The language left me wondering how true it would ring for some of my friends whose worlds are so complex, or even my daughter who sees the world differently to those around her.Ī paragraph needs to be devoted to Cath Moore’s treatment of identity here as it is the struggle of much of this audience. How she found Dylan and created her world so convincingly I am stilled amazed by. There was nothing missing, no gaps in space, time, character or plot. Moore does the work that all good authors do with a carefully written piece, she shows restraint and trusts the reader to do most of the work. The book is beautiful and authentically crafted, at no time did I tire of the way Dylan sees the world despite her paranoia and repetitive habits. I quickly became invested in her story.Ĭath Moore has done something amazing here. Whilst reading I started to fall into cadence of Dylan’s thoughts and began to understand her language as did the characters around her. It was… Taking into account Cath Moore’s screenwriting and Danish film background stylistically it is implicit in her writing style. I spent the first couple of chapters trying to ascertain whether this was bad writing or there was something else being communicated here. Narratives were choppy and disjointed with elements of magical realism and disconnection of time. Being inside Dylan’s head took time to acclimatise to, but once I did I was charmed. Reading a story written in first person from what appears to be an autistic adolescent was confusing from the start. The central journey within Metal Fish, Falling Snow occurs inside Dylan’s world, a place constructed of the real, expressed through the imagined. Set against the backdrop of inland Australia, Dylan travels down long desert roads and meets characters from small towns in a long and arduous journey where she inadvertently causes one catastrophe after another. Her mother’s partner Pat starts them on a road trip together to she doesn’t want to know where It is while in the whirling mists of her reality that her mother dies in an accident and Dylan adds grieving and coping with sudden change to her already challenging list of things to deal with. Dylan is a teenage girl who is dealing with all the things that a teenager deals with, family relationships, bullying, identity and self-acceptance.

Metal Fish, Falling Snow is written in first person present perspective, which places the reader solidly inside the mind of Dylan. Cath Moore opens our door to her protagonist Dylan, a biracial teen who is what the world would consider on the autistic spectrum, but is what some of us would agree is magic. Some books can’t be described as anything but personal-this is one.

Review Metal Fish, Falling Snow by Cath Moore