but also filling us with promise and hope.
It's evident that I recognize Friday Never Leaving as a powerful, beautifully written novel. Nevertheless, it's like its force whizzed right by me. Something kept jarring me back to reality. Maybe it was the oddity of the story - it bounced from cursed destiny to grief filled contemporary to B-rated horror movie, with a dash of romance, - or the sometimes too elaborate prose, or the characters who felt like strangers to me even at the end - though maybe that was the intention? Whatever it was, and with sadness, I failed to get emotionally invested. I think my head was not in the right place for such a challenging read at the time, but it's not one I'm likely to forget regardless. I do recommend it to those who enjoy meaningful, raw, literary reads.
--
An advance copy was provided by the publisher for review.
For more of my reviews, visit my blog at Xpresso Reads
June 12, 2015
4.5 stars
What makes a person who they are? Is it some magical combination of experiences, memories and family? What happens when those things are stripped away, are proven false or leave you behind? Who are you then? And do you actually have any say in the matter?
Friday Brown has spent her entire life traveling from town to town with her mother Vivienne. Never in one spot long enough to know anyone. Never needing anyone else but her mother to know her. But then Vivienne dies. Left alone with a grandfather that's a stranger, Friday is lost. Vivienne not only physically created Friday, she mentally shaped her as well. Vivienne's stories built her up but now the truth is breaking down. Friday doesn't know who she is without Vivienne... but it's time to find out.
Reverting to her nomadic instincts, Friday runs away to the streets and finds herself a part of a new kind of family--broken people fitting their jagged edges together trying to become whole. But is Friday finding herself or merely letting the next charismatic mother figure mold her into someone else? Sometimes it's just easier to allow yourself to be swept away with the current than exhaust yourself struggling to swim against it. And no one knows they are caught in a riptide until it's too late.
Friday Brown has a more subdued style than All I Ever Wanted but the story is just as intense. Wakefield's prose is as beautiful as ever with an exquisite tension thrumming throughout. When the setting switches to an abandoned, isolated town in the Outback, the stress fractures formed by the effort of keeping the family together begin to strain, crumbling apart to chilling results. Friday's journey and portrayal are painfully honest and once again, Wakefield's characters are so vividly drawn their strength reverberates off the page. From devotion to desperation to horror, every emotion rings true.
If I had to describe Vikki Wakefield's novels using one word it would be "fearless". If I could choose two words they'd be "required reading".
I recieved a copy from the publishers for review.
This review originally appeared on Young Adult Anonymous. **GIVEAWAY on the blog!**
What makes a person who they are? Is it some magical combination of experiences, memories and family? What happens when those things are stripped away, are proven false or leave you behind? Who are you then? And do you actually have any say in the matter?
Friday Brown has spent her entire life traveling from town to town with her mother Vivienne. Never in one spot long enough to know anyone. Never needing anyone else but her mother to know her. But then Vivienne dies. Left alone with a grandfather that's a stranger, Friday is lost. Vivienne not only physically created Friday, she mentally shaped her as well. Vivienne's stories built her up but now the truth is breaking down. Friday doesn't know who she is without Vivienne... but it's time to find out.
Reverting to her nomadic instincts, Friday runs away to the streets and finds herself a part of a new kind of family--broken people fitting their jagged edges together trying to become whole. But is Friday finding herself or merely letting the next charismatic mother figure mold her into someone else? Sometimes it's just easier to allow yourself to be swept away with the current than exhaust yourself struggling to swim against it. And no one knows they are caught in a riptide until it's too late.
Friday Brown has a more subdued style than All I Ever Wanted but the story is just as intense. Wakefield's prose is as beautiful as ever with an exquisite tension thrumming throughout. When the setting switches to an abandoned, isolated town in the Outback, the stress fractures formed by the effort of keeping the family together begin to strain, crumbling apart to chilling results. Friday's journey and portrayal are painfully honest and once again, Wakefield's characters are so vividly drawn their strength reverberates off the page. From devotion to desperation to horror, every emotion rings true.
If I had to describe Vikki Wakefield's novels using one word it would be "fearless". If I could choose two words they'd be "required reading".
I recieved a copy from the publishers for review.
This review originally appeared on Young Adult Anonymous. **GIVEAWAY on the blog!**
December 6, 2012
Friday Brown is such a gorgeous and heartbreaking reading experience. Vicki Wakefield writes in this sublime way ~ her stories have this almost fairytale, other-worldly quality while at the same time feeling so emotionally real and resonant that it aches like the truth. This story is vivid: sorrowful yet full of love, surreal yet devastatingly believable.
There's this gorgeous blend of adventure and tension. While friendships are being forged and the plot sails ahead into the unknown, there's an undercurrent of danger - just enough to create a pool of dread right in the pit of my stomach. Guys, it was only a solid month after finishing this read that I was able to come to terms with it all and conclude that, simply, this sophomore novel is amazing.
Wakefield possess the magic combo: prose to die for, sneaky, smiley humour, characters that come to life and work their way into your heart, and a power-packed climax that leaves you breathless a la Jellicoe Road. In some ways, this book reminds me a smidgen of Jellicoe Road - in the way that sometimes it seems like too much ~ the character's backgrounds, heartache and sorrow upon sorrow mingled with the perfect carving of relationships but like Jellicoe, Friday Brown pulls everything off and more. These characters and this story is brilliant and lingering and will hold fast.
I especially loved all of Fridays' stories passed down from her mum. Ethereal and beautiful and clever and special, all truth mingled with fantasy and hope mingled with regret. Just gorgeous.
I cannot not mention what I truly love about Vicki Wakefield's work: her characters are such brilliant teenagers. She never belittles them, instead gives so much life and energy, it rings with the truth. I think the ultimate YA authors are the ones who believe in just how awesome teenagers are, showcasing their resilience and life and ability to have fun and live in a world not dulled by adult sensibilities.
Vicki Wakefield is an extraordinary talent who would shine in whichever genre she would choose to write in. I am cheering for Aussie teens who can experience books such as this: utterly compelling and life-changing stuff.
If you're into Aussie YA, Vicki Wakefield should be at the top of your list to check out. Two books out and she is right up there with the cool kids at the top.
I truly loved this book (even as it ripped me to shreds and patched me up again) and I am thrilled to recommend it to you all and cannot wait to see what you think :)
There's this gorgeous blend of adventure and tension. While friendships are being forged and the plot sails ahead into the unknown, there's an undercurrent of danger - just enough to create a pool of dread right in the pit of my stomach. Guys, it was only a solid month after finishing this read that I was able to come to terms with it all and conclude that, simply, this sophomore novel is amazing.
Wakefield possess the magic combo: prose to die for, sneaky, smiley humour, characters that come to life and work their way into your heart, and a power-packed climax that leaves you breathless a la Jellicoe Road. In some ways, this book reminds me a smidgen of Jellicoe Road - in the way that sometimes it seems like too much ~ the character's backgrounds, heartache and sorrow upon sorrow mingled with the perfect carving of relationships but like Jellicoe, Friday Brown pulls everything off and more. These characters and this story is brilliant and lingering and will hold fast.
I especially loved all of Fridays' stories passed down from her mum. Ethereal and beautiful and clever and special, all truth mingled with fantasy and hope mingled with regret. Just gorgeous.
I cannot not mention what I truly love about Vicki Wakefield's work: her characters are such brilliant teenagers. She never belittles them, instead gives so much life and energy, it rings with the truth. I think the ultimate YA authors are the ones who believe in just how awesome teenagers are, showcasing their resilience and life and ability to have fun and live in a world not dulled by adult sensibilities.
Vicki Wakefield is an extraordinary talent who would shine in whichever genre she would choose to write in. I am cheering for Aussie teens who can experience books such as this: utterly compelling and life-changing stuff.
If you're into Aussie YA, Vicki Wakefield should be at the top of your list to check out. Two books out and she is right up there with the cool kids at the top.
I truly loved this book (even as it ripped me to shreds and patched me up again) and I am thrilled to recommend it to you all and cannot wait to see what you think :)
October 20, 2013
Though it hardly happens, I can describe this book in one word : Specious.
Whenever a contemporary book comes along, the querulous part of me abandons ship and I'm as irrationally bound to the emotional quotient of the book as the next person is, to the movie, Titanic ( Tell me that you didn't feel the voice of Celine Dion at the end of the movie give your heart a tight little squeeze. Tell me. ) So, I either like the book or I don't, demurral or appreciation and there is no gray region of confusion as such.
But with this book, I felt all those walls of well-defined black and white archetypical norms crumbling down, all because of the prominent dearth of emotive response from my side, which, from my stance, determines the success of a contemporary novel.
This book was reminiscent of my all time favorite book, On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta because of the abstruse plot fraught with a multitude of possibilities that was presented to us. Where this book dived for the worse, in my opinion, was the author's attempt to exploit every one of those possibilities in such a short book.
Let me take a quote from the book ( and the blurb ) that pretty much summarizes everything :
Friday is grief-stricken after her mother's death and doesn't want to live with a grandfather who was nothing more than a ghost of her mother's past. And so she runs away. To find a dad she has never known.
Since Friday is a seventeen-year old, I couldn't help but try to relate to her and my advances were perpetually cut down by her unintelligible responses to various stimuli. It's true that I have never known grief like that but her running away is a puerile expression of her bereavement. We all have contemplated running away, haven't we ? But that was when we were in our early teens and the throes of dealing with a reticent and stubborn mother was the end of the world.
So, now when Friday runs away, I expect a reason that cuts deep enough to overthrow my existing sense of reason, which this book didn't exactly give me.
Once on the street, she realizes that her father would have a family of his own where she'd only be an unwelcome intrusion and so she chooses to live on the street. There, she is adopted by a mute boy, Silence and to tell you the truth, he's one of the reasons I'm giving this book a fair enough rating. She meets a street family comprising of teen kids and joins them. At this point it's clear that Friday is supposed to be rational, something the author seemed to be contradicting very often.
The leader of these street kids is Arden who is neurotic but nobody questions her hot and cold attitude that borders on mental sickness. But blinded by sorrow, Friday admires Arden as a hero for her formidable strength.
Then the most significant part of the book is a curse, that is said to be haunting the Brown women, according to which they all die because of water. Throughout the book Vivienne, Friday's mother is like a ghost and is remembered at least once every ten pages. I liked that aspect very much because it was understandable.
Now I seem to have unintentionally given you a half-hearted summary of the book but my qualms still haven't been voiced.
The curse after being exquisitely limned out in the prologue, is revisited only after 230 pages by which I'd nearly forgotten. Her street life calls for sympathy and understanding and overshadows her grief in a matter of pages. And there is the subject her self-realization ( which, I'm assuming is central to the story ) being brushed to the periphery. It also takes a turn where the story revolves around a potential murder and soon devolved into an uninteresting horror quip.
If you can understand this melee, it is evident that the leaps of genres and abysmal sketching out of characters ( especially the protagonist ) has left this book grossly incomplete.
However, this book does a good job in exploring each of these aspects individually with amazing writing and fleshed out instances. What remains is a massive jigsaw puzzle of where everything fits together.
Whenever a contemporary book comes along, the querulous part of me abandons ship and I'm as irrationally bound to the emotional quotient of the book as the next person is, to the movie, Titanic ( Tell me that you didn't feel the voice of Celine Dion at the end of the movie give your heart a tight little squeeze. Tell me. ) So, I either like the book or I don't, demurral or appreciation and there is no gray region of confusion as such.
But with this book, I felt all those walls of well-defined black and white archetypical norms crumbling down, all because of the prominent dearth of emotive response from my side, which, from my stance, determines the success of a contemporary novel.
This book was reminiscent of my all time favorite book, On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta because of the abstruse plot fraught with a multitude of possibilities that was presented to us. Where this book dived for the worse, in my opinion, was the author's attempt to exploit every one of those possibilities in such a short book.
