AustLit

Mills discusses Gary Crew's Strange Objects and John Marsden's So Much to Tell You, in relation to the representation of women and the central images in both narratives of mutilation, blood and death. She argues that 'In each book a mutilated female body speaks mutely and powerfully about the betrayal of women and the failure of words to make the writer new' (41). For Mills, the mutilated bodies in both texts are positioned 'outside the order of nature' and while the narratives may 'speak of development in time towards a happy or catastrophic ending...the message burnt or hacked into female flesh is timeless' (41).