Ellie Pillai is not done yet
Christine Pillainayagam
Faber
Review: Lauren O’Connor-May
Ellie Pillai is a British, Indian, Catholic, Tamil teenager who is juggling adolescent anxieties about her ex-boyfriend, possible new crush, the girl that had dated both of them, her gay best friend who is dealing with romantic foibles and a bipolar mother, her other best friend who is recovering from an eating disorder and a sudden unexplained break-up, her high-powered aunt’s pending marriage to a Chinese man with annoying relatives, a her traditionalist and rigid powerhouse grandmother’s lovingly critical interference, her sick father and pregnant mother.
Add to that a need to understand herself and the vibrant culture clash that she is, and the pressure to choose her final year school subjects that will influence the trajectory of her life.
If that’s not enough, her song has gone viral and a music producer wants to fly her to New York to talk record deals, just before the hugely anticipated and much stressed-over wedding in three parts.
Anyone who thinks that teens have it easy has clearly forgotten what adolescence is like and should read this book.
Interestingly, my own adolescent children were not interested in it and abandoned it midway but I suspect that may have been because it resonated a little too much.
This is the third book in the Ellie Pillai series and while I hadn’t read the second book and had listened to the audio version of the first book quite a while ago, I was still able to follow the story.
The Ellie Pillai books are not so much novels as multi-media experiences. The books have QR codes in them that link to the author’s performance of the characters’s songs and the books are also very visually appealing with doodles around the chapter heads and along the page edges.
Highly recommended.
