M.J. Hyland

Lou Connor wants to escape her emotionally crass family and life of poverty, so she travels from Sydney to the USA as an exchange student. But her host-family, the Hardings – who live in a prefabricated mansion in a nameless Chicago suburb – are in suffocating pursuit of a particular form of suburban perfection. From the very beginning, nothing is as it seems.

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How the Light Gets In

M. J. Hyland

Maria Joan Hyland

A powerful debut from an Australian novelist that features one of the most likeable but contrary figures you are likely to meet in contemporary fiction.Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a beautiful house in Illinois and couldn't be more welcoming . . . until she starts to be distubed by the suffocating and repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things begin to go terribly wrong.How the Light Gets In is an acutely observed story of adolescence, reminiscent of American Beauty in its dissection of engrained prejudices and middle-class hypocrisy. In Lou Connor, Hyland has created a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.

Erica

Interesting read, but not the most exciting. The ending was also too open-ended for me.

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