Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
From the many award-winning authors of Mullumbimby, a new dark and humorous book. The witty Kerry Salter has lived her entire life avoiding both her hometown and prison. She is only a few inches from being locked up, but now that her Pop is dying, she decides to go on a stolen Harley. Kerry anticipates staying over the border for little more than twenty-four hours. But she rapidly learns that the Bundjalung nation has an odd way of pulling onto individuals. As the Salters struggle to halt the development of their beloved river, old family wounds begin to reopen. And when a handsome dugai man shows up out of nowhere set on kissing her up, it only causes more difficulty—but then again, trouble is Kerry’s middle name.
Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
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Too Much Lip is a gritty and sardonic comedy that provides forgiveness and atonement where none appear imaginable.
The book depicts an Australian Aboriginal family in the early twenty-first century and provides information about the ancestry of the family’s relatives. The novel shows us the harm that British colonialism caused to a sophisticated and prosperous culture that had coexisted with this continent for many thousands of years. The colonizers of Australia did terrible things to the indigenous people, including genocide and kidnapping of their children and effectively imprisoning them in mission settlements of various Christian denominations.
The family at the heart of this tale has the scars of that past, but they also possess the dignity inherited from their Aboriginal ancestors as well as the lingering language and tales that serve as metaphors for the bond between people and their land. This book is incredibly beautifully written, and the story develops with all the complexity, serendipity, analogies, and humour we anticipate from this kind of literature. However, because family life may be so brutally difficult at times, it is often necessary to take a break from it. I, the reader, a second-generation European Australian who is primarily of English origin, feel shame.
What my English and Irish ancestors did historically, and many people still think that way today. However, I went back to the book. Although it is based on rape and occasionally actual interracial love, the tale is good and the writing is excellent, and the family in the novel has both European and Aboriginal ancestry. After all, some of the white persecutors in the adjacent towns are distant cousins of the family.
