In the suburbs of Brisbane, 1975, 12-year-old Andie Tanner lives with her father, her mother and \u201cfour quiet souls \u2026 downstairs, underneath the house\u201d: her father\u2019s racing greyhounds. Her life is simple and whole, made up of her family, the streets of Morningside, her suburban primary school and the dogs \u2013 who Andie adores above all else.<\/p>\n
Toni Jordan\u2019s eighth novel, Tenderfoot, opens in a world built around these greyhounds; the kennels, the raised bench used for treatments, the kibble and powders, scales and leads and muzzles and collars. Andie\u2019s parents are gamblers and to them gambling is a \u201cfamily legacy, an ideology of living\u201d. But they train their dogs meticulously, a way of mastering chance in a game otherwise ruled by it. On the track, the hounds resist the laws of nature; \u201cto them, gravity means nothing. They hover \u2026 are streaks of light; they are life, flashing before your eyes\u201d.<\/p>\n
For Andie, impatient for her own life to begin, the world is full of waiting and of longing: waiting \u201cfor the boxes to open \u2026 for the race to begin\u201d; longing for the future in which she can become a greyhound trainer herself. At school, she is clever and polite; a rule-follower. But she soon learns that the rules won\u2019t always keep her safe. When she is shunned by her friends, Andie throws herself into a quest to recover her classmate\u2019s missing cat, Macavity, certain this will win back the affection of her peers. But as she struggles to navigate the labyrinth of childhood friendships, her life at home begins to disintegrate as well.<\/p>\n
Told through alternating perspectives of adult narrator and child protagonist, Andie\u2019s story revolves around her relationship with her parents: her beautiful, exhausted, often irritable mother, and her gentle but unreliable father. They are deeply complex characters and Jordan\u2019s portrayal of struggling adults who try their best and yet often fail their serious, overly responsible child is sharp and empathetic. \u201cAfter your parents are gone,\u201d Andie reflects from the perspective of adulthood, \u201cyou realise that inside you and everyone you know \u2026 is a child \u2013 fallible and wounded, and wrong about so many things\u201d.<\/p>\n
Andie tells us that \u201cchildhood is as much a place as it is a time\u201d and Jordan renders this place with extraordinary clarity and precision. Her spare, honest prose captures the confusion of being 12: a mixture of earnestness and vulnerability, competence and helplessness. Tenderfoot honours the naivety of its child narrator without softening the world\u2019s edges and I felt a creeping terror for Andie as she is compelled to navigate this world alone. \u201cMaturity does not rise smoothly like water filling a tank\u201d, Jordan writes. \u201cInstead, our coming of age is a jerky, unpredictable process, a wild tide coming in on a ragged beach.\u201d<\/p>\n
As she narrates from decades in the future, Andie is both the girl she was \u2013 earnest, hopeful, wise beyond her years \u2013 and the woman she\u2019s become, bearing the weight of what she\u2019s learned. \u201cWhen you\u2019re small, the world comes into focus like a polaroid: smudged and indistinct, taking years to resolve into clarity,\u201d Andie reflects. Tenderfoot itself feels like such an image \u2013 a snapshot of a girl on the cusp of change, caught between what she knows, what she longs for and what the world delivers instead.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Saved for Later<\/p>\n Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia’s culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Jordan is deeply sensitive to social class and community. The racetrack, as Andie\u2019s father insists, is a great leveller: \u201cRich or poor, teenager or pensioner, new Australian or old, at the dogs, everyone is equal.\u201d But equality is fragile in a world structured by chance. At her first job at the TAB, Andie serves lines of punters \u201ctrapped in a prison of their own making\u201d. Betting embodies the paradox of gambling: the dream of freedom is chained to the inevitability of loss. Andie loves this community, the people she\u2019s grown up around. She is one of them. But as the story progresses she begins to see not only what the track promises but also what it costs.<\/p>\n Above all, Tenderfoot grapples with the complexity of human behaviour. \u201cThe truth is\u201d, Andie says, \u201cgreyhounds are two animals at the same time \u2026 the gentlest of animals unless you are a small furry creature. It\u2019s simplistic to think that people are either good or bad. People behave the same way dogs do.\u201d The duality of people, always capable of cruelty and tenderness in equal measure, is what animates Jordan\u2019s novel and what makes Andie\u2019s story so ordinary and so devastatingly recognisable.<\/p>\n With its precise prose and balance of immediacy and hindsight, Tenderfoot has the makings of an Australian classic: a novel about family, loss and the ghosts of who we once were and who we might become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the suburbs of Brisbane, 1975, 12-year-old Andie Tanner lives with her father, her mother and \u201cfour quiet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":["post-118597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}