In 2024 I was recommended a book by a family member, who went to an event and heard the author tell the story of his childhood and this novel he wrote called Boy Swallows Universe. Barely a week after this conversation, a friend arrived in my hometown of Aix en Provence, from Australia, pressed this book into my hands and said “You have GOT to read this!”.

Yes, you guessed right, it was Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton and I reviewed it here.

That book was published in 2018. I then saw there was another book about to be published called Lola in the Mirror, which some reviewers described as being even better than the debut novel. On reading about the inspiration for the novel, I decided to get a copy.

Love Stories and a Typewriter

Trent Dalton spent 17 years writing social affairs journalism across Australia. He had his own troubled childhood and upbringing, but he also witnessed and wrote about the situations of so many others, driven by the question; how was it that 120,000 people slept rough every night in one of the brightest, most fortunate countries in the world?

It is this question and the stories shared by the many people he has met over those years, that inspired him to create this latest story Lola in the Mirror.

Frank and Heartfelt

One of the people he was inspired by and wrote about, was Kathleen Kelly, the mother of a friend of his, who passed away on Christmas Day 2020. His book Love Stories is dedicated to her and prefaced with a letter written to her, typed on the sky blue Studio 44 Olivetti typewriter she bequeathed him.

In a letter to Kath, he writes of her memorial service:

Greg spoke of you and your beloved Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter, the sky-blue one that you’d been tapping on since the early 1970’s, writing fiery letters about woman’s rights and human rights and doing life right to politicians and principals and popes. He spoke about the letter you wrote to the Catholic Leader in 1970, railing against Canon Law demanding the covering of women’s heads in church. You were furious and brilliant.

After the service, Greg tells Trent that his Mum cut out all the stories he wrote and made scrapbooks that documented her life and all that was important to her and that she wanted him to have her typewriter. Being the honour that it was, Dalton wanted to do something special with it, to write something filled with love and depth and truth and frankness and heart because that’s how Kath was.

I told Greg I wanted to walk through the streets of Brisbane’s CBD (central business district) for two months asking random strangers to tell me love stories. I told him I then wanted to sit two for weeks straight with the Olivetti on the corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, on the edge of King George Square, and ask random strangers to stop and tell me more love stories, and then I wanted to write about all those love stories on your beautiful Olivetti.

Those two months of listening to people tell their stories of love, loss and belonging were research for this story of Lola, frank, fearless and full of heart.

Lola in the Mirror

Lola in the Mirror is a riveting, page turning novel that gripped me from the opening pages and never let go. It is a whirlwind of risk and adventure, an exploration of friendship, loss, perseverance and the resilience of the human spirit to not give up on a dream. It is a challenging coming-of-age story of an innocent girl who desperately wants to know who she is and rise above her situation.

The novel opens with a black and white illustration entitled ‘Escaping the Tyrannosaurus Waltz‘, the dance of mothers and their monsters, or the dark shadow of domestic violence, something Dalton recalled about his own mother, who often had to choose between homelessness or ‘the monster’, a terrible choice faced by many women in Australia, for whom domestic and family violence is one of the leading causes of homelessness.

The artist is a 16-year-old girl, she and her mother are on the run, they have been for all her life. The girl does not know her own name, because it’s too dangerous, but her mother promises to reveal things to her soon, when she turns 18, because then she will be free to make her own choices.

Houseless not homeless

The girl does not describe herself as homeless, the two live in a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the banks of the Brisbane River. There is a community of friends who live in similar circumstances, who look out for each other and this girl has a dream of a future life that will be different to how she lives now. For now that scrapyard home is her sanctuary, where she can dream up the best version of herself.

For a start, I ain’t homeless, I’m just houseless. Those two things are about as different as resting your head on a silk pillowcase and resting your head on a brick.

As this girl navigates her life in search of who she is, she comes across a mirror that she takes home, and after a period when the mirror cracks, something magical happens, half the mirror shows her legs and the other shows a dressed up woman in different world cities, who converses with her.

She wants to see her face, but she always has her back to her. She calls her Lola. Lola’s presence keeps her curious, keeps her coming back and looking in the mirror, gives her reason to keep dreaming. She is like a pulse on her mood, on her self-belief.

“Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what’s my future? What’s my past? … Mirror, mirror, please don’t lie. Tell me who you are. Tell me, who am I?”

The storytelling is incredible, the characters are fully formed, and the depiction of the city, the river, the bridges is visionary. You cannot read this book and not care about what happens to this girl or get hooked into wanting to know how she gets in and out of various situations. It is mystery, adventure, crime, psychological suspense and love story rolled into one. The best kind of holiday read ever.

When Life Connects With Art

I took this book on holiday with me to Australia, figuring I would read it there and leave it behind. It is set in Brisbane which is where I flew into, although I was staying much further South. On the day I started reading, my son was due to fly back to France. I sat in the passenger seat of the car as we drove to the airport. This time, we took a different route and suddenly we were driving alongside the CBD and there were all these bridges and a glimpse of Victoria Park and the mighty river.

When I got back to my book later in the day, on page 45, I read descriptions of exactly the same places we had just driven past. It was surreal, to move from the imagined place to these live flashes of what I had just seen. It brought the story to life and for the rest of the novel, those images kept recurring. I have always been a fan of reading works set in the places I travel to, and I’m glad I read this one in situ as well.

The Artwork

Throughout the novel are a number of superb illustrations, which both tell parts of the story and also suggest a future life of the girl artist. Each drawing is followed by an imagined art critic review in a black box, as if it were being displayed at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the commentary describing what the artist is representing in the illustration.

Of course, I became curious about the actual artwork and skipped to the back of the book to look up the story behind it. It’s a good one.

Trent Dalton, Author

Trent Dalton is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and the international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies, and Lola in the Mirror. His books have sold over 1.3 million copies in Australia alone. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.

Lola in the Mirror is for anyone who ever felt like they were going to collapse under the weight of sorrow. The book is also for all those beautiful souls who help us carry that weight. It’s an art story. It’s a crime story. It’s a mystery novel. And it’s a life story. I hope people will read this, get to the end and realise why I wrote Love Stories and sat on a Brisbane street corner watching people and asking them about love, loss and belonging for three months.