The astonishing new novel from the incomparable, multi-award-winning and Laureate na nÓg Sarah Crossan.
I am not who I say I am. Marla isn't who she thinks she is. I am a girl trying to forget. Marla is a woman trying to remember.Allison has run away from home and with nowhere to live finds herself hiding out in the shed of what she thinks is an abandoned house. But the house isn't empty. An elderly woman named Marla, with dementia, lives there - and she mistakes Allison for an old friend from her past called Toffee.
Allison is used to hiding who she really is, and trying to be what other people want her to be. And so, Toffee is who she becomes. After all, it means she has a place to stay. There are worse places she could be.
But as their bond grows, and Allison discovers how much Marla needs a real friend, she begins to ask herself -where is home? What is a family? And most importantly, who am I, really?
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[Her name is Marla / and to her I am Toffee / though my parents named me Allison]***
(Bloomsbury YA, 2 May 2019, ebook, 405 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I've read a few of Crossan's books and have tended to be impressed. She writes novels in verse which offers something a little different. In this book we meet Allison, a sympathetic figure, a teenage girl on the runaway after a violent incident with her father. Her path's cross with an elderly woman called Martha who has dementia. The strange friendship and bond that develops between them is tender and sad at the same time. The book focuses on Allison and Martha becoming closer and closer and includes flashbacks to Allison's life when Kelly-Anne, her father's girlfriend is still around, before her father hurt her. Toffee is painful to read at times but all the more enjoyable because of it.
