Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

A coming of age story, packed with teenage angst. Sunburn is set in the 1990s, in a small and conservative Irish village. Main character Lucy, although pressured to conform, treads a different path when she becomes infatuated with her school friend, Susannah. Over the course of the summer, and the end of high school, Lucy must make decisions about her future.

Surges of hormones and a still-developing frontal lobe make teenage years so hard, right? And I think we can all recall the turmoil and intensity of teenage romances –

“It isn’t that I want him, it’s just that he wants somebody else.”

Howarth has captured the intensity well, however, I don’t think the story offered anything new.

2/5

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Either I really missed the point… or this was simply a bit boring. It took a really, really long time to get to the guts of the story and when I finally did, I was ‘meh’. But other readers are very, very excited about Creation Lake.

Protagonist Sadie Smith, an infiltrator-for-hire, is on assignment in rural France, busting up a cultish eco-anarchic commune. There’s a whole political angle that I suspect went over my head – that’s okay, because I did enjoy the theorising on Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. Really interesting stuff that almost prompted me to dig out my genetics textbooks… anyway, the Neanderthal bits are curious but not essential to the story, and they were just one of many diversions from the core action.

Kushner creates a great sense of place, Sadie is an interesting character, and the pace picks up significantly toward the end, but for what…? I was left scratching my head.

2/5

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Haidt considers the origins of the ‘anxiety epidemic’ for Gen Z. Most rush to blame it on ‘social media and/or Covid’ but, as Haidt explains, the issue is far more nuanced. He delves into things such as the introduction of the front-facing camera on mobile phones (allowing for selfies) and the anxiety experience by gender, to the role of Gen X’s helicopter parenting (there are reasons for this as well), Haidt also presents a number of potential solutions. I was listening to this book around the time of the new social media age-limit laws being discussed in Australia – timely (needless to say, it aligns with Haidt’s recommendation).

The users aren’t the customers for most social media platforms. If platforms offer services or information for free it’s because the users are the product. Their attention is a precious substance that the companies extract and sell to their customers (the advertisers).

Also in the mix is a ban on phones in schools – again, in Victorian government schools, phones are prohibited, so you can actually observe kids interacting at lunchtime, rather than hunched over devices.

Haidt generously shares much of his research and all of his graphs and figures online (you don’t have to have read the book to find these interesting and informative), and his website, which contains useful resources can be found here.

There were a couple of significant takeaway messages for me (and honestly, this book deserves a more thorough review) – firstly, Haidt states that for Gen Z, parents became over-protective in the real world and under-protective in the online world. In other words, we got it around the wrong way – let your kids ride their bikes, unsupervised, until it’s almost dark… real-life risk taking is essential for development.

Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.

Secondly, social media increased the quantity of social connection for teens but vastly reduced the quality. Parents (of boys in particular) who tell themselves that by playing video games with ‘friends’ their kids are socially connected need to think again.

This book is engrossing and terrifying. That said, I think it’s essential reading for parents of young children.

4/5