Harm None by Gay Lynch, Hembury Books 2025. 141 pages.
Reading this as Netflix’s Adolescence hit the headlines was timely indeed. Harm None raises some similar questions of teenage development, gender and technology, but through the eyes of a girl.
It’s an intriguing mix of YA, Australian literary fiction and witchcraft-themed mystery that treats older teens (and up) with respect, not holding any hands in the darkness, but maintaining an earthy grandmaternal presence to keep the more disturbing elements from overwhelming younger adolescents.
Garnet is an old soul in an adolescent body, having had to grow up fast with an unreliable mum, absent dad, and a loving but busy grandmother. She’s sexually aware and curious, but wary too. Fair enough, it’s a country town in 2003, and the attempted revolution of #metoo is a long way off.
The Crucible is the English text they’re studying at school and quotes from Miller’s play are scattered like good potion ingredients throughout this novel. You don’t have to know the play to enjoy the book, but it helps.
(My son and I watched the 1996 movie with Daniel Day Lewis in simmering form, Joan Allen more or less translucent with quiet rage, and Winona Ryder in fine form as Abigail. Son: People are crazy! Me: Correct tense, kid)
Someone is messing with Garnet by sending weird video files that disappear after a single viewing; they seem to know of her ancestral ties to Scottish witch trials that were around the same time as the Salem trials depicted in the Crucible.
So there’s a mystery to unpack, with an engrossing historical thread that helps tie down the story as it gets weirder: A dodgy new neighbour has moved in, and brings the seedy side of maleness to disturb the three generations of women living among cultivated herbs and local wildlife.
This is why the book is not for younger teens, but I think the author’s efforts to show some humanity to an otherwise brooding and threatening presence should lead to some good conversations between older teens, and maybe with their trusted adults too. Why are men more likely to harm? What makes this gender difference happen? And what distinguishes explanation from excuse for unfair treatment of women and children by men?
It turns up in other ways, this gender equity dilemma. The local lads present the usual mixed bag, and Garnet must practice policing her boundaries, retreating when needed into the confidences of her bestie and her grandmother.
Not her mum so much. She is trying in both senses, and this moved me, as a psychotherapist, because I see how effort and effect don’t always match up, and kids growing up too fast is one of the sadder and more silent sorts of pain I know.
I love that as Garnet works through her boundaries with others, males especially, she gets a chance to reckon with that issue of premature adulthood. Book-loving adolescent girls who are 15 going on 40, and anyone who’s loved such a girl or been one, will I think feel seen by this book.
Garnet has to fight for her right to be a girl for as long as she needs, and to find her own way into womanhood at her own pace. For her struggles she is my current literary shero, with honourable mentions to her grandmother and her mum. Yes, even her mum: mercurial, impulsive, object of so much judgement. But still here, still trying. No witch – unless by witch, you mean woman others haven