Cath Crowley

One Australian summer, two very different sixteen-year-old girls--Charlie, a talented but shy musician, and Rose, a confident student longing to escape her tiny town--are drawn into an unexpected friendship, as told in their alternating voices.

A Little Wanting Song

Laura

I don't know why, but it was a while before I picked this Cath Crowley novel up. I think the combination of unattractive cover and not being too invested in the plot kind of turned me off to it, and if I hadn't been such a huge Cath Crowley fan after reading both Graffiti Moon and Words in Deep Blue I wouldn't have even given it a second glance. 

This is her debut, I believe, though it was out in Australia for five years before being re-released in either 2010 or 2011, when I think it was published world wide. This was probably due to the Australian success of Graffiti Moon. I believe it was also originally published as Chasing Charlie Duskin; that's what Goodreads tells me at least. And, being her debut, the writing isn't as gorgeously lyrical as it was in Graffiti Moon or Words in Deep Blue. It wasn't as easy to fall into her prose in this novel than it in her other books. There weren't as many beautiful, quotable moments either, and I ended up being disappointed by that.

I also found myself weirdly distracted while reading, and I don't really know why. Maybe because I read this book on my iPad and sometimes when I read books on there I can't concentrate as well.

The two main characters, Charlie and Rose, were like prototypes of the Cath Crowley MCs we would get in later books. Charlie is an artist, a musician, who thinks of her life in the context of songs and is has a dead mother whom she still talks to. Rose wants to escape from her small country hometown to go to a science school in Melbourne and become a marine biologist. Both have home lives that, while aren't completely typical, are extremely realistically done with beautiful nuance. And her characters are equally as realistic, with wants and needs that many teenagers could relate to. I especially loved it when Crowley would go in depth on their relationships with their parents.

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A Little Wanting Song

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