The Crustacean

The year's most spiky and powerful novella.

"When I was 13 I knew nothing about anything.

I only cared about love.

And the older man, who I thought I fell in love with, never told me he was divorced.

I made that up on my own."

Chichirim is a plain 13-year-old girl. An ordinary, misunderstood, lonely seventh-grader. A girl with a terrible secret.

Her dad is worse than useless. And her mum spends all her days tattooing thick ugly eyebrows on old women.

Her parents forget her birthday, and her sister hates them so much she wishes they were dead.

Chichirim does bad things at school. And still, no one cares.

Until, one day, an older man picks her up on the side of the road.

He tells her she is pretty.

He tells her what to do.

Underneath her hard outer shell, her softness is being exploited and destroyed by the people she trusts and loves the most.

"I want to come back as a crab. A crab's skin is made of bone and the flesh is inside the bone. But we're the opposite. We have bone inside flesh."

The Crustacean is an intricately crafted novella exploring memory, exploitation, and the lasting effects of adult abuse and betrayal, for readers of My Dark Vanessa and Tampa.