Sinopsis

Winner of the Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, 2012.?

Over the nine days before her seventeenth birthday, Mim's life turns upside down. In the end, the same things look entirely different.

Rule number one: I will not turn out like my mother.

Mim knows what she wants, and where she wants to go. Anywhere but home-in a dead suburb and with a mother who won't get off the couch. Her two older brothers are in prison, so now Mim has to retrieve a lost package for her mother. Does this make her a drug runner? She's set herself rules to live by, but she's starting to break them. And she can't seem to find answers to all the new questions:

Why is the monster dog Gargoyle hidden in the back shed?

Why is the boy she sent Valentines to for years now suddenly a creep?

And who is the mysterious girl next door who moans at night?

Vikki Wakefield lives in the Adelaide foothills with her husband and...