AustLit

'Growing up in the 1960s in a small rural community, Suzanne Covich is the dux of her primary-school classes. But it's what she learns at home that shapes the Ten Out of Ten Kid into the girl who won't cry, who plays dead, whose vulnerability is disguised beneath Huck Finn bravado. The class clown who sometimes forgets to keep her big mouth shut. The girl whose father bashes her mother and crawls between his daughters' sheets. In this extraordinary memoir of childhood, Suzanne Covich writes in a voice as raw and compelling and alive as if she were sitting across from you with a cup of coffee, reading aloud.' (Trove record)