"'Miss Amelia Hayes, welcome to The Land of Dreams. I am the staff trainer. I will call you grasshopper and you will call me sensei and I will give you the good oil. Right? And just so you know, I'm open to all kinds of bribery.'From the moment 15-year-old Amelia begins work on the checkout at Woolworths she is sunk, gone, lost...head-over-heels in love with Chris. Chris is the funny, charming, man-about-Woolies, but he's 21, and the 6-year difference in their ages may as well be 100. Chris and Amelia talk about everything from Second Wave Feminism to Great Expectations and Alien, but will he ever look at her in the way she wants him to? And if he does, will it be everything she hopes?"
This was such a cute read! Just the title and the book cover alone made me want to take the book home which I did and didn’t regret because this is one of the more genuine, more honest coming of age stories about being fifteen, being awkward and falling in love for the first time, about heartbreak. About the toughness of being at that crucial age of entering the world of adulthood and generally about growing up.
Creatively told in the alternating POVs, Amelia’s voice and Chris’ narrative through his diary, we learn about these two well rounded, very well depicted characters who are worlds and ages apart. Amelia is 15 and Chris is 21, and how they find this sort of magical connection with each other in the Land of (Broken) Dreams aka the local supermarket where they both work part-time.
I enjoyed the humour, in equal parts witty, deprecating and pain-filled. The characters - Amelia, naïve, idealistic and smart, and Chris - love-torn, scared of his future and indecisive. The not-friendship-not-love relationship between Amelia and Chris that is refreshingly unique. To the conversations about families, feminism, books, love, life and of course the ending which is a heart-aching perfection in my eyes. I loved it all.
Age rating should be 13+. Heavy drinking, smoking and drug use.
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