Let me take a quote from the book ( and the blurb ) that pretty much summarizes everything :
‘I am Friday Brown. I buried my mother. My grandfather buried a swimming pool. A boy who can’t speak has adopted me. A girl kissed me. I broke and entered. Now I’m fantasising about a guy who’s a victim of crime and I am the criminal. I’m going nowhere and every minute I’m not moving, I’m being tail-gated by a curse that may or may not be real. They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on a Saturday I will drown…’
Friday is grief-stricken after her mother's death and doesn't want to live with a grandfather who was nothing more than a ghost of her mother's past. And so she runs away. To find a dad she has never known.
Since Friday is a seventeen-year old, I couldn't help but try to relate to her and my advances were perpetually cut down by her unintelligible responses to various stimuli. It's true that I have never known grief like that but her running away is a puerile expression of her bereavement. We all have contemplated running away, haven't we ? But that was when we were in our early teens and the throes of dealing with a reticent and stubborn mother was the end of the world.
So, now when Friday runs away, I expect a reason that cuts deep enough to overthrow my existing sense of reason, which this book didn't exactly give me.
Once on the street, she realizes that her father would have a family of his own where she'd only be an unwelcome intrusion and so she chooses to live on the street. There, she is adopted by a mute boy, Silence and to tell you the truth, he's one of the reasons I'm giving this book a fair enough rating. She meets a street family comprising of teen kids and joins them. At this point it's clear that Friday is supposed to be rational, something the author seemed to be contradicting very often.
The leader of these street kids is Arden who is neurotic but nobody questions her hot and cold attitude that borders on mental sickness. But blinded by sorrow, Friday admires Arden as a hero for her formidable strength.
Then the most significant part of the book is a curse, that is said to be haunting the Brown women, according to which they all die because of water. Throughout the book Vivienne, Friday's mother is like a ghost and is remembered at least once every ten pages. I liked that aspect very much because it was understandable.
Now I seem to have unintentionally given you a half-hearted summary of the book but my qualms still haven't been voiced.
The curse after being exquisitely limned out in the prologue, is revisited only after 230 pages by which I'd nearly forgotten. Her street life calls for sympathy and understanding and overshadows her grief in a matter of pages. And there is the subject her self-realization ( which, I'm assuming is central to the story ) being brushed to the periphery. It also takes a turn where the story revolves around a potential murder and soon devolved into an uninteresting horror quip.
If you can understand this melee, it is evident that the leaps of genres and abysmal sketching out of characters ( especially the protagonist ) has left this book grossly incomplete.
However, this book does a good job in exploring each of these aspects individually with amazing writing and fleshed out instances. What remains is a massive jigsaw puzzle of where everything fits together.
February 3, 2013
Rating: 4.25/4.5 Stars
I always find it extraordinarily difficult to read books that receive a great amount of hype. For one, they not only raise my expectations, but when they come about for books whose authors I've never read before, I am placed in a situation where I expect to read a 5 Star novel and compare it to other 5 Star novels, which is simply not fair for the book itself and changes my experience in irrevocable ways. With Friday Brown, I went through a similar situation. Friday Brown undoubtedly deserves the full 5 Stars that nearly every other reader has bestowed upon it, but as this was my first experience with Vikki Wakefield, I wound up expecting to find another Jellicoe Road, which this was not. Nevertheless, Wakefield's sophomore novel is a poignant and beautiful tale, one that I enjoyed tremendously, despite the slight twinge of disappointment that came from my over-hyped expectations.
Friday Brown is a subtle novel, the kind that hides in the shadows but manages to extend its long limbs around your heart while you dream. As a tale of self-discovery, it is astonishingly unique, peeling back the layers of Friday's growth in slow and tortuous ways. At times, it seems as if the novel lacks a plot - and, to some extent, it does. Friday Brown is the type of story you can't imagine an author really sitting down to scope out and outline; instead, it's the type of book you can't help but think that the author sat down to write and before they knew it, the words were writing themselves, not the other way around. Nevertheless, despite being such a fluid mesh of beautiful prose, scene after scene, and a vivid array of images, Friday Brown never lags in pace or allows your attention to wander. It keeps the reader engaged on this startling journey and before long, the abrupt twists and turns become a natural part of the experience.
Wakefield's sophomore novel is the unraveling tale of Friday Brown, a seventeen-year-old girl who has grown up with her mother, Vivienne, her life a tapestry of stories of past generations and her every day a new adventure, a new town, a new face. When Friday's mother passes away, leaving her behind with a grandfather who's more stranger to her than friend, Friday cannot help but feel alone. After all, who is she without her mother, her constant companion, or the tales she weaves for her everyday? Thus, Friday runs away into the city, hoping to find her long forgotten father but instead stumbling upon Silence, a mute boy who introduces her to a band of homeless children led by Arden. Arden, a woman not much older than Friday herself, is the slightly insane, but recklessly brave, mother of a group of children much like Friday herself - children with no place to belong. Friday, like many before her, soon becomes enraptured with Arden's charismatic ways, but as her hold over her sanity begins to falter, Friday just may begin to find herself.
One of the most remarkable qualities about any Australian novel is its ability to make itself felt so life-like. Friday Brown feels like an astonishingly real tale, one that exposes the hidden truths of children who belong nowhere, who matter to no one, and who can disappear so easily. Friday, despite having a home and family, manages to connect with children like Silence for she too feels lost and alone in the world. Yet, her struggle never prepared her for a life on the streets and to see Friday embrace the raw, hidden parts inside her to fend for herself in the city is an eye-opening journey. We can see, even from the beginning itself, that Friday and Arden, both lively with sparks, will eventually ignite flames between themselves, but the slow manner in which this eventual confrontation builds up and takes place is gripping, leaving you flipping page after page until Friday finally comes to find herself.
Unlike most self-discovery novels, Friday Brown is not about traveling to exotic places or meeting life-changing people, preferably good-looking men. Instead, it is centered around the inner battle between oneself, between the need to belong and feel accepted and the urge to come unto oneself and lead. Through a variety of outside influences, situations, and events, Friday finds herself gradually climbing a ladder, taking control, and finding the bits and pieces of her she never believed she had or, if she did, that she didn't know were hers. With the dual settings of this novel - the city and an abandoned suburban town in the wilderness - comes a dual relationship with nearly every aspect of this tale, whether it be the nurturing motherhood of Arden versus that of Vivienne or the difficulties of city-life versus the harsh brutality of nature. With every step that she takes, Friday is forced to face her past and her present and the ultimate revelations she will find will lead her to none other than her very own self.
Moreover, in addition to this unique blend of self-discovery, longing, and friendship comes a tale of debilitating grief, responsibility, and courage. Friday Brown is not a happy-go-lucky tale of becoming the best version of yourself. It is, rather, an unflinching journey of the resonating relationships, losses, and discoveries that are all part of finding oneself. I finished Friday Brown with hope, my heart heavy with grief, but covered with silver linings. Yet, I must admit that for all its excellence, beauty, and honesty, Friday Brown was a novel I still expected a little more from. It is a slightly obscure novel, one that I found myself questioning while reading for it seemed to be moving in no direction and at times, when it did move, when I did expect certain climaxes, they never came. Friday Brown delivers on every front, establishing itself as a poignant read, but perhaps I expected to be a little more heart-broken, a little more heavy with grief.
Friday Brown is a quiet novel, though, as I previously stated. It is subtle, refusing to clearly spell out the growth, change, and self-discovery of its protagonist. It is, rather, a novel that is felt, clearly as a punch through the gut with grief, softly as the blowing wind with hope, and harshly as a stab with reality. Would I have fallen in love with Friday Brown more thoroughly if its message had been drilled into my head a little more forcefully? Perhaps, but I like to think that this is a novel I will return to and cherish, return to and love, the way it deserves to be loved. For, next time, I won't be taken by surprise. Next time, I'll open my heart and allow myself to be changed by this book too. I know I will.
I always find it extraordinarily difficult to read books that receive a great amount of hype. For one, they not only raise my expectations, but when they come about for books whose authors I've never read before, I am placed in a situation where I expect to read a 5 Star novel and compare it to other 5 Star novels, which is simply not fair for the book itself and changes my experience in irrevocable ways. With Friday Brown, I went through a similar situation. Friday Brown undoubtedly deserves the full 5 Stars that nearly every other reader has bestowed upon it, but as this was my first experience with Vikki Wakefield, I wound up expecting to find another Jellicoe Road, which this was not. Nevertheless, Wakefield's sophomore novel is a poignant and beautiful tale, one that I enjoyed tremendously, despite the slight twinge of disappointment that came from my over-hyped expectations.
Friday Brown is a subtle novel, the kind that hides in the shadows but manages to extend its long limbs around your heart while you dream. As a tale of self-discovery, it is astonishingly unique, peeling back the layers of Friday's growth in slow and tortuous ways. At times, it seems as if the novel lacks a plot - and, to some extent, it does. Friday Brown is the type of story you can't imagine an author really sitting down to scope out and outline; instead, it's the type of book you can't help but think that the author sat down to write and before they knew it, the words were writing themselves, not the other way around. Nevertheless, despite being such a fluid mesh of beautiful prose, scene after scene, and a vivid array of images, Friday Brown never lags in pace or allows your attention to wander. It keeps the reader engaged on this startling journey and before long, the abrupt twists and turns become a natural part of the experience.
Wakefield's sophomore novel is the unraveling tale of Friday Brown, a seventeen-year-old girl who has grown up with her mother, Vivienne, her life a tapestry of stories of past generations and her every day a new adventure, a new town, a new face. When Friday's mother passes away, leaving her behind with a grandfather who's more stranger to her than friend, Friday cannot help but feel alone. After all, who is she without her mother, her constant companion, or the tales she weaves for her everyday? Thus, Friday runs away into the city, hoping to find her long forgotten father but instead stumbling upon Silence, a mute boy who introduces her to a band of homeless children led by Arden. Arden, a woman not much older than Friday herself, is the slightly insane, but recklessly brave, mother of a group of children much like Friday herself - children with no place to belong. Friday, like many before her, soon becomes enraptured with Arden's charismatic ways, but as her hold over her sanity begins to falter, Friday just may begin to find herself.
One of the most remarkable qualities about any Australian novel is its ability to make itself felt so life-like. Friday Brown feels like an astonishingly real tale, one that exposes the hidden truths of children who belong nowhere, who matter to no one, and who can disappear so easily. Friday, despite having a home and family, manages to connect with children like Silence for she too feels lost and alone in the world. Yet, her struggle never prepared her for a life on the streets and to see Friday embrace the raw, hidden parts inside her to fend for herself in the city is an eye-opening journey. We can see, even from the beginning itself, that Friday and Arden, both lively with sparks, will eventually ignite flames between themselves, but the slow manner in which this eventual confrontation builds up and takes place is gripping, leaving you flipping page after page until Friday finally comes to find herself.
Unlike most self-discovery novels, Friday Brown is not about traveling to exotic places or meeting life-changing people, preferably good-looking men. Instead, it is centered around the inner battle between oneself, between the need to belong and feel accepted and the urge to come unto oneself and lead. Through a variety of outside influences, situations, and events, Friday finds herself gradually climbing a ladder, taking control, and finding the bits and pieces of her she never believed she had or, if she did, that she didn't know were hers. With the dual settings of this novel - the city and an abandoned suburban town in the wilderness - comes a dual relationship with nearly every aspect of this tale, whether it be the nurturing motherhood of Arden versus that of Vivienne or the difficulties of city-life versus the harsh brutality of nature. With every step that she takes, Friday is forced to face her past and her present and the ultimate revelations she will find will lead her to none other than her very own self.
Moreover, in addition to this unique blend of self-discovery, longing, and friendship comes a tale of debilitating grief, responsibility, and courage. Friday Brown is not a happy-go-lucky tale of becoming the best version of yourself. It is, rather, an unflinching journey of the resonating relationships, losses, and discoveries that are all part of finding oneself. I finished Friday Brown with hope, my heart heavy with grief, but covered with silver linings. Yet, I must admit that for all its excellence, beauty, and honesty, Friday Brown was a novel I still expected a little more from. It is a slightly obscure novel, one that I found myself questioning while reading for it seemed to be moving in no direction and at times, when it did move, when I did expect certain climaxes, they never came. Friday Brown delivers on every front, establishing itself as a poignant read, but perhaps I expected to be a little more heart-broken, a little more heavy with grief.
