Red Ink

Gr 10 Up—A tale of loss—of a parent, an identity, and innocence. At 15, Melon Fouraki must come to terms with a reality more bizarre than her name. Melon knows "the story" that she has been told about her mother's immigration to London from a small town in Greece, but she doesn't know the truth. When her mother is killed in a freak bus accident, Melon must cope not only with her grief but with the precariousness of her living situation. The ever-changing sequence of events that seems incongruous with the current family relationships is an elegant way of examining the way humans craft their pasts for themselves and their progeny. Mayhew's decision to tell the story from Melon's perspective, while sharing the girl's mother's tale from the point of view of a very articulate narrator, creates an element of complexity, adds an aura of magic, and provides readers with a foreshadowing of the harsher reality that is to come. As Melon unravels the truth of her story, she also begins to examine some of her own self-destructive decisions that, in the clarity of hindsight, make her far more like her mother than she expected.