Weaving Us Together by Lay Maloney

Title: Weaving Us Together

Author: Lay Maloney

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Lothian Children’s Books/Hachette

Published: 30^th July 20025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 297

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: A sharp and insightful coming-of-age story about all the ways we find home from an exciting debut author and 2022 black&write! Fellow.

When I look back, I realise everything I needed was there all along.

I’m Jean O’Ryan and this is my story. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged when I moved with my dad to a little town surrounded by hills. In that valley where the rivers meet the sea, Seraphina Landry found me fallen over on a road. With a hand from Seraphina and the rest of The Crew, we weave our lives together using threads of hope, grief, joy and love. Never alone, I find my mob, face the worst of days, search for answers, and figure out what kind of person I wanna be.

A sharp and funny Australian YA about a non-binary Aboriginal person as they transverse the ups and downs of life, including finding their family, healing from trauma, and figuring out who they are.

From Gumbaynggirr and Gunggandji writer and black&write! Fellowship winner Lay Maloney.

~*~

Jean O’Ryan lives with their father in a small town surrounded by hills.  They are Indigenous, but doesn’t know where they fit in, doesn’t know where their people come from, and doesn’t always know how they identify – but they know it’s not what most people expect. Jean’s story start’s in 2011, when they are becoming a teenager. Meeting Seraphina Landry changes everything. Jean starts to learn about Country, about their culture and connection to the land. About the family they never knew and why they never knew the family. Jean is grappling with their trauma from years ago when their mother died. Yet, the teen years bring more trauma. Friendships coming and going, understanding why the people around them feel, speak and react the way they do, and coming to terms with more death in their family. With people they thought would be around forever leave the world.

Jean’s friends – the Crew – see them through everything. Bryan, Seraphina, Lulu, and Ariel explore their world and identities, sometimes spending years coming to terms with who they all are, who they like and where they fit into the world. Grappling with identities and intersectional identities around being Aboriginal, gender and sexuality in this coming-of-age story is uniquely Australian. It gives people whose stories and histories have often been hidden or ignored a voice and sits alongside every other young adult coming-of-age story in Australia. This increasingly diverse range of stories means that everyone will have something they can relate to. That every reader should be able to find a story that reflects something about their reality and their lives in the books that they read.

Jean’s story is powerful because it grapples with trauma. With generational trauma, with personal trauma, and cultural trauma as it navigates how Indigenous people have been navigating their world and where they fit in. What it means to embrace their culture and navigate a world where there are clashes of culture, assumptions about race, and expectations from the world around Jean and her community. Things aren’t always straightforward, but it is important that these voices and experiences are heard. The characters are faced with tough issues and confrontational issues that have deep effects based in the traumas they’ve faced throughout their lives.

It pulls together very specific experiences in the 2022 winner of the black&write Fellowship to promote Indigenous voices and bring their stories to life. It shows the broad range of stories from everyone out there that reflect universal, cultural, and individual feelings and situations that in some way, everyone can relate to. Or learn from the stories, learn from the voices, and open people’s eyes up to a reality that they might not know much about. These stories are a part of Australia’s history, so everyone should have a chance to know about these stories. They should be hearing about it more as well. It’s a story filled with anger, sorrow, humour and confusion in equal amounts as Jean explores their identity. Because when you’re a teen, everyone is exploring their identity in some way. Not everyone has the answers right away. We never do at any age, because sometimes, we might only get the answers later in life. We might only find out the truth years after things have happened. Discoveries can bring new understandings and connections into our lives, which lead to forging identities. Or working out an identity that hasn’t been clear for a long time, like Jean.

Throughout the novel, I could see they didn’t identify as a boy or a girl, but for the first half or so, Jean didn’t have the language to talk about how they felt. Characters like Uncle Mickey were great, because he was open and I got the sense that the kids felt at ease with him. He was the one to help Jean and her friends talk about their identities and become who they were, accepting them when others might not have. He was a safe person. Someone I felt anyone could trust. Everything in this book was brilliantly rendered, and the strong emotions danced off the page, dangling things in front of the reader and waiting until certain points to drop the surprises. It worked well, because things needed to be kept back at times. It’s about the characters discovering who they are, and this makes the novel work very well.

Weaving Us Together is about family and coming together in culture and language, in experiences and identity. It’s one that some readers will relate to, and others will learn something from, so it will be a great read for young adult and teen readers.