The Amethyst Child

Singleton has garnered numerous accolades for her previous fantasy and historical novels. I come fresh to her work, but on the basis of this contemporary story will certainly seek out her earlier titles.

Amber is a gently disaffected teenager who, despite understanding parents, feels she doesn’t quite fit in the modern New Look and Bebo-obsessed world of her classmates. At this vulnerable point she meets Dowdie (Dorothy), a free spirit who lives in the ‘Community’, an out-of town commune led by charismatic leader, James.

Amber is fascinated by Dowdie and enthralled by the sense of magic she creates about her. Despite some initial doubts she becomes drawn further and further into the world of the Community and when she meets Johnny, another misfit, she introduces him to Dowdie. Johnny, an ‘emo’ with a passion for cutting-edge photography, preserves an apparently ironic distance from life at the community house, but when James bans him for his negative attitude, his sense of rejection becomes the catalyst for a series of horrific events. Ultimately, these are cathartic for all three teenage protagonists, but at a cost.

Framed by Amber’s interviews with the detective investigating the Community, the story unfolds with all the menace of a building storm, narrative events at one with the emotional weather of the tale, its mood of combined languor and anticipation. This in turn mirrors Amber’s inner world at the start of the book, a state of ‘aimless desire’, waiting for the right stimulus to flare into ecstasy or die back into despondency. Here is an author who does not so much imagine as reinhabit the extraordinary country of heightened consciousness that is adolescence. Beautifully written, Amethyst Child is even-handed in its sympathies, enlarging the reader’s understanding for James’ compromised and thwarted visionary, as well as for Johnny’s neglectful parents. This is a book which fosters emotional confidence and courage – highly recommended.