The Girl Below

Bianca Zander

Penguin

Otago Daily Times, September 15th 2012

With her debut novel The Girl Below, Bianca Zander joins a long list of writers who have successfully mixed realism and fantasy to create a coming-of-age/ghost story that I found literally haunting.

At an age where most of her peers have careers, families and the other trappings of adult life, Zander’s 28-year-old narrator Suki Piper is still drifting.  Returning to London after a decade in New Zealand she hopes to settle in the city she grew up in only to find that with no family or friends, her identity purged from the NHA and IRD databases, she has no place there.  The only things that remain are the phantoms that haunted her childhood and a recurring dream involving the abandoned WWII air-raid shelter in the back yard of her parent’s apartment. 

One of the hardest aspects of the transition of adolescence is the replacement of the magical thinking of youth with the realism required to live in the adult world, and Suki soon realises she needs to reach back through time to her younger self to lay these ghost to rest before she can find her place in the world.  The juxtaposition of Suki’s journey through the shadows of memory and her daily struggle with the hard edges of present day reality creates a story that is by turns sad, grim and fantastic. 

I’m not sure I can say I enjoyed The Girl Below – my response to the novel was more complicated than that – but it was certainly a satisfying and thought provoking read.  While not to everybody’s taste, I would recommend it to anybody who enjoys the idiosyncratic weirdness of authors such as Haruki Murakami and Audrey Niffenegger.  Bianca Zander is definitely a writer to watch.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/haunting-mystery-girl-who-couldnt-grow