His confusion over his sexuality – and his fear of ostracism, should he turn out to be gay – form the centre of the novel’s plot. While Jackson is unable to maintain an erection with his girlfriend Tesha, he begins to find himself attracted to Tomas. Tomas has been in juvie, his past is murky, and initially Jackson is annoyed to have to share his room with him. Here, the stranger is Tomas, who Aunty Pat brings along on the Christmas visit.
Opening just before Christmas, when Aunty Pat always visits with Jackson’s younger cousins, The Boy from the Mish also features a common literary plot element – the mysterious stranger whose arrival heralds change. Author Gary Lonesborough stresses that while this is a work of fiction, it is informed by his own life experience.
Unusual because its main characters are Aboriginal boys and young men living in a country town, a demographic we don’t often hear from in YA novels. Classic because the narrator, a 17-year-old Aboriginal boy called Jackson, who lives on the Mish (Mission), is facing a huge issue of sexuality and identity. In this sense, The Boy from the Mish is both a classic coming of age novel and an unusual book. Many, like the groundbreaking Outsiders, are narrated by young people struggling with difference, be it poverty, race, nerdiness, appearance or sexuality. Typically, the protagonists struggle with families and peers, navigate the minefields of adolescent sexuality, drugs and alcohol, and emerge changed, having absorbed some (often painful) life lessons. Hinton’s The Outsiders one of the first books to target a teenage audience and explore alienation from the teens’ point of view. The YA genre is widely seen as evolving in the 1970s, with S.E. Now, even at the upper end, I haven’t been a young adult for 45 years. It’s categorised as YA (Young Adult) fiction, which theoretically targets 12 to 18 year olds. It was with a feeling of trepidation that I set out to review this book.
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