Friday Brown is a quiet novel, though, as I previously stated. It is subtle, refusing to clearly spell out the growth, change, and self-discovery of its protagonist. It is, rather, a novel that is felt, clearly as a punch through the gut with grief, softly as the blowing wind with hope, and harshly as a stab with reality. Would I have fallen in love with Friday Brown more thoroughly if its message had been drilled into my head a little more forcefully? Perhaps, but I like to think that this is a novel I will return to and cherish, return to and love, the way it deserves to be loved. For, next time, I won't be taken by surprise. Next time, I'll open my heart and allow myself to be changed by this book too. I know I will.
February 2, 2015
This book is incredible. Writing this about two months after finishing Friday Brown, these are the only words I seem to be able to form. However, I am going to do my best to write some sort of review because I want the whole world to know that I love this book. In fact, it may even be one of my favourite books of all time. Yes. That was a big statement. Vikki Wakefield has eclipsed all my other favourite authors, the way George Harrison stole my heart with Something, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Here Comes the Sun. Seriously, where can I buy my ‘I love Vikki’ badge? It will be right alongside my lifetime Beatles fan club membership, I promise.
“I was the sum of two people, one dead, the other unknown. I’d lived in a hundred small towns and I’d never known another person for my whole life, except Vivienne.”
Friday Brown is still reeling from the death of her mother Vivienne when she decides to run away from the grandfather who is caring for her and find the father she’s never known. She disappears into a crowded city, where faces blur together as feet busily pound the lifeless grey pavement. Here Friday finds comfort in a group of equally lost people where she bonds with Silence, someone who needs a loving friend almost as much as she does.
I adored the characters in this novel. I was in love with Friday right from the very first page (which, might I add, is superb). She’s smart, loving and fiercely loyal, but she lacks confidence. Her journey of self-discovery is remarkably well written. She has to face her past and realise that sometimes even those we love most can lie to us. For Friday though, the problem is that these lies and half-truths formed her and without them she is lost. I was so glad to see how she found herself and her inner strength throughout the novel. Of course, a review of Friday Brown would not be complete without Silence. Silence, the gorgeous, silent boy who changes Friday’s world. Needless to say, I thought their friendship was absolutely gorgeous.
Each of the other characters was remarkable in their own way, but it was Arden who stuck with me for the most chilling of reasons. She was enchanting, calculating and extremely manipulative. Yet her nurturing, mothering personality attracted the other street kids like moths to a flame. I couldn’t help feeling unsettled by her from the outset, but understood Friday’s need to impress her as she filled part of the void Vivienne left in Friday’s life.
The writing was magnificent. It drew me in and help me captive. The second part in particular struck me the most as the book took on a gothic turn, with writing reminiscent of Barbara Baynton’s The Chosen Vessel. It was absolutely gorgeous, hauntingly and devastatingly so. Everything about this novel was authentic; the setting, the people, the feelings. Through Wakefield’s prose I could feel the red dirt between my toes, I could feel a real and loving connection between Friday and Silence and I was left utterly heartbroken by all the emotions. Seriously, Wakefield took my heart, tore it out and squashed it into tiny little pieces. Needless to say I ate a lot of chocolate upon finishing this book.
I honestly cannot explain how much I love this novel. However, I have chosen a song which I think fits Friday Brown perfectly: Sad Lisa by Cat Stevens. I have never heard a song which seems to fit a novel so beautifully.
For me, everything about this novel was perfect; from the haunting cover and the gorgeous prose to Friday’s wonderful journey of self-discovery. In case you hadn’t already noticed, I just want to shout from the rooftops how much I adore Friday Brown and I cannot wait to see what else Ms Wakefield has in store for us.
This review and many more can be found at Maree's Musings.
“I was the sum of two people, one dead, the other unknown. I’d lived in a hundred small towns and I’d never known another person for my whole life, except Vivienne.”
Friday Brown is still reeling from the death of her mother Vivienne when she decides to run away from the grandfather who is caring for her and find the father she’s never known. She disappears into a crowded city, where faces blur together as feet busily pound the lifeless grey pavement. Here Friday finds comfort in a group of equally lost people where she bonds with Silence, someone who needs a loving friend almost as much as she does.
I adored the characters in this novel. I was in love with Friday right from the very first page (which, might I add, is superb). She’s smart, loving and fiercely loyal, but she lacks confidence. Her journey of self-discovery is remarkably well written. She has to face her past and realise that sometimes even those we love most can lie to us. For Friday though, the problem is that these lies and half-truths formed her and without them she is lost. I was so glad to see how she found herself and her inner strength throughout the novel. Of course, a review of Friday Brown would not be complete without Silence. Silence, the gorgeous, silent boy who changes Friday’s world. Needless to say, I thought their friendship was absolutely gorgeous.
Each of the other characters was remarkable in their own way, but it was Arden who stuck with me for the most chilling of reasons. She was enchanting, calculating and extremely manipulative. Yet her nurturing, mothering personality attracted the other street kids like moths to a flame. I couldn’t help feeling unsettled by her from the outset, but understood Friday’s need to impress her as she filled part of the void Vivienne left in Friday’s life.
The writing was magnificent. It drew me in and help me captive. The second part in particular struck me the most as the book took on a gothic turn, with writing reminiscent of Barbara Baynton’s The Chosen Vessel. It was absolutely gorgeous, hauntingly and devastatingly so. Everything about this novel was authentic; the setting, the people, the feelings. Through Wakefield’s prose I could feel the red dirt between my toes, I could feel a real and loving connection between Friday and Silence and I was left utterly heartbroken by all the emotions. Seriously, Wakefield took my heart, tore it out and squashed it into tiny little pieces. Needless to say I ate a lot of chocolate upon finishing this book.
I honestly cannot explain how much I love this novel. However, I have chosen a song which I think fits Friday Brown perfectly: Sad Lisa by Cat Stevens. I have never heard a song which seems to fit a novel so beautifully.
For me, everything about this novel was perfect; from the haunting cover and the gorgeous prose to Friday’s wonderful journey of self-discovery. In case you hadn’t already noticed, I just want to shout from the rooftops how much I adore Friday Brown and I cannot wait to see what else Ms Wakefield has in store for us.
This review and many more can be found at Maree's Musings.
August 30, 2012
4.5 stars
WOAH. I need a moment.
___________
WOAH. I need a moment.
___________
November 24, 2015
4.5, but I'm bumping it up because I read this book months ago and can't stop thinking about it. It spoke to me on a personal level, and that's why it deserves all the praise it can get.
So, I've read 40 books this year and this is my first 5-star read. Just shows how picky I am.
My life has been told to me through campfire tales - stories that spill over when the fire has burnt low and silence must be filled.
This is a realistic survival story that follows kids on the run, all from troubled homes and pasts.
It progressively grows darker and grittier, until we find out what these children are really capable of. It is dirty and unapologetic, and made me uncomfortable many times.
It reminds me of Tiger Lily, where children have to act like adults.
They have warped views of love and power, and therefore abuse both.
After all, how could they know? No one taught them, and that breaks my heart. In the end, they’re just confused, lost kids who do not know better.
Friday Brown is a very bittersweet and heartbreaking book, with hope sprinkled here and there.
The prose is gorgeous and poignant, with no ounce of pretentiousness. It feels sensitive and delicate and beautiful. I strongly related to Friday, who is at a crossroads in her life.
Life is full of wrong turns and dead ends and pathways that peter out. They all count, even the wrong turns; they all add more to who you become. Nobody wants to be a one-way street.
Friday and Arden's relationship tugged at my heartstrings. I love the concept of idolization and adoration of an older girl who dares you, who introduces you to a new world and makes you feel special. But you don't know that she's a master at manipulation and in the end as insecure and sad as the rest of them.
Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.
What made this a 4.- star read instead of a 5 is because I feel one particular character could’ve been more fleshed-out.
I feared she would fall prey to the Manic pixie dream girl syndrome, and barely avoided the trap. We never find out her real backstory and that made her feel less relatable.
Final verdict:
I loved this little book, and can't believe how few people have read it. It deserves more recognition, because it's par with some of my favorite contemporaries.
I wish Vikki Wakefield had five other novels published, so I could get my heart broken by these amazing characters and beautiful writing.
Some things aren’t meant for this world. They’re too fragile, and life breaks them.
So, I've read 40 books this year and this is my first 5-star read. Just shows how picky I am.
My life has been told to me through campfire tales - stories that spill over when the fire has burnt low and silence must be filled.
This is a realistic survival story that follows kids on the run, all from troubled homes and pasts.
It progressively grows darker and grittier, until we find out what these children are really capable of. It is dirty and unapologetic, and made me uncomfortable many times.
It reminds me of Tiger Lily, where children have to act like adults.
They have warped views of love and power, and therefore abuse both.
After all, how could they know? No one taught them, and that breaks my heart. In the end, they’re just confused, lost kids who do not know better.
Friday Brown is a very bittersweet and heartbreaking book, with hope sprinkled here and there.
The prose is gorgeous and poignant, with no ounce of pretentiousness. It feels sensitive and delicate and beautiful. I strongly related to Friday, who is at a crossroads in her life.
Life is full of wrong turns and dead ends and pathways that peter out. They all count, even the wrong turns; they all add more to who you become. Nobody wants to be a one-way street.
Friday and Arden's relationship tugged at my heartstrings. I love the concept of idolization and adoration of an older girl who dares you, who introduces you to a new world and makes you feel special. But you don't know that she's a master at manipulation and in the end as insecure and sad as the rest of them.
Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.
What made this a 4.- star read instead of a 5 is because I feel one particular character could’ve been more fleshed-out.
I feared she would fall prey to the Manic pixie dream girl syndrome, and barely avoided the trap. We never find out her real backstory and that made her feel less relatable.
Final verdict:
I loved this little book, and can't believe how few people have read it. It deserves more recognition, because it's par with some of my favorite contemporaries.
I wish Vikki Wakefield had five other novels published, so I could get my heart broken by these amazing characters and beautiful writing.
Some things aren’t meant for this world. They’re too fragile, and life breaks them.
October 7, 2024
4.75/5
so much sadness.
tears and snot dripping.
what have you done to me?
so much sadness.
tears and snot dripping.
what have you done to me?
August 13, 2012
This is a beautiful, heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming novel. It made me cry. And when I finished, I just sat and hugged it for a while because I didn't want to let it go.
I loved All I Ever Wanted, and with Friday Brown, Vikki Wakefield has created another collection of complex, fascinating characters in settings that are both familiar and unsettling.
Friday is a devastatingly real narrator. Her fear, loneliness and courage are palpable on the page. She's written in a way that's so painfully honest it's almost unbearable at times. But that's what makes her journey so mesmerising: that she bears the weight of her uncertainty and isolation to stand up for herself and those she cares about.
This story deeply moved me. It’s not only beautifully and cleverly written - with awesome dialogue and fully fleshed characters - it’s also a tense page-turner, particularly once Friday and her new ‘family’ go bush. The Brown family legacy also adds another layer of tension Friday can't quite shrug off.
This book has heartbreaking moments – and these are what make the story so powerful. But ultimately Friday Brown is a story about self acceptance, the value of friendship and family, and the importance of taking responsibility for our own life stories.
It's young adult fiction at its best (actually, it's an important book no matter where it sits in the bookshop).
Did I mention I loved this book?
I loved All I Ever Wanted, and with Friday Brown, Vikki Wakefield has created another collection of complex, fascinating characters in settings that are both familiar and unsettling.
Friday is a devastatingly real narrator. Her fear, loneliness and courage are palpable on the page. She's written in a way that's so painfully honest it's almost unbearable at times. But that's what makes her journey so mesmerising: that she bears the weight of her uncertainty and isolation to stand up for herself and those she cares about.
