Paperback by Stripes Publishing, £6.99
A kick-ass coming of age tale, The Incredible Adventures Of Cinnamon Girl sees comic book obsessed 17-year-old Alba losing her grip on her predictable, known world: school, the sugar-clouded bakery her mum runs, her best friend Grady asleep on her sofa. Art College in Sydney looms, but she’s refusing to recognise that fact, preferring to hunker down and blot out anything that could unbalance her happy, comfortable sphere.
And then a video goes viral announcing the end of days, and apparently Alba’s quiet, dusty little Australian town is the only place on the planet that will survive. The hippy masses descend, mucking up Alba’s Christmas plans and making her cling on to her blinkers even more fervently, but you can’t fight change…
Our heroine swerves between being a confident, powerful, talented, chatty role model and irritatingly “naive” and “oblivious” at times in award-winning writer Keil’s second book for Young Adults, but she’s brilliantly wrought, as is her gaggle of friends, particularly sweary farmer’s boy Eddie and tortured insomniac Grady.
While packed with the usual teenage angst (sex, drink, worries about the future), grief, fear and fun are woven in too, and in such a way that any room for cliche is obliterated.
This’ll make you hungry for slabs of apple strudel from Albany’s bakery, nostalgic for home and will nudge every girl into valuing themselves just that bit more. And rightly so.
