Like a House on Fire

Reading Cate Kennedy’s beautiful short stories is like looking through a peephole into people’s lives. There is often no clear start or end, but it is a moment in time. Enough to see people in quite dire situations and to watch what decisions they make, and not necessarily see the full impact – Kennedy let’s the reader take it away and chew on it in their own time. I can’t get the last story out of my mind – a young girl is given the assignment of writing in a diary, and we get the innocence of a child revealing the quite awful situation that she is in, but doesn’t really understand. I worry for her.