This story deeply moved me. It’s not only beautifully and cleverly written - with awesome dialogue and fully fleshed characters - it’s also a tense page-turner, particularly once Friday and her new ‘family’ go bush. The Brown family legacy also adds another layer of tension Friday can't quite shrug off.
This book has heartbreaking moments – and these are what make the story so powerful. But ultimately Friday Brown is a story about self acceptance, the value of friendship and family, and the importance of taking responsibility for our own life stories.
It's young adult fiction at its best (actually, it's an important book no matter where it sits in the bookshop).
Did I mention I loved this book?
August 6, 2014
Liliane ‘Friday’ Brown is a wanderer. She and her mother, Vivienne, spent Friday’s formidable years bouncing from one outback town to the next, chasing drover men and trying to escape a watery Saturday curse … Friday has been hearing the tales of her drowned women ancestors since she was a child. Brown women always die by drowning, and always on a Saturday. Saturday is the reason Vivienne nicknamed her daughter Friday, it’s why she kept them wandering around the desert outback, and in the end it killed her anyway.
Now Friday is alone, but she still feels the need to follow in her mother’s wandering footsteps.
Friday packs up her swag and leaves her grandfather’s quiet home, with the concrete pool. She hoofs it into the city, and there feels more lost and alone, never more aware of the hole Vivienne left in her heart.
And then Friday meets Silence. Or, rather, they perform a small miracle together and ignite a fateful friendship that Friday is never likely to forget…
Silence is a street kid. He does not talk much, and upon her pleading he leads Friday to the abandoned house where he and his street ‘family’ live. There’s little boy AiAi who jangles when he walks, for all the bones his old daddy broke. Darcy makes her living from men, and she hates Friday on sight. Joe is a straight-talking wise boy, and Carrie has fangs and a wounded past. Bree is an indigenous girl whose family perform street music, and Mailk is the muscle who sells drugs on the side. And reigning over all these lost boys and girls is Arden, a veritable Peter Pan Amazonian with dreadlocks and a vengeful tattoo.
Friday is reluctantly drawn into their tough and wild life, even though she feels the emptiness in her grow everyday she stays. It’s Silence that keeps her hanging around, Silence and the walls of this abandoned house that he papers with worded shapes. And then it’s Arden, her fiery temperament and rough loyalty.
… And then it’s Wish. An old street kid Arden used to know. His smile reminds Friday, for the first time since her mother died, that people can connect again. Not all who wander are lost.
But when Arden insists on moving her street kin to the outback wild, when she gets it into her head to keep them all isolated in one faraway place, Friday gets the sinking feeling that she and Silence should have left a long time ago …
‘Friday Brown’ is the new young adult novel from Australian author, Vikki Wakefield.
I read Wakefield’s debut novel last year, and found a new favourite Aussie YA author in the process. Like many others I was eagerly anticipating her second outing, and feeling that sick see-saw feeling, between hoping it will be just as good as her first, but worried lightning won’t strike twice. Well, rest assured, ‘All I Ever Wanted’ was no lightning in a bottle and ‘Friday Brown’ is a glorious thunderstorm after the fact.
This second novel is nothing like Wakefield’s first. Except, perhaps, in their young female protagonists who are a little bit lost, lonely and loyal. We meet Friday Brown shortly after her mother’s death, when she’s stuck at her grandfather’s house but knows the only place for her is where she and Vivienne left off – wandering, bouncing between towns and never laying roots. So she takes her swag and heads into the city – where she meets Silence, Arden and her place in their street family sends them all on a fateful collision course.
I am Friday Brown. I buried my mother. I ran away from a man who buried a swimming pool. A boy who can’t speak has adopted me. A girl kissed me. I broke and entered. Now I’m fantasising about a guy who’s a victim of a crime and I am the criminal. I’m going nowhere and every minute I’m not moving, I’m being tailgated by a curse that may or may not be real. They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on a Saturday, I will drown . . .
This novel feels a love letter to Australia. As in ‘All I Ever Wanted’, Wakefield doesn’t put a hard and fast name on her settings – Friday could be knocking around the city of Sydney or Melbourne, or even Wakefield’s hometown of Adelaide. But it doesn’t matter – because Wakefield excels in writing the feel of a place; the city streets with throngs of people that can make a person feel terribly alone. Friday takes to writing her thoughts in chalk on the pavement, and the many suited pedestrians who stroll by without making eye-contact could be from any Aussie city at all, it doesn’t matter. So too with the outback setting of the novel’s second half – a red-dusted stage where the city kids are chasing shade at an abandoned town. Wakefield does a sublime job of writing Australia for everyone – by not naming the places, readers instantly transpose their own memories and feelings to the unfolding scenes, and I loved that. But the anonymity doesn’t mean Wakefield’s settings have any less heart. As I said, ‘Friday Brown’ feels like a love letter to Australia, and never more than when Friday is recounting her childhood spent traveling from town to town;
Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I'd slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.
In reading ‘Friday Brown’, I kept thinking that Vikki Wakefield is a hard writer to pin down, and I love that too. That she’s a new shining star for Australian YA is a given. But her explorations in ‘Friday Brown’ are urban and fantastical, coming-of-age mixed with thriller. This is a hard novel, and that’s partly what makes it so good, but there’s something magic here too. Friday has only one crying eye, a drowning curse stalks her Saturday’s and her mother lives in the stories she remembers. There’s a touch of Alice Hoffman to Vikki Wakefield, I think.
What’s also unmistakeable is that Vikki Wakefield writes the tough stuff. ‘All I Ever Wanted’ gave us Mim, a girl from a troubled family and dangerous suburb who just wanted to get out. ‘Friday Brown’ presents us with life on the street, and the myriad of reasons a child might want to become a face on a missing poster. I cried and cried reading ‘Friday Brown’, but I so enjoyed the journey that I can’t begrudge Wakefield my tears. She earned them, every one. Her characters are so vivid and endearing, or vicious and infuriating that she makes you feel everything down to your bones. Silence was a beautiful, quiet boy who spoke with a rasp and felt in visible. Arden, by contrast, is a beautiful danger – and her characterisation was gorgeous, from her animal-like dreadlocked hair to the way Wakefield describes her fighting stance, she reminded me a bit of Alex Garland’s Sal, from ‘The Beach.’ I was dragged into these character’s lives and enjoyed every minute with them.
One thing I will say is that I don’t think Wakefield excels at writing traditional romance, and shouldn’t try to. I actually love that Wakefield often writes the antithesis to the romance of most young adult novels. Wish comes in the middle of Friday’s story, and she feels an almost instant, kismet attraction to him that comes to hold a bit more gravity towards the end – and for that reason may have needed to be strung out more in the middle. But I didn’t feel overly invested in that particular connection. I was more interested in Friday’s tender friendship with Silence, a different kind of love story but far more powerful, in my opinion. It happened in ‘All I Ever Wanted’ too, where I was glad that Mim’s daydreamed romance with Jordan Mullen soured in reality, and it was her relationship with his sister, Kate, that I found myself more enthralled by. I feel like Wakefield almost veered towards the more traditional love story stuff with Wish and Friday, and I didn’t need it at all – not when there was plenty more to be read in Friday’s relationships with Silence and Arden.
I’m so happy to have Vikki Wakefield for Australian YA. She definitely brings something vital and individual to the genre – writing about tough but lonely girls, the friendships that save them and the past that haunts them. ‘Friday Brown’, like her debut, is Wakefield writing the tough stuff – this time about street life and missing someone so much that you lose yourself when you lose them. I loved this book from the bottom of my heart to the tips of my toes. But now, of course, comes the terrible downtime between Vikki Wakefield releases, when I have to wait for her next book to come into my life. Sigh.
Now Friday is alone, but she still feels the need to follow in her mother’s wandering footsteps.
Friday packs up her swag and leaves her grandfather’s quiet home, with the concrete pool. She hoofs it into the city, and there feels more lost and alone, never more aware of the hole Vivienne left in her heart.
And then Friday meets Silence. Or, rather, they perform a small miracle together and ignite a fateful friendship that Friday is never likely to forget…
Silence is a street kid. He does not talk much, and upon her pleading he leads Friday to the abandoned house where he and his street ‘family’ live. There’s little boy AiAi who jangles when he walks, for all the bones his old daddy broke. Darcy makes her living from men, and she hates Friday on sight. Joe is a straight-talking wise boy, and Carrie has fangs and a wounded past. Bree is an indigenous girl whose family perform street music, and Mailk is the muscle who sells drugs on the side. And reigning over all these lost boys and girls is Arden, a veritable Peter Pan Amazonian with dreadlocks and a vengeful tattoo.
Friday is reluctantly drawn into their tough and wild life, even though she feels the emptiness in her grow everyday she stays. It’s Silence that keeps her hanging around, Silence and the walls of this abandoned house that he papers with worded shapes. And then it’s Arden, her fiery temperament and rough loyalty.
… And then it’s Wish. An old street kid Arden used to know. His smile reminds Friday, for the first time since her mother died, that people can connect again. Not all who wander are lost.
But when Arden insists on moving her street kin to the outback wild, when she gets it into her head to keep them all isolated in one faraway place, Friday gets the sinking feeling that she and Silence should have left a long time ago …
‘Friday Brown’ is the new young adult novel from Australian author, Vikki Wakefield.
I read Wakefield’s debut novel last year, and found a new favourite Aussie YA author in the process. Like many others I was eagerly anticipating her second outing, and feeling that sick see-saw feeling, between hoping it will be just as good as her first, but worried lightning won’t strike twice. Well, rest assured, ‘All I Ever Wanted’ was no lightning in a bottle and ‘Friday Brown’ is a glorious thunderstorm after the fact.
This second novel is nothing like Wakefield’s first. Except, perhaps, in their young female protagonists who are a little bit lost, lonely and loyal. We meet Friday Brown shortly after her mother’s death, when she’s stuck at her grandfather’s house but knows the only place for her is where she and Vivienne left off – wandering, bouncing between towns and never laying roots. So she takes her swag and heads into the city – where she meets Silence, Arden and her place in their street family sends them all on a fateful collision course.
I am Friday Brown. I buried my mother. I ran away from a man who buried a swimming pool. A boy who can’t speak has adopted me. A girl kissed me. I broke and entered. Now I’m fantasising about a guy who’s a victim of a crime and I am the criminal. I’m going nowhere and every minute I’m not moving, I’m being tailgated by a curse that may or may not be real. They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on a Saturday, I will drown . . .
This novel feels a love letter to Australia. As in ‘All I Ever Wanted’, Wakefield doesn’t put a hard and fast name on her settings – Friday could be knocking around the city of Sydney or Melbourne, or even Wakefield’s hometown of Adelaide. But it doesn’t matter – because Wakefield excels in writing the feel of a place; the city streets with throngs of people that can make a person feel terribly alone. Friday takes to writing her thoughts in chalk on the pavement, and the many suited pedestrians who stroll by without making eye-contact could be from any Aussie city at all, it doesn’t matter. So too with the outback setting of the novel’s second half – a red-dusted stage where the city kids are chasing shade at an abandoned town. Wakefield does a sublime job of writing Australia for everyone – by not naming the places, readers instantly transpose their own memories and feelings to the unfolding scenes, and I loved that. But the anonymity doesn’t mean Wakefield’s settings have any less heart. As I said, ‘Friday Brown’ feels like a love letter to Australia, and never more than when Friday is recounting her childhood spent traveling from town to town;
Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I'd slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.
In reading ‘Friday Brown’, I kept thinking that Vikki Wakefield is a hard writer to pin down, and I love that too. That she’s a new shining star for Australian YA is a given. But her explorations in ‘Friday Brown’ are urban and fantastical, coming-of-age mixed with thriller. This is a hard novel, and that’s partly what makes it so good, but there’s something magic here too. Friday has only one crying eye, a drowning curse stalks her Saturday’s and her mother lives in the stories she remembers. There’s a touch of Alice Hoffman to Vikki Wakefield, I think.
