What happens when your life is completely turned around in an instant?

Peeling The Onion by Wendy Orr

Available for $17.95 via Booktopia.

What happens when our life is turned around in an instant? Often in life there is a moment when things change forever, when our life, as we knew it, alters. At other times a change is planned for and/or may occur gradually.

But it is this sudden change that Wendy Orr examines in her novel for young adults.

And why talk about a novel for young adults on Starts at Sixty? Apart from the fact that over 60s has grandchildren, over 60s often have to deal with sudden change. While this book, on one level, is a light read it deals with some hard facts about changes in our lives.

The novel is written in the first person by Anna, a bubbly teenager who loves exercise, particularly karate. She is popular, good at school, has a loving family and close friends. She is experiencing her first romance. But on a drive home, the car she is a passenger in, is hit by another one and her body and her world are shattered.

The author, Wendy Orr, used her own experience as a basis for the book though she was an adult at the time of her accident. I first came across the book as an English text and found that students responded to it quite well. A few years later, while recovering from a serious accident, I remembered the book and re-read it. Obviously, the concerns of a older woman (I was sixty-three) and a sixteen year old are going to be very different but there is enough there that is common to the experience. When Anna was told she was ‘lucky’ she was angry, I was old enough to know how lucky I was to survive. I could relate to her experience with the medical profession and the well meaning, but misguided remarks of others.

The title to the book refers to the layers and roles we each have in ourselves. Anna has to write a poem as an assignment. In the first one she writes about the peeling of an onion, as the layers are stripped back the essential onion is revealed – good and wholesome. At this stage Anna is fighting her injuries, not acknowledging the extent of them and determined her life will be as it was. She is in denial and angry.

She revises her poem. The second poem is about an onion being peeled revealing a rotten core. Anna is despair. Her injuries are worse than first thought. She is unable to attend school still despite her attempts to do so. Her romance is rocky and her family is stressed. She starts to believe it would be better off if she’d died. Reluctantly she agrees to counselling.

A chance encounter with the driver of the other car sends her to the core of her fears and her darkest moments.

Without explaining here exactly what happens, Anna comes to terms with what has happened. Her final poem is about the onion bulb sprouting new life.

She has peeled the onion.

Despite the subject matter the book is a light read and optimistic in the end. There is gentle humour throughout the book and serious teenage romance which is realistically portrayed.

The minor characters lacked complexity, though Anna herself is well drawn. For instance, her mother bakes under stress; her younger sister is always inventing an illness. The impact on a family is more complicated than that.
This book is set in an Australian country town and the school setting and the law as it relates to the accident is Victorian.

If you want a quick, light read that nevertheless provokes some thought, I recommend this book, even if you’re no longer a ‘young adult’.

Have you ever read a book that was for a younger audience? What was it? Did you enjoy it?