She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of latching on to people-not to mention her chaotic family and the threat of a proposal to develop a prison on Granny Ava’s Island, the family’s spiritual home. Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, across the border.
But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley for one last visit. A tough, generous, reckless woman accused of having too much lip, Kerry uses anger to fight the avalanche of bullshit the world spews. Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent her adulthood avoiding two things: her hometown and prison. It is a challenge and a delight to read.A gritty and darkly hilarious novel quaking with life-winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin Award-that follows a queer, First Nations Australian woman as she returns home to face her family and protect the land of their ancestors. By turns elegantly descriptive and exquisitely affronting, Too Much Lip describes a family in perpetual crisis: fractured, addicted, abused and abusive, absent and broken. Her writing is as varied as her characters for whom identity is never singular or simple. Lucashenko evokes a sense of deep recognition of this country’s language, landscape and place with her prose.
More than anything, as a white lady from North Queensland, this story is both for me and not. It is both literary and pulp fiction, high culture and low. Lucashenko is writing what can be described as the postmodern Indigenous Australian novel, and Too Much Lip will appeal broadly to readers of Australian fiction, smart and politically minded rural and romance titles, and Indigenous fiction.
But the stakes change, and Kerry finds herself fighting to save her family’s land, burial grounds, history and connection to home. After an armed robbery gone awry, Kerry returns to her hometown to say farewell to her dying Pop. Central to the novel are themes of rage, incarceration, and generational trauma. Title of Melissa Lucashenko’s latest book-both an accusation and a lament-speaks of hunger, greed, desperation, destruction and redemption.
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