Careless
By Deborah Robertson

This month's BRA book club selection was an interesting little novel that explores how we all deal with grief differently and choose to memorialise the dead. I looked at it numerous times in the bookstore and was glad that it was chosen as one of this year's reads. I would not have read it if left to my own devices.

In the first novel from Australian Robertson, Pearl, at eight, already exerts a self-punishing precision on a world she cannot control. When her younger brother, Riley, whom Pearl's aloof single mother, Lily, charged Pearl with caring for, is mowed down (along with several other children) deliberately by a disturbed father's car, Lily tries to peddle Pearl's grief to the media. She then gets involved with Adam, an artist who has created a scandal by making and showing a body cast of a dead teenage heroin addict. With Adam up for the design of the memorial to honour the children slain with her son, Lily morbidly attempts to secure his affection. A another storyline follows Sonia, a recent widow of a famous woodcarver and furniture maker, from whom Adam rents studio space. Pearl, meanwhile, to deal with her grief and keep chaos at bay, becomes almost obsessed by Frank Lloyd Wright's house 'Fallingwater' .