Joy Moody is Out of Time by Kerryn Mayne

Author: Kerryn Mayne

Genre: Mystery, Crime

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Published:

Format: Paperback

Pages: 352

Price: $34.99

Synopsis: On her twin daughters’ twenty-first birthday, Joy Moody – proprietor of Bonbeach’s premier laundromat – is found dead. Yet that is not the strangest thing happening behind the bright pink facade of Joyful Suds.

For much of their lives, Joy has been telling Cassie and Andie one big, fat lie: that they are from the future, and that when they turn twenty-one they will travel back to the year 2050.

What started as a colourful tale to explain how the girls came to live with her has now become a decade-long deception. Worse still, Joy has started to believe it herself.

The lie is certainly preferable to the truth she can’t face – about what happened to the girls’ real mother, and how far Joy’s gone to keep them ‘safe’ . . .

With the twins’ twenty-first birthday fast approaching, and with Andie starting to have doubts, time is fast running out for Joy Moody. In more ways than one.

~*~

Crime fiction often traverses very similar themes in a lot of books. The crimes are often murders or kidnappings, or stalking. And secrets, there are always a lot of secrets. Without them, it wouldn’t be as interesting. The stories are enriched by the secrets, because it is the crime and mystery connected with them that brings everything together. And in a book I read recently this was dealt with cleverly, delving into personal beliefs and motives, and desires to keep people safe whilst also controlling a narrative.

Joy Moody has twenty-one-year-old twins whom she claims were born in 2050, and that they’ll be going back to the future on their twenty-first birthday. Interesting premise, that upon first reading, could be mistaken as science fiction. Yet, reading further, things are slowly revealed, and the story is uncovered through the years, from 2002 until 2023, where we first meet Joy and her daughters, Cassie and Andie. As it moves back and forth, revealing the sheltered life the twins have lived, and how one has accepted it, whilst the other twin has rebelled, or at least started to question what Joy has really told them, everything starts to unravel. And because of this, everything is important. The story unfolds slowly, going back and forth in time at Joyful Suds Laundrette in Victoria. It’s done well, capturing the perspectives of the twins, Joy, and several other characters like a police detective who come in when things start to change, and the countdown crested tension – it gave the sense that something was coming, that it couldn’t be stopped, and that somehow, the twins were going to have to find all the answers, and work out where they really came from.

It’s an intriguing mystery, especially when they start speaking about the Daughters of the Future Revolution and the other concepts their mother introduced them to so she could keep them isolated from the real world. So they wouldn’t question what she told them, nor would anyone look too much into their presence.

It also could present as a time travel novel at the start, which is something I have seen more of in children’s and young adult fiction. There are hints and elements at the start that suggest things aren’t quite what they seem. That everything is a façade and nobody’s bad behaviour is excused. There might be hints about why it happens, which suggests motives, and allows readers to see how the twins grow and evolve later in the novel, and how they uncover things and learn about what the world is really like.

It’s a complex mystery with layers and threads that need to be teased throughout the story, because it seems that everyone has to come to realise things in their own time, that information is shared in certain ways until everything starts to come to a head. It means that things evolve well, and they bring concepts that people might not have thought of, or don’t always think about to light.

It also shows what people can do when they are desperate to keep secrets, when faced with death and consequences for their actions. It’s a novel that plays with ideas of time, isolation, fear and secrecy. People will always do whatever they can to protect themselves and keep their secrets and this story felt as though it had something different – maybe it was how Joy justified things and acted, and pretended the girls would be heading into the future. And I felt that each character was layered, because they all brought something unique to the story to create, and each gave the story a bit of zest to move it along.

Overall, this was an intriguing novel, and one that adds something interesting to the crime and mystery genre. A good book that people will enjoy.