Member Reviews
Christina D, Media/Journalist
Review Metal Fish, Falling Snow by Cath Moore
Some books can’t be described as anything but personal—this is one. Cath Moore opens our door to her protagonist Dylan, a biracial teen who is what the world would consider on the autistic spectrum, but is what some of us would agree is magic.
Metal Fish, Falling Snow is written in first person present perspective, which places the reader solidly inside the mind of Dylan. Dylan is a teenage girl who is dealing with all the things that a teenager deals with, family relationships, bullying, identity and self-acceptance. It is while in the whirling mists of her reality that her mother dies in an accident and Dylan adds grieving and coping with sudden change to her already challenging list of things to deal with. Her mother’s partner Pat starts them on a road trip together to she doesn’t want to know where
Set against the backdrop of inland Australia, Dylan travels down long desert roads and meets characters from small towns in a long and arduous journey where she inadvertently causes one catastrophe after another. The central journey within Metal Fish, Falling Snow occurs inside Dylan’s world, a place constructed of the real, expressed through the imagined.
Reading a story written in first person from what appears to be an autistic adolescent was confusing from the start. Being inside Dylan’s head took time to acclimatise to, but once I did I was charmed. Narratives were choppy and disjointed with elements of magical realism and disconnection of time. I spent the first couple of chapters trying to ascertain whether this was bad writing or there was something else being communicated here. It was… Taking into account Cath Moore’s screenwriting and Danish film background stylistically it is implicit in her writing style. Whilst reading I started to fall into cadence of Dylan’s thoughts and began to understand her language as did the characters around her. I quickly became invested in her story.
Cath Moore has done something amazing here. The book is beautiful and authentically crafted, at no time did I tire of the way Dylan sees the world despite her paranoia and repetitive habits. Moore does the work that all good authors do with a carefully written piece, she shows restraint and trusts the reader to do most of the work. There was nothing missing, no gaps in space, time, character or plot. How she found Dylan and created her world so convincingly I am stilled amazed by. The language left me wondering how true it would ring for some of my friends whose worlds are so complex, or even my daughter who sees the world differently to those around her.
A paragraph needs to be devoted to Cath Moore’s treatment of identity here as it is the struggle of much of this audience. Metal Fish, Falling Snow is patent example of how to incorporate struggles with Blackness in Australia into a character in a way that is real and does the work of truth-telling and making human. Her own mixed race parentage of an Irish Australian mother and Guyanese father mirrors itself in Dylan’s French mother and Guyanese father. Although not biographical, the pain and racial disphoria caused by the messages the world installs in Dylan, communicates a truth that is profound and undecorated. This journey when considered by itself is so subtle in its inclusion in the wholeness of Dylan’s character that it does not allow for the polarisation of the story to soothe the binary beast that is so often demanded of with Black writers. Moore has balanced the treatment of the identity struggle so well within this narrative, allowing it to be a present in reality but not forcing Dylan to deal with it. The growth felt organic throughout the narrative. Personally I was so connected to this story by the end that I was truly emotional. It evoked my own journey as a child growing up in Australia and struggles with my own identity. In the final chapter when Dylan tells Pat she can’t go with him, the way she explains the importance of having people who are around you who understand you broke me;
‘I also have to stay in case somewhere along his own timeline Joni feels skin shame and looking at his reflection feels like stepping on shattered glass. I’ll try and suck his shame out like venom from a snakebite. I need to be here so I can remind him that we are fine, even if it doesn’t always feel that way’ (Moore 2020).
Classified YA, Metal Fish, Falling Snow should be included in high school and university reading lists. It promises to make the reader’s world bigger and awards to people often not represented the opportunity to be seen as human, not just while reading the book, but forever after.