What’s also unmistakeable is that Vikki Wakefield writes the tough stuff. ‘All I Ever Wanted’ gave us Mim, a girl from a troubled family and dangerous suburb who just wanted to get out. ‘Friday Brown’ presents us with life on the street, and the myriad of reasons a child might want to become a face on a missing poster. I cried and cried reading ‘Friday Brown’, but I so enjoyed the journey that I can’t begrudge Wakefield my tears. She earned them, every one. Her characters are so vivid and endearing, or vicious and infuriating that she makes you feel everything down to your bones. Silence was a beautiful, quiet boy who spoke with a rasp and felt in visible. Arden, by contrast, is a beautiful danger – and her characterisation was gorgeous, from her animal-like dreadlocked hair to the way Wakefield describes her fighting stance, she reminded me a bit of Alex Garland’s Sal, from ‘The Beach.’ I was dragged into these character’s lives and enjoyed every minute with them.
One thing I will say is that I don’t think Wakefield excels at writing traditional romance, and shouldn’t try to. I actually love that Wakefield often writes the antithesis to the romance of most young adult novels. Wish comes in the middle of Friday’s story, and she feels an almost instant, kismet attraction to him that comes to hold a bit more gravity towards the end – and for that reason may have needed to be strung out more in the middle. But I didn’t feel overly invested in that particular connection. I was more interested in Friday’s tender friendship with Silence, a different kind of love story but far more powerful, in my opinion. It happened in ‘All I Ever Wanted’ too, where I was glad that Mim’s daydreamed romance with Jordan Mullen soured in reality, and it was her relationship with his sister, Kate, that I found myself more enthralled by. I feel like Wakefield almost veered towards the more traditional love story stuff with Wish and Friday, and I didn’t need it at all – not when there was plenty more to be read in Friday’s relationships with Silence and Arden.
I’m so happy to have Vikki Wakefield for Australian YA. She definitely brings something vital and individual to the genre – writing about tough but lonely girls, the friendships that save them and the past that haunts them. ‘Friday Brown’, like her debut, is Wakefield writing the tough stuff – this time about street life and missing someone so much that you lose yourself when you lose them. I loved this book from the bottom of my heart to the tips of my toes. But now, of course, comes the terrible downtime between Vikki Wakefield releases, when I have to wait for her next book to come into my life. Sigh.
February 26, 2015
Vivienne used to say that sometimes the best you can do is to try not to be one of the bastards.
I can not stop crying! Isa, this book seriously affected me and I'm not sure if I should be blessing you or cursing you! I finished this hours ago and I still, every time I let myself stop and the thoughts creep in, I can not stop the crying.
Friday Brown is emotionally lost. Her mother is gone and her world has been turned upside down. Life leads her into the city and to a ragtag group of street kids all working for the good of their little family, it appears.
Friday lacks confidence, she doubts and she pushes away anyone she feels may get too close to her. She's used to living her whole life on the move, never putting down any roots and only ever loving just one person, her mom Vivienne. But all of that is challenged when this group enters her life. Some of them she likes right away, others are more trying. But it's her relationship with Silence, the slightly younger boy that befriended her, that really penetrates her heart. This is not about romance, it's about connection.
Silence... it's been a really long time since a character has blindsided me like Silence did. I love him. I know, he's fictional, but it doesn't matter. I love him. It's not a 'oooh, i have such a book crush' kind of love, because I don't have a book crush. I love him the way I love my very best friend. I love his soul. As we readers all know, despite the fact that they are words on paper, a brilliant writer has the ability to breathe a soul into their characters. Silence has a beautiful soul. I love him.
Silence
Honestly, there have been only a handful of books that have affected me like this. I can seriously count them on two hands. (So can you, actually... they're all listed on a shelf called soul books.) This book got to me on the same level as A Fault in our Stars. It has held me in it's thrall, similar to Jellicoe Road. I wish I had this in print so I could hold it and stroke it. So I could open it and touch the pages.
Anyone who picks this book up, come back here. Send me a note. Talk about it with me. I need to talk about it. I need others to read this.
There in the silence of the hills,
I shall find peace that soothes and stills
the throbbing of the weary brain,
for I am going home again.
June 16, 2013
I loved Vikki Wakefield’s debut novel All I Ever Wanted (which I read in one night) and have been looking forward to her second book ever since. Friday Brown didn’t let me down.
Vikki Wakefield’s descriptions are incredibly evocative — you can tell she cares about every word. Her metaphors and similes are especially vivid — so much so that I was jealous reading them. (There are many ‘I wish I could write like that’ moments in this book!) I really appreciated Vikki Wakefield’s powerful portrayal of the Australian outback — her description of Friday’s arrival at Murungal Creek, a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, is particularly foreboding: “The troop carrier limped in at dusk. Behind us, the sky was bleeding out. A derelict black-and-white sign hung at an angle, complete with a bullet hole and a smear of something brown and unmentionable … The road snaked away, crumbling to nothing, past ancient river red gums that reached up into the deep, dark blue.”
I adore Vikki Wakefield’s characters because they feel so real. Reading Friday Brown, I was especially compelled by Arden, the charismatic but volatile gang leader who takes Friday under her wing. Friday’s first impression of Arden is unforgettable: “A face turned to glare at us … Long-limbed with pale eyes. Her head looked too large for her body and her naked back was moon-white and inscribed with ink. Ribs pressed sharp as blades against her skin. A predator poised over its prey.” Vikki Wakefield manages to capture the push and pull of Arden’s personality perfectly, which wouldn’t have been easy, and Arden’s fearsomeness continued to fascinate me until the final pages.
I believe Vikki Wakefield is one of the reasons why contemporary Australian YA is so strong. There’s a rawness about Friday Brown that really works — it’s a confronting read that doesn’t let you go. Highly recommended.
Vikki Wakefield’s descriptions are incredibly evocative — you can tell she cares about every word. Her metaphors and similes are especially vivid — so much so that I was jealous reading them. (There are many ‘I wish I could write like that’ moments in this book!) I really appreciated Vikki Wakefield’s powerful portrayal of the Australian outback — her description of Friday’s arrival at Murungal Creek, a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, is particularly foreboding: “The troop carrier limped in at dusk. Behind us, the sky was bleeding out. A derelict black-and-white sign hung at an angle, complete with a bullet hole and a smear of something brown and unmentionable … The road snaked away, crumbling to nothing, past ancient river red gums that reached up into the deep, dark blue.”
I adore Vikki Wakefield’s characters because they feel so real. Reading Friday Brown, I was especially compelled by Arden, the charismatic but volatile gang leader who takes Friday under her wing. Friday’s first impression of Arden is unforgettable: “A face turned to glare at us … Long-limbed with pale eyes. Her head looked too large for her body and her naked back was moon-white and inscribed with ink. Ribs pressed sharp as blades against her skin. A predator poised over its prey.” Vikki Wakefield manages to capture the push and pull of Arden’s personality perfectly, which wouldn’t have been easy, and Arden’s fearsomeness continued to fascinate me until the final pages.
I believe Vikki Wakefield is one of the reasons why contemporary Australian YA is so strong. There’s a rawness about Friday Brown that really works — it’s a confronting read that doesn’t let you go. Highly recommended.
August 30, 2012
Friday Brown, the book, is hard to read. This author doesn't muck around. There's no toffee apples or candy cane at this show.
And Friday Brown, the girl, is hard to pin down. She's drowning in grief and steeped in curses and looking for her place in the world. Looking in a lot of wrong places, I might add.
Both the city and the country landscapes are luminous and real. A sense of place, crucial to all the characters, ensures the narrative is grounded and real.
A book and a girl worthy of revisiting. It's a big ask to top 'All I Ever Wanted', but this'll do the job. Good stuff.
And Friday Brown, the girl, is hard to pin down. She's drowning in grief and steeped in curses and looking for her place in the world. Looking in a lot of wrong places, I might add.
Both the city and the country landscapes are luminous and real. A sense of place, crucial to all the characters, ensures the narrative is grounded and real.
A book and a girl worthy of revisiting. It's a big ask to top 'All I Ever Wanted', but this'll do the job. Good stuff.
Want to Read
May 10, 2012
September 5, 2013
This book, you guys, this book.
It didn’t affect me all that much until a moment in the novel when things changed irrevocably. I am not being melodramatic, okay, maybe slightly, but still. It was an intense moment of retrospection and the event that happened was tragic but more than the tragedy, it was the cruelty and the finality of it that affected.
I don’t know why Friday Brown leaves her grandfather’s house when she does. I don’t know what makes her throw away that bundle of money her grandfather throws at her – this doesn’t make sense with the character because her lifestyle would make her, at the very least, pragmatic. In fact, all matters of money in this novel are unrealistic. It may be because I’m a grad student with very little money but the ease with which the street children make money and the ease with which people part with their money (to give to these children) that seemed highly unbelievable to me in this time of financial uncertainty. But ah well.
The characters populating this novel are many and fascinating. Colourful and troubled. Arden…Wakefield tries to make her into this charismatic, yet dangerous cult leader type (a la Charles Manson) but she didn’t really succeed with me. I couldn’t see her clearly, not enough time was spent developing her and delving into the depths of her psyche to present the kind of leader that Wakefield was aiming for. Wish was a second runner up, a romance interlude that wasn’t necessary and the page time devoted to that could have been used to sharpen the characters already present. Friday Brown annoyed me at times. She really did.
No, it was Silence who won me over. Silence whom I followed. Silence whose story I wanted to know. And Silence, who ultimately broke my heart. I needed more about him – the parts in the story that didn’t have him felt bereft, his quietness, his few words, his expressions, these were all beautiful. I hated what happened to him and I will mourn that it did. It is Silence that makes the novel succeed for me and Silence is the reason I recommend it to you.
It didn’t affect me all that much until a moment in the novel when things changed irrevocably. I am not being melodramatic, okay, maybe slightly, but still. It was an intense moment of retrospection and the event that happened was tragic but more than the tragedy, it was the cruelty and the finality of it that affected.
I don’t know why Friday Brown leaves her grandfather’s house when she does. I don’t know what makes her throw away that bundle of money her grandfather throws at her – this doesn’t make sense with the character because her lifestyle would make her, at the very least, pragmatic. In fact, all matters of money in this novel are unrealistic. It may be because I’m a grad student with very little money but the ease with which the street children make money and the ease with which people part with their money (to give to these children) that seemed highly unbelievable to me in this time of financial uncertainty. But ah well.
The characters populating this novel are many and fascinating. Colourful and troubled. Arden…Wakefield tries to make her into this charismatic, yet dangerous cult leader type (a la Charles Manson) but she didn’t really succeed with me. I couldn’t see her clearly, not enough time was spent developing her and delving into the depths of her psyche to present the kind of leader that Wakefield was aiming for. Wish was a second runner up, a romance interlude that wasn’t necessary and the page time devoted to that could have been used to sharpen the characters already present. Friday Brown annoyed me at times. She really did.
No, it was Silence who won me over. Silence whom I followed. Silence whose story I wanted to know. And Silence, who ultimately broke my heart. I needed more about him – the parts in the story that didn’t have him felt bereft, his quietness, his few words, his expressions, these were all beautiful. I hated what happened to him and I will mourn that it did. It is Silence that makes the novel succeed for me and Silence is the reason I recommend it to you.
July 6, 2017
After a slump through Australian YA books that I borrowed from the school library and left abandoned,* I was pretty wary of Friday Brown. But after reading it, I was proved wrong. It's definitely one of the better Australian YA books I've read and has restored my faith in the genre.
*I'm talking specifically about Pieces of Sky and One True Thing . Pieces of Sky was way, way too similar to The Protected that it just bored me. One True Thing was too slow and felt more like the cliche '"unique" girl meets hot guy and she pretends not to be attracted to him even though she so obviously is' type of story that I've read way too many times.
If you liked this book, you might also like:
The Year of the Rat by Clare Furniss
Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley
Paperweight by Meg Haston
The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth
*I'm talking specifically about Pieces of Sky and One True Thing . Pieces of Sky was way, way too similar to The Protected that it just bored me. One True Thing was too slow and felt more like the cliche '"unique" girl meets hot guy and she pretends not to be attracted to him even though she so obviously is' type of story that I've read way too many times.
