Book Review: Stories she tells herself are not an escape, they are reality

But she’s also kind, funny, intelligent, creative and fiercely loyal to her friends. She’s our first person narrator and the hero of this story in a way that is powerfully, and sometimes heartbreakingly, vivid.

Anais was born in an asylum to a ‘cigarillo-smoking outcast Queen’ who travelled on a flying cat and died not long afterwards.

Her longest-lasting foster placement, with a prostitute called Mother Theresa, ended in tragedy and trauma.

By the time we meet Anais, she may or may not have been responsible for putting a police officer in a coma, and she’s being placed in The Panopticon, a children’s home where the inmates – or clients, as they are incongruously called – can be observed and scrutinised at all times.

In this unpromising setting, Anais finds a family of sorts in the other ‘clients’; the children of The Panopticon have been discarded, overlooked and betrayed by everyone in their lives – the only people who don’t treat them with contempt or even worse, sympathy, are each other.

Anais’s voice is remarkable – it is what makes this book so impressive. This is about her use of language – she speaks in dialect and an array of colourful swear words. But it’s also her frank honesty, matter-of-fact descriptions interspersed with moments of pure beauty, and her hilarious sarcasm. And it’s the stories she tells herself, both consciously and unconsciously.

Her epic flights of imagination are not separate from the brutality and horrific unfairness of what Anais goes through.

The stories she tells herself are not an escape – they are her reality. The world of our imagination can be more powerful and more real than anything else – and thank God for that.

This is a superbly written book, and we care about this girl an alarming amount by the end. I really hope she’ll be okay.