#84 Boner McPharlin’s Moll- Tim Winton

#84 Boner McPharlin’s Moll- Tim Winton

“Boner McPharlin was the solitary rough boy that country towns produce, or perhaps require.” Jackie was a young teenager “appalled and enchanted”

by this local, mysterious, outcast legend. She seeks out this bad boy, without understanding what it means to be anything but a child, she pretends.

At first I thought this was a Breakfast Club type of story about teenage angst full of young American small town archetypes (or Australian as it turns out). I thought it was like something out of the John Cougar Mellencamp songbook, I was humming Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days.

In some ways, it is like that, but it actually goes deeper, much deeper. Image is everything, but we are never like we were in High School, we are never what we pretend to be in High School, and we are never like what we want to be like in High School. Sometimes however, we are exactly what we hide about ourselves.

Below are two passages that put together, pretty much sums up the difference between adolescence and adulthood.

Notable Passages: “At 15 I would have annihilated myself for love.”  And then…“Thirty years is a long time to have regrets.”

Rating: 8-7-9-7 Total= 31