If you liked this book, you might also like:
The Year of the Rat by Clare Furniss
Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley
Paperweight by Meg Haston
The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth
August 6, 2013
I really liked this, but I did not love this. I loved the language, the writing, the moments where the images and truths cut straight to the marrow. But the story for me didn't quite match the evocative writing -- which isn't to say there isn't an amazing story here. There is. It just didn't capture me as much as I had hoped for.
Friday Brown has always lived her life moving from place to place. Her and mother Vivienne didn't stay long anywhere. They ran from their pasts, from the family curse of death by water, to new places with new hopes. But when Vivienne dies -- the first woman in the family to not be taken out by the curse, not quite -- Friday is living with her grandfather and she feels unsettled. Being in one place, that stasis, doesn't fit with her soul. And she certainly can't wrap her mind around her losses.
So she leaves.
Friday takes up residence with a group of other homeless teenagers after running into Silence at the train station. He saved her and brought her back to the squatter house, where she quickly finds herself entranced with Arden. Arden entranced me too; she was powerful, she had a mystique about her, and she was captivating.
Arden knows this. And she abuses it. She is a woman with power.
When the squatters move on to the Outback, to a place where no one else is around them, Arden truly asserts her power and dominance. It doesn't sit well with Friday nor most of the others in the crew, but it is Friday who challenges her. And it is Friday who pays the consequences for it.
But when Friday sees her life nearing an end, after losing a friend, can she figure out how to find the place she truly needs to be? Is there such thing as stability? How do you pick yourself up again when everything you once knew is turned on its head? When the mother you thought you knew wasn't truly the person you thought she was? When moving doesn't mean freedom but instead means imprisonment? When finally you allow yourself the opportunity to grieve your losses and pick up the pieces for yourself?
Is it possible to be whole again and what does that look like?
Wakefield does an incredible job of letting us look at the complexities of people. While the relationships she creates between these people is equally complex, they never quite got to the level I'd hoped for. Arden is intriguing, but we never see her power exerted until the very end. We know of it -- Friday tells us about it -- but I wanted more. In ways it's that not seeing which makes it scary, but to experience the full intensity, I wanted to see the full intensity. I loved the relationship that emerged between Friday and Silence, though; she listened to him and she GOT him. She got his insistence that love and memory mattered, that someone is never really gone, ever, if you keep them in your mind and your heart. That learning people aren't always what they seem on the surface is hard, but it doesn't change the fact that love is something you have the right to choose to give; it's not automatic.
I think there is serious potential for this to be talked about for the Printz this year, as it comes out in the US as Friday Never Leaving. It's literary, it's challenging, multi-layered, and the writing itself is just damn good. I wanted to mark page after page for some of the thoughts that Friday shared and the truths she discovered. It's an achey read, not a feel-good read, and I suspect that even though I liked-not-loved it, the story and Friday's voice will remain with me for quite a while.
Friday Brown has always lived her life moving from place to place. Her and mother Vivienne didn't stay long anywhere. They ran from their pasts, from the family curse of death by water, to new places with new hopes. But when Vivienne dies -- the first woman in the family to not be taken out by the curse, not quite -- Friday is living with her grandfather and she feels unsettled. Being in one place, that stasis, doesn't fit with her soul. And she certainly can't wrap her mind around her losses.
So she leaves.
Friday takes up residence with a group of other homeless teenagers after running into Silence at the train station. He saved her and brought her back to the squatter house, where she quickly finds herself entranced with Arden. Arden entranced me too; she was powerful, she had a mystique about her, and she was captivating.
Arden knows this. And she abuses it. She is a woman with power.
When the squatters move on to the Outback, to a place where no one else is around them, Arden truly asserts her power and dominance. It doesn't sit well with Friday nor most of the others in the crew, but it is Friday who challenges her. And it is Friday who pays the consequences for it.
But when Friday sees her life nearing an end, after losing a friend, can she figure out how to find the place she truly needs to be? Is there such thing as stability? How do you pick yourself up again when everything you once knew is turned on its head? When the mother you thought you knew wasn't truly the person you thought she was? When moving doesn't mean freedom but instead means imprisonment? When finally you allow yourself the opportunity to grieve your losses and pick up the pieces for yourself?
Is it possible to be whole again and what does that look like?
Wakefield does an incredible job of letting us look at the complexities of people. While the relationships she creates between these people is equally complex, they never quite got to the level I'd hoped for. Arden is intriguing, but we never see her power exerted until the very end. We know of it -- Friday tells us about it -- but I wanted more. In ways it's that not seeing which makes it scary, but to experience the full intensity, I wanted to see the full intensity. I loved the relationship that emerged between Friday and Silence, though; she listened to him and she GOT him. She got his insistence that love and memory mattered, that someone is never really gone, ever, if you keep them in your mind and your heart. That learning people aren't always what they seem on the surface is hard, but it doesn't change the fact that love is something you have the right to choose to give; it's not automatic.
I think there is serious potential for this to be talked about for the Printz this year, as it comes out in the US as Friday Never Leaving. It's literary, it's challenging, multi-layered, and the writing itself is just damn good. I wanted to mark page after page for some of the thoughts that Friday shared and the truths she discovered. It's an achey read, not a feel-good read, and I suspect that even though I liked-not-loved it, the story and Friday's voice will remain with me for quite a while.
August 27, 2012
I was dragged along to Hanging Rock as a kid. Hands flailing, screaming to my parents they'd have to drag me all the way up the mountain. It's famous for the four school girls that went missing in 1900 on a school excursion, but I wasn't going to let that old tale break me.
Once you stand at the top of that rock, you get why people have kept coming back for 112 years. The mystery of the girls disappearing even through extensive searches for years -- it's just the lure. Once you're find your spot in the opening where the land opens up you feel this small. The hills climb over each other to the point they're blue hues, grassy plains are a sea of green, and the huts, picnic tables and cars are specks in the hold that Hanging Rock has over everything around it.
This is Friday Brown in my eyes. It's a story of street kids, who are more than bare-footed, kids without a home, told within the scenery of Australia from the slums to the shocking outback where nature is in control, no matter how hard you fight it.
Vikki Wakefield is an art form. It takes talent plus time plus dedication to write a story like this, that shatters your heart, and sits you at the front seat of a horror movie you can't tear away from. But she's also a rare type of author who has the ability to trap everything that means despair, and lost, and searching, and growing up in a 300-odd page story.
This is the type of book that haunts you after in the best way possible. The cast of street kids that we get to know through this story are different in so many ways, yet they come together as a family because what ties them together is a sense of belonging, and every person needs that whether you have dreams to marry a nice partner and have two children, or you plan to become CEO of a corporation.
I never said it was good or right -- but people form groups out of a need for comfort and safety in all sorts of twisted ways. Cue Arden, who's the head honcho.
Vikki Wakefield tackles the hard subjects in Friday Brown -- stuff like homelessness, abuse and its power, family, fear and loss. In typical Vikki Wakefield style, she manages to throw all the themes that make us human in a gripping campfire-story-like fashion, and makes you wonder how Friday Brown can be something she made up in her head.
This book is moving. Be prepared to feel and have your heart ripped out because this is no light read. It gets you thinking and staying up all night pondering questions you'd never thought of before.
And it's impossible to hate a story that so mirrors how an artist captures a moment/thought/idea on canvas through their eyes. Friday Brown will blow your mind. As an adult, I respect this book so much. It makes me appreciate what I have, and how, simply by luck, I'm not one of those people who've slipped through "society". The characters in this book are the type you realised you already knew only a few pages in.
Recommended -- 5 stars!
Once you stand at the top of that rock, you get why people have kept coming back for 112 years. The mystery of the girls disappearing even through extensive searches for years -- it's just the lure. Once you're find your spot in the opening where the land opens up you feel this small. The hills climb over each other to the point they're blue hues, grassy plains are a sea of green, and the huts, picnic tables and cars are specks in the hold that Hanging Rock has over everything around it.
This is Friday Brown in my eyes. It's a story of street kids, who are more than bare-footed, kids without a home, told within the scenery of Australia from the slums to the shocking outback where nature is in control, no matter how hard you fight it.
Vikki Wakefield is an art form. It takes talent plus time plus dedication to write a story like this, that shatters your heart, and sits you at the front seat of a horror movie you can't tear away from. But she's also a rare type of author who has the ability to trap everything that means despair, and lost, and searching, and growing up in a 300-odd page story.
This is the type of book that haunts you after in the best way possible. The cast of street kids that we get to know through this story are different in so many ways, yet they come together as a family because what ties them together is a sense of belonging, and every person needs that whether you have dreams to marry a nice partner and have two children, or you plan to become CEO of a corporation.
I never said it was good or right -- but people form groups out of a need for comfort and safety in all sorts of twisted ways. Cue Arden, who's the head honcho.
Vikki Wakefield tackles the hard subjects in Friday Brown -- stuff like homelessness, abuse and its power, family, fear and loss. In typical Vikki Wakefield style, she manages to throw all the themes that make us human in a gripping campfire-story-like fashion, and makes you wonder how Friday Brown can be something she made up in her head.
This book is moving. Be prepared to feel and have your heart ripped out because this is no light read. It gets you thinking and staying up all night pondering questions you'd never thought of before.
And it's impossible to hate a story that so mirrors how an artist captures a moment/thought/idea on canvas through their eyes. Friday Brown will blow your mind. As an adult, I respect this book so much. It makes me appreciate what I have, and how, simply by luck, I'm not one of those people who've slipped through "society". The characters in this book are the type you realised you already knew only a few pages in.
Recommended -- 5 stars!
August 14, 2015
Vikki Wakefield’s novel All I Ever Wanted was the winner of the 2012 Adelaide festival literary awards for YA fiction. So I knew with Friday Brown I was in for a real treat. I wasn’t disappointed.
The Brown women were cursed. Going back generations they all died at an early age, on a Saturday, and all involving water. Vivienne would tell Friday that when she died the curse would move to her. Knowing this Friday wondered why her mother was always drawn to water. Every time they came across a river her mother would strip off and dive straight in. They lived a nomadic life moving from town to town. Friday loved this life, just the two of them. She grew up knowing love, peace and adventure. After her mothers death (another fatality of the Brown curse?) 17 year old Friday decided that she would start a new life on her own. She is soon befriended by a reticent and sombre boy named Silence and is taken back to a squat inhabited by homeless children, headed by the militant but charismatic, Arden. This is where Friday’s true struggles with her past and future, right and wrong begin. Friday knew that Arden’s control wasn’t a good thing but every time she tried to leave she was drawn back to her. However, when events started to spiral out of control Friday realised she would have to call on an inner strength she didn’t know she had to save herself and her friends.
Friday Brown is a riveting coming of age novel. Vikki Wakefield puts into words some of our deepest feelings and quite often you find yourself nodding as you read. I loved that Friday had only positive thoughts of her life with her mother. It must have truly been a hard life wandering from town to town with a mother that was a heavy drinker and quite often having to sneak out to avoid paying bills. Friday must have had to do the mothering on some occasions but we hear only of the freedom and the love they had. A beautiful story filled with heartache, hope, danger, suspense and a twist at the end you wont see coming. It will make you think and make you cry. Friday shows us how to be true to yourself and even if you are smaller and weaker than someone else you must always stand up for what you believe is right.
The Brown women were cursed. Going back generations they all died at an early age, on a Saturday, and all involving water. Vivienne would tell Friday that when she died the curse would move to her. Knowing this Friday wondered why her mother was always drawn to water. Every time they came across a river her mother would strip off and dive straight in. They lived a nomadic life moving from town to town. Friday loved this life, just the two of them. She grew up knowing love, peace and adventure. After her mothers death (another fatality of the Brown curse?) 17 year old Friday decided that she would start a new life on her own. She is soon befriended by a reticent and sombre boy named Silence and is taken back to a squat inhabited by homeless children, headed by the militant but charismatic, Arden. This is where Friday’s true struggles with her past and future, right and wrong begin. Friday knew that Arden’s control wasn’t a good thing but every time she tried to leave she was drawn back to her. However, when events started to spiral out of control Friday realised she would have to call on an inner strength she didn’t know she had to save herself and her friends.
