Review: The Edge Of Limits


Full confession: I adore the writing style of Susanne Gervay. Her picture books resound with lilting emotion. Her junior novels entertain and engross. Her young adult fiction, gripping and gritty. So, while I’m being upfront and honest, her latest YA, The Edge of Limits was a more exacting reading experience than expected.

In Susanne’s own words this novel, delves into adolescent relationships and consent looking into the complexities of boys as they confront sexuality, power, and relationships. Teenage boys are not a species I admit to understanding in great measures. I have never lived with their unique drives, language and emotional tropes, their male ‘smells’.

So, reading about 17-year-old Sam and his testosterone imbued school mates as they plough their way through self-actualisation and a school survival camp, was not the proverbial walk through the park. The park was the confronting physical and mental terrain of the Aussie bush. The walk, a challenging journey of realisation, guilt and confrontation. And yet, a kind of enlightenment was attained from Sam’s coming-of-age tale, disquieting at times, illuminating at others.

Loyalty, self-preservation, the maintenance of mateship, the ability to ‘choose correctly’; these values are gender non-specific and although teenage hormones intensify them, they are aspects of our human nature that may be tested and guarded, stretched and broken, at any age. This is why The Edge of Limits resounds so sharply.

At its heart, Sam’s story is about differentiating between when to remain dumb and when to shout out in defiant defence of all the is right and good. Integrity. Such a rich and potent quality. Strange how it ends in ‘grity’ – aka gritty – precisely what Gervay’s narrative possesses; a grittiness that is sometimes hard to swallow but simultaneously enticing.

I realise this is more of a reflection of the ethos and delivery of the story as opposed to a full-blown review of the story itself but that’s OK. It’s wise to ease gently into bathwaters you may have let run too hot. Eventually, the experience is one to relish. Like this book. For those who want a more in-depth plunge into the plotlines and premises, read KBR’s Liz Vercoe’s account of The Edge of Limits. Her perceptions mirror many of my own.

I still don’t know exactly what teenage boys smell like but thanks to novels like these, I can appreciate their humanness just a little bit better and fortunately, it allows them to do so, as well.

Title: The Edge Of Limits
Author: S J Gervay
Publisher: Flying Elephant, $15.99
Publication Date: November 2022
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780648203551
For ages: 14+
Type: Young Adult Fiction

Buy the Book: Flying Elephant Media, Boomerang Books, Booktopia

 

 

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