Title: The Rip

 Author: Mark Brandi

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Crime Fiction

 Published: February 26th 2019 by Hachette Australia

 Series: Standalone

 My rating: ★

Synopsis

‘It’s funny how quick it happens and without you really noticing. Anton said once that it’s like walking out into the sea, and you think everything’s fine and the water’s warm, but when you turn back you’re suddenly miles from shore. I’ve never been much of a swimmer, but I get what he means. Like, being caught in a current or something. A rip.’

A young woman, living on the street has to keep her wits about her. Or her friends. But when the Drugs kick in that can be hard.

Anton has been looking out for her. She was safe with him. But then Steve came along.

He had something over Anton. Must have. But he had a flat they could crash in. And gear in his pocket. And she can’t stop thinking about it. A good hit makes everything all right.

But the flat smells weird.
There’s a lock on Steve’s bedroom door.
And the guy is intense.

The problem is, sometimes you just don’t know you are in too deep, until you are drowning.

My Review

SPOILER ALERT!

I usually never write reviews with spoilers – I hate the thought of ruining a Book for someone. But with this one… let’s just say I need to properly rant about it.

The book follows a homeless girl who’s battling with addiction and life on the streets, accompanied by her dog, Sunny and her best friend, Anton. All is going as well as it can be for her, but all that changes when Anton and her “befriend” someone that should not be trusted.

Right off the bat what you notice is the crass nature of the writing. Now, while I understand that it was written as such so that the language of the thoughts matches with the overall personality of the Character narrating the book, for me, it didn’t do any favours to the book. Not only was the writing crass, but sometimes somewhat exaggerated and unreal. It was a small book – 206 pages – and it should have ended rather quickly but it me ages to finish it because I had barely any motivation to keep on reading it.

There were instances where the author tried to show the mistreatment that is received by homeless junkies; This could have turned out to be extremely heart-breaking, and on some occasions it was. However, this one time, the main character entered a store; Considering she did so with the intention of shoplifting, it was no surprise that she wasn’t treated with warmth or outstanding service. But out in the open, not at all hidden from the public eye, the store’s security guard grabbed her arm, leaned in close, threatened to “smash her teeth in” and then slid his hands between her legs and squeezed her there. It seems extremely implausible that such behaviour would be acceptable in the middle of the store, with customers inside it, by a store employee, even if was directed at a homeless junkie.

Secondly, the characters were extremely unidimensional – there was barely any sort of complexity to them, especially the protagonist. I understand that the character is a junkie. But all she talked about and pondered over was how heroin made her feel. Now, I don’t know much about how it feels to be addicted to drugs, so even if I assume this is what it feels like – to have a constant need to be explaining what the drugs  make you feel like, that still leaves the book with a glaring problem of character development, or the lack thereof.  The only character development that we see for her is in the last chapter. [Warning – onslaught of spoilers beyond this point] And even then, such an instant sudden and drastic change occurs in the absence of the journey and the explanation such a change warranted. One second, she was heavily abusing drugs and the next she just wasn’t. The author simply just wrote “after” to denote it as an epilogue, without telling us how much time had even passed. But no matter how much time had passed, it didn’t make sense to me that she never even brought up the drugs once in the epilogue, didn’t reference her journey, her struggle to break out of the addiction – Was it hard for her to go through? Does she still struggle with it sometimes? Or is she still on the drugs?

This brings me to my next point; The ending. It was extremely predictable. Goodreads has categorized this book under the genre of ‘mystery’, but there was none in this book at all. Except maybe all the unresolved plot points. There were just so many loose ends. The ending was abrupt and not well thought out, leaving the reader with many unanswered questions. Some of them include: In the end, was the main character really off drugs? Did she get a job? How did Anton die? What did Steve do with Sunny? Was my assumption about Steve, the containers and Mary correct? What really happened to Steve – a court case, yes. But for what? What all of his many crimes were they finally able to charge him with?  This did not feel like an open-ended finale to the book. It seemed more like the author forgot, or perhaps neglected to tie up all these loose ends.

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About the Author

Mark Brandi’s bestselling novel, Wimmera, won the coveted British Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger, and was named Best Debut at the 2018 Australian Indie Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year, and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. His second novel, The Rip, was published to critical acclaim by Hachette Australia in March 2019.

Mark’s shorter work has appeared in The Guardian, The Age, the Big Issue, and in journals both here and overseas. His writing is also sometimes heard on ABC Radio National.

Mark graduated with a criminal justice degree and worked extensively in the justice system, before changing direction and deciding to write. Originally from Italy, he grew up in rural Victoria.

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