Only Ever Always by Penni Russon (review)

Rupert Brooke's poem "Doubt" makes a fitting epigraph for this story of two girls working through grief and loneliness on their way to hope and new beginnings. Thirteen-year-old Claire is reluctantly sorting through her old toys in preparation for the birth of a new cousin to her beloved uncle Charlie when she comes across the music box he gave her when she was born. She drifts off to sleep in the wake of memories and finds herself dreaming about a girl named Clara, whose world is post-apocalyptic and who lives by collecting broken bits of things to sell while trying to avoid the gang bosses who collect people to use for their own purposes. Clara makes a dangerous deal that allows her to cross over into Claire's realm to steal some life-saving medicine for her friend, and while there she steals Claire's music box; when Charlie dies, Claire's grief drives her deeper into Clara's world, where Clara is nursing a grief of her own as her friend dies and she is taken prisoner by one of the gang bosses. Making sense of the myriad connections and transpositions between Claire's and Clara's world requires a reliance on intuition more than logic; fortunately, Australian author Russon's richly poetic language encourages just such a reliance. The second and third-person narration of Claire's sections draws readers into her inner world as something slightly more than spectator, while Clara's street-inflected Aussie dialect invokes a sense of walking through a strange world with an intimate guide. The sadness of their broken circumstances is mitigated by their shared strength to bear life's inevitable losses. Give this to fans of David Almond who see magic behind the veil of the ordinary.