Friday Brown is a riveting coming of age novel. Vikki Wakefield puts into words some of our deepest feelings and quite often you find yourself nodding as you read. I loved that Friday had only positive thoughts of her life with her mother. It must have truly been a hard life wandering from town to town with a mother that was a heavy drinker and quite often having to sneak out to avoid paying bills. Friday must have had to do the mothering on some occasions but we hear only of the freedom and the love they had. A beautiful story filled with heartache, hope, danger, suspense and a twist at the end you wont see coming. It will make you think and make you cry. Friday shows us how to be true to yourself and even if you are smaller and weaker than someone else you must always stand up for what you believe is right.
June 26, 2013
friday brown has:
half formed goals. unanswered questions. odd choices. odder people... ofpseudofamilies. it’s the last that’s not limited to that of her choosing as there’s the one that she comes from, too. the story begins with her having lost something, as well as of her losing touch with who she is. that’s the case for all of them. they’ve lost themselves or more apt, are wanting to. but things shift as it becomes her finding in the unexpected not her answers but something she didn't think she was looking for: a place? a connection?
now, it’s all about her being shoved into things she’s not quite sure she wants. so, there are awkward moments with like minded folks, as well as her ‘not-opposites.’ because all of them? they’re different from her, yes… but also from everyone else. Lost Boys? they’re a little bit of that. only instead of never growing up, it’s them never being found. and though i was expecting an August Rush feel-good kind of read. this was not that. mainly because their wendy’s not exactly the mother you’d want for yourself. But then there were times it did feel like August Rush… especially silence. but really, they’re a bit more undefined on the what would follow. And they’re a bit more heartbreaking with part of their respective histories revealed. (again, silence especially.) (also there's that cover which makes so much more sense now. better yet. it fits. perfectly. them, all smidged and dirty, but not totally, as there's that picture of her raised up that way.)
so then it’s her: asking what she’d gotten herself into because the lot? in the margins, hiding. running away? running somewhere? both true here, eventually, there’s that slow stripping away of the distractions. Distractions of her admiring another and wanting to be someone else as well as to have what another has.
but eventually, as said, it’s her unsticking her head from the sand. but how she unsticks it and why… well, THOSE LAST MOMENTS?! they nearly break her, (some moments do in fact break some bit of her,) and they nearly did me too.
half formed goals. unanswered questions. odd choices. odder people... of
now, it’s all about her being shoved into things she’s not quite sure she wants. so, there are awkward moments with like minded folks, as well as her ‘not-opposites.’ because all of them? they’re different from her, yes… but also from everyone else. Lost Boys? they’re a little bit of that. only instead of never growing up, it’s them never being found. and though i was expecting an August Rush feel-good kind of read. this was not that. mainly because their wendy’s not exactly the mother you’d want for yourself. But then there were times it did feel like August Rush… especially silence. but really, they’re a bit more undefined on the what would follow. And they’re a bit more heartbreaking with part of their respective histories revealed. (again, silence especially.) (also there's that cover which makes so much more sense now. better yet. it fits. perfectly. them, all smidged and dirty, but not totally, as there's that picture of her raised up that way.)
so then it’s her: asking what she’d gotten herself into because the lot? in the margins, hiding. running away? running somewhere? both true here, eventually, there’s that slow stripping away of the distractions. Distractions of her admiring another and wanting to be someone else as well as to have what another has.
but eventually, as said, it’s her unsticking her head from the sand. but how she unsticks it and why… well, THOSE LAST MOMENTS?! they nearly break her, (some moments do in fact break some bit of her,) and they nearly did me too.
July 1, 2013
Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you’re severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated and fallible and human.
This is a book of unfinished chapters. Friday Brown's life is composed of unfinished chapters. Why do books have to be so heartbreaking?
The cover just about makes me lose my shit.
Definite recommendation, guys. Read this bloody book. Read it, for those last chapters and for the whole book and for Friday and Silence and Bree and Wish and Carrie and, even, Arden. Read it.
This is a book of unfinished chapters. Friday Brown's life is composed of unfinished chapters. Why do books have to be so heartbreaking?
The cover just about makes me lose my shit.
Definite recommendation, guys. Read this bloody book. Read it, for those last chapters and for the whole book and for Friday and Silence and Bree and Wish and Carrie and, even, Arden. Read it.
November 18, 2015
I am Friday Brown. I buried my mother. I ran away from a man who buried a swimming pool. A boy who can't speak has adopted me. A girl kissed me. I broke and entered. Now I'm fantasizing about a guy who's a victim of a crime and I am the criminal. I'm going nowhere and every minute I'm not moving, I'm being tailgated by a curse that may or may not be real. They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on Saturday, I will drown...
Does that confuse you? Then there's a good chance that this entire book will.
Entertainment rating: 2 stars
Quality of writing rating: 4 stars
It was ok.
I spent a good portion of this book just trying to understand the point to it all. I became extremely confused because people or environments would come in to play in this story, and then two seconds later, none of it mattered anymore, we were now on a new tangent. I just felt like I couldn't pick what to care about or what to follow because I didn't really get the point. It wasn't obvious to me.
In the end, I see a slight point. I felt like it took a lot of boredom for me to get there, but I see the tiny little point now.
The one thing I did care about was Silence, and just further made me lose hope. I was feeling sad for the remainder of the story.
I'll try and explain things.
Friday's mom dies at the beginning of the story. They were drifters as she grew up, and after her mother's death, she sets out on her own again. She starts off on a search for her father and heads to the city. Once she gets there, she runs into a boy who can't talk — his name is Silence. Silence is is part of a group of homeless kids who live together in an abandoned house. Friday asks Silence to take her with him and she goes back to the house to meet the rest of the group. This is where Friday meets Arden.
Arden is the head of this group of forgotten teenagers. Each one of them has to make $200 a week and give it to Arden in order to stay; it doesn't matter how the money is earned.
We've pretty much forgotten about the whole "finding dad" thing by now. Not important.
Then Wish, a boy who isn't homeless but knows them all, stops by and awkwardly meets Friday. Day 2: he comes back and they all hang out. After everyone falls asleep, he and Friday start passionately making out...that's all. Then he's like, hey lets go out tomorrow, I'll come pick you up, and she's like, ok, yeah, see you then.
That doesn't happen.
And it really was only like a page and half of the book.
Because then they all decide to leave because Arden has been planning this big move for a while. Arden takes them all to this ghost town in the middle of the Bush, and the story basically becomes about survival for a while.
Friday decides she needs to get away, and Silence wants her to take him with her. Arden doesn't take this kindly at all. She's losing her control. She's always had complete control of everyone in this group, and she can't handle that she doesn't have control of Friday, and that Friday is taking her control of some of the others away as well.
I could go on, but at this point things start to get really evil and weird. Arden starts seriously losing her shit. The town literally starts to flood. And OH YEAH! THERE'S THIS WHOLE THING ABOUT FRIDAY BEING CURSED. THAT SHE WILL DIE BY DROWNING LIKE EVERY OTHER PERSON IN HER FAMILY DOES...
So that's going on too.
Arden becomes dangerous, and the whole thing just starts spiraling out of control — and downhill.
It wasn't bad, it just really struggled to stay on a topic. It all comes full circle, and it all makes some sense, but I wasn't all that entertained by this.
Silence was the best character in this story, with the best character development and personality. I don't even feel like we got to fully figure him out. There are so many questions still. What happened in actuality that night with Arden? Where is Amy? ...So many others. I think that's why I'm almost mad that his story ended the way it did. And mad at the other characters .
It's well written, and if you like contemporary YA fiction, you might like this.
Coming of age...life lessons...etc.
I didn't hate it, but it wasn't for me.
Want to Read
September 22, 2012*Reads the blurb*
Me too, Niall. Me, too
I just have to read this. Everyone seems to love it.
Me too, Niall. Me, too
I just have to read this. Everyone seems to love it.
October 14, 2012
I picked this to read because it sounded very different to Enclave which I'd finished before, and because the cover had a quote from Melina Marchetta about how she loved Vikki Wakefield books so much.
However, I really didn't like it at all. Just not my style of book, but I can think of a couple of people who would really like it, so I'm going to recommend it to them.
However, I really didn't like it at all. Just not my style of book, but I can think of a couple of people who would really like it, so I'm going to recommend it to them.
Read
September 8, 2015I FINALLY got around to reading this and what a book! Beautiful writing, compelling story. Just so good.
June 18, 2018
Vikki Wakefield is a phenomenal writer.
There's no getting around that fact.
It actually astounds me that there was never a point in Friday Never Leaving where I wasn't overcome with extreme emotion.
So to say I cannot rate this , when my heart wants so badly to give this brilliantly penned book five stars , is really disappointing for me.
But you see , I have one issue with this book.
And its hard to get around.
Maybe its just specific to ME as a person , and maybe that's the case since there are very little negative reviews for this book.
I'm just going to write my thoughts out to try and get past what EXACTLY stopped me from loving this book completely , when I have confessed to myself that writing doesn't get much better than this.
Let me give you a summary.
Basically, the short version is that Friday Brown has known nobody her whole life except her mother. She talks about how her personality has shaped hers , and without her , she doesn't much understand her identity. So when her mother dies of cancer early on in the story , Friday can't imagine living with her grandpa , a man she barely knows who kicked her mother of the house years before.
So she runs away , only two hundred bucks to her name.
There she meets Silence , who I adore just as much as Friday , at a train station. He takes her back to where he lives squatting with his friends in an abandoned , rotting house.
This is all still pretty early on in the story.
Friday meets Arden , a girl who rules over the young teens in the squatters house and gains a almost cult - like devotion from them that is really freaking creepy to read about.
Now here's where my big issue comes to play.
Arden is , for all intents and purposes , an abuser.
I could spot it on the first page. In fact , its not supposed to be a secret , though it is never explicitly stated. Its all in the gory subtext.
So now , I understand why all these kids follow her around like she's their savior. Most of them have been abused or mistreated. They are either roughing it on their own because their family housing is too small , running away from abusive parents , or selling their bodies in prostitution to get by.
It was all really , terribly heartbreaking to put it lightly.
What I'm trying to get at is that if you have been mistreated your WHOLE LIFE , its easy not to be able to differentiate between abuse and non- abuse. Its all they know , and Arden seems a much , much better choice than their parents , who are more forwardly abusive.
The lines are extremely blurred.
I get it. Its realistic , even if the reader can spot Arden's cruelty from a mile away.
But this is my point.
Our main character , Friday Brown , was NEVER abused.
Sure , she had a hard life. Her mother was a wanderer and never let them settle down anywhere. She didn't have turkey dinners or family cookouts.
She was however , loved unconditionally. That is well proven in the text.
This may be just me , but having been treated well by my parents , having been taught through their actions the difference between RIGHT and WRONG , I could never sit by and witness abuse or injustice without thinking , " Hey , this is not right. Let me do something about it."
The FIRST TIME I saw Arden lift a hand in anger to those children , I would have erupted.
Nobody needs to tell me that's wrong.
I'm not even going to mention the verbal abuse ( because that's definitely a real problem) and the subtle manipulations that Arden enacts in this novel.
As a psychopath , Arden was really fantastically characterized.
I'm being a bit hard on Friday. She was in a very vulnerable situation ,and Arden was said to be charismatic.
But charisma only gets you so far.
And there comes a point when I as a person stop relating to a character when she sees bad things going on but does nothing at all to change them , except by saying that she's going to leave.
Which she never actually does. Hence the title , I suppose.
But you see , its NOT like Friday doesn't fully grasp what's going on. She doesn't think abuse , but she DOES think , wrong , wrong , wrong , wrong.
Once you acknowledge that in your head , YOU are responsible to save others and yourself.
Listen , I'm not saying that the way your parents treated you as a child guarantees that you will be a good person , or that you will be able to understand abuse.
Eventually , it comes down to you. What do I know innately, down deep inside me , is the right way to treat someone?
What I AM saying , is that your parents hold a lot of sway and influence. Its easier for a child to become like their parents than not.
So when your parents instill in you the necessity of right and wrong , unless you are a horrendous person ,which Friday is not , those lessons and that knowledge stay with you.
I'm going to say something really trite.
Knowledge is power.
Friday had the knowledge that what was going was wrong , but she didn't DO ANYTHING until it was too late , until ( spoiler , spoiler , spoiler , spoiler , spoiler ) her friend was DEAD by Arden's hand.
That's another thing that never made sense to me.
Friday knows that Arden is bad news.
They are trapped in a ghost town ,about to be drowned. Arden wants to stay for some reason ,so Friday is going to go get help because she's the only one who can drive besides Malik , who Arden states will never be allowed to leave her side.
Arden says , "I'm keeping your friend Silence here as insurance that you come back."
Ring ring ring ring !
Alarm bells immediately would have gone off in MY head.
A girl who Friday knows has abused this little boy , though she doesn't know how , is holding him for ransom. She gets off on power , so after the flood is over , Friday knows Arden isn't going to give him up.
She KNOWS this.
At this point I would have
A) gotten out of the car. I'm not leaving my dearest friend with this girl , who HATES him now that he is no longer devoted to her , because he recognized the abuse.
B) Demanded that Malik drive. If that wasn't going to happen , I'd rather have WALKED to my destination than let them stay with my friend.
C) If they still didn't let Silence go. I would have waited till nightfall to sneak away. They were all okay anyway doing that.
D) UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES EVER DO YOU BARGAIN WITH A MENTALLY UNSTABLE PSYCHOPATH.
You just don't.
But no. Friday drives away.
And when she gets back , Arden says her friend hitched a ride with somebody and is gone.
Friday knows this is NOT true. She KNOWS Arden lies with every breath.
She searches for her friend. Desperately.
Falls asleep in a heap of exhaustion.
Wakes up to a clanging noise.
Goes to investigate the cellar where the noise is coming from.
Her friends come with her.
Arden gets up. She coaxes them back and says , " It's just the wind. It's just the wind."
Did I mention this girl is a liar?
Did I mention that Friday KNOWS this girl is a wicked liar?
NO WAY WOULD I NOT INVESTIGATE THAT NOISE.
And it WAS her friend Silence. He was a mute , so he couldn't scream in the cellar. He banged on it with rocks. He made the clanging noise.
By the morning , he was dead.
I feel this is needless tragedy. I feel that the heroine had at her disposal common sense and intuition.
She just doesn't USE IT.
WHY? WHY?
So I can feel devastated when my favorite character dies horrifically and needlessly ?
It was NEEDLESS tragedy.
It's the worst kind , and maybe other people can tolerate it , but I just CAN'T.
I don't believe a human being would react the way Friday did. Can't wrap my brain around it.
Its why I don't get Romeo and Juliet. I don't get the depth of their irrational madness and grief ,after knowing each other a day.
I don't get it. Unless they are MENTALLY ILL , I'm calling bull.
It's why I don't get Jodi Lynn Anderson's , The Vanishing Season.
Unless you are a completely unfeeling and callous horror , how do you let someone give you all their clothes to keep warm in a snow storm?
Why wouldn't you think of switching the articles of clothing around? Why wouldn't you ?
I have an answer. You would think of that.
Its not realistic to think otherwise , and despite the emotion of this novel , I feel the tragedy was a ploy on my feelings when there are many ways that logically it could have been prevented.
Friday Brown is far from a dimwitted character.
She just conveniently forgets not to trust a pathological liar because the plot demands it.
I don't like being manipulated , nor do I appreciate gratuitous violence and death. I know it happens , but not like this. Not if you have a brain.
That whole scene , where the clanging is ringing in the background and Arden is stretching out her hands , wheedling away with her words and lies , is going to haunt me forever.
Its the worst possible thing . It's darkness and ruin.
Maybe I'm thinking entirely too much of myself , but I don't see how Friday trusted her for a freaking minute.
And that ruins everything.
Vikki Wakefield is an amazing writer. There's no getting around that fact.
But her story left me feeling worse than when I started , so I can not in good conscience recommend this painful wound of a novel.
There's not enough hope to carry it to its conclusion , and books need hope. Otherwise, what's the point?
There's no getting around that fact.
It actually astounds me that there was never a point in Friday Never Leaving where I wasn't overcome with extreme emotion.
So to say I cannot rate this , when my heart wants so badly to give this brilliantly penned book five stars , is really disappointing for me.
But you see , I have one issue with this book.
And its hard to get around.
Maybe its just specific to ME as a person , and maybe that's the case since there are very little negative reviews for this book.
I'm just going to write my thoughts out to try and get past what EXACTLY stopped me from loving this book completely , when I have confessed to myself that writing doesn't get much better than this.
Let me give you a summary.
Basically, the short version is that Friday Brown has known nobody her whole life except her mother. She talks about how her personality has shaped hers , and without her , she doesn't much understand her identity. So when her mother dies of cancer early on in the story , Friday can't imagine living with her grandpa , a man she barely knows who kicked her mother of the house years before.
So she runs away , only two hundred bucks to her name.
There she meets Silence , who I adore just as much as Friday , at a train station. He takes her back to where he lives squatting with his friends in an abandoned , rotting house.
This is all still pretty early on in the story.
Friday meets Arden , a girl who rules over the young teens in the squatters house and gains a almost cult - like devotion from them that is really freaking creepy to read about.
Now here's where my big issue comes to play.
Arden is , for all intents and purposes , an abuser.
I could spot it on the first page. In fact , its not supposed to be a secret , though it is never explicitly stated. Its all in the gory subtext.
So now , I understand why all these kids follow her around like she's their savior. Most of them have been abused or mistreated. They are either roughing it on their own because their family housing is too small , running away from abusive parents , or selling their bodies in prostitution to get by.
It was all really , terribly heartbreaking to put it lightly.
What I'm trying to get at is that if you have been mistreated your WHOLE LIFE , its easy not to be able to differentiate between abuse and non- abuse. Its all they know , and Arden seems a much , much better choice than their parents , who are more forwardly abusive.
The lines are extremely blurred.
I get it. Its realistic , even if the reader can spot Arden's cruelty from a mile away.
But this is my point.
Our main character , Friday Brown , was NEVER abused.
Sure , she had a hard life. Her mother was a wanderer and never let them settle down anywhere. She didn't have turkey dinners or family cookouts.
She was however , loved unconditionally. That is well proven in the text.
This may be just me , but having been treated well by my parents , having been taught through their actions the difference between RIGHT and WRONG , I could never sit by and witness abuse or injustice without thinking , " Hey , this is not right. Let me do something about it."
The FIRST TIME I saw Arden lift a hand in anger to those children , I would have erupted.
Nobody needs to tell me that's wrong.
I'm not even going to mention the verbal abuse ( because that's definitely a real problem) and the subtle manipulations that Arden enacts in this novel.
As a psychopath , Arden was really fantastically characterized.
I'm being a bit hard on Friday. She was in a very vulnerable situation ,and Arden was said to be charismatic.
But charisma only gets you so far.
And there comes a point when I as a person stop relating to a character when she sees bad things going on but does nothing at all to change them , except by saying that she's going to leave.
Which she never actually does. Hence the title , I suppose.
But you see , its NOT like Friday doesn't fully grasp what's going on. She doesn't think abuse , but she DOES think , wrong , wrong , wrong , wrong.
Once you acknowledge that in your head , YOU are responsible to save others and yourself.
Listen , I'm not saying that the way your parents treated you as a child guarantees that you will be a good person , or that you will be able to understand abuse.
Eventually , it comes down to you. What do I know innately, down deep inside me , is the right way to treat someone?
What I AM saying , is that your parents hold a lot of sway and influence. Its easier for a child to become like their parents than not.
So when your parents instill in you the necessity of right and wrong , unless you are a horrendous person ,which Friday is not , those lessons and that knowledge stay with you.
I'm going to say something really trite.
Knowledge is power.
Friday had the knowledge that what was going was wrong , but she didn't DO ANYTHING until it was too late , until ( spoiler , spoiler , spoiler , spoiler , spoiler ) her friend was DEAD by Arden's hand.
That's another thing that never made sense to me.
Friday knows that Arden is bad news.
They are trapped in a ghost town ,about to be drowned. Arden wants to stay for some reason ,so Friday is going to go get help because she's the only one who can drive besides Malik , who Arden states will never be allowed to leave her side.
Arden says , "I'm keeping your friend Silence here as insurance that you come back."
Ring ring ring ring !
Alarm bells immediately would have gone off in MY head.
A girl who Friday knows has abused this little boy , though she doesn't know how , is holding him for ransom. She gets off on power , so after the flood is over , Friday knows Arden isn't going to give him up.
She KNOWS this.
At this point I would have
A) gotten out of the car. I'm not leaving my dearest friend with this girl , who HATES him now that he is no longer devoted to her , because he recognized the abuse.
B) Demanded that Malik drive. If that wasn't going to happen , I'd rather have WALKED to my destination than let them stay with my friend.
C) If they still didn't let Silence go. I would have waited till nightfall to sneak away. They were all okay anyway doing that.
D) UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES EVER DO YOU BARGAIN WITH A MENTALLY UNSTABLE PSYCHOPATH.
You just don't.
But no. Friday drives away.
And when she gets back , Arden says her friend hitched a ride with somebody and is gone.
Friday knows this is NOT true. She KNOWS Arden lies with every breath.
She searches for her friend. Desperately.
Falls asleep in a heap of exhaustion.
Wakes up to a clanging noise.
Goes to investigate the cellar where the noise is coming from.
Her friends come with her.
Arden gets up. She coaxes them back and says , " It's just the wind. It's just the wind."
Did I mention this girl is a liar?
Did I mention that Friday KNOWS this girl is a wicked liar?
NO WAY WOULD I NOT INVESTIGATE THAT NOISE.
And it WAS her friend Silence. He was a mute , so he couldn't scream in the cellar. He banged on it with rocks. He made the clanging noise.
By the morning , he was dead.
I feel this is needless tragedy. I feel that the heroine had at her disposal common sense and intuition.
She just doesn't USE IT.
WHY? WHY?
So I can feel devastated when my favorite character dies horrifically and needlessly ?
It was NEEDLESS tragedy.
It's the worst kind , and maybe other people can tolerate it , but I just CAN'T.
I don't believe a human being would react the way Friday did. Can't wrap my brain around it.
Its why I don't get Romeo and Juliet. I don't get the depth of their irrational madness and grief ,after knowing each other a day.
I don't get it. Unless they are MENTALLY ILL , I'm calling bull.
It's why I don't get Jodi Lynn Anderson's , The Vanishing Season.
Unless you are a completely unfeeling and callous horror , how do you let someone give you all their clothes to keep warm in a snow storm?
Why wouldn't you think of switching the articles of clothing around? Why wouldn't you ?
I have an answer. You would think of that.
Its not realistic to think otherwise , and despite the emotion of this novel , I feel the tragedy was a ploy on my feelings when there are many ways that logically it could have been prevented.
Friday Brown is far from a dimwitted character.
She just conveniently forgets not to trust a pathological liar because the plot demands it.
I don't like being manipulated , nor do I appreciate gratuitous violence and death. I know it happens , but not like this. Not if you have a brain.
That whole scene , where the clanging is ringing in the background and Arden is stretching out her hands , wheedling away with her words and lies , is going to haunt me forever.
Its the worst possible thing . It's darkness and ruin.
Maybe I'm thinking entirely too much of myself , but I don't see how Friday trusted her for a freaking minute.
And that ruins everything.
Vikki Wakefield is an amazing writer. There's no getting around that fact.
But her story left me feeling worse than when I started , so I can not in good conscience recommend this painful wound of a novel.
There's not enough hope to carry it to its conclusion , and books need hope. Otherwise, what's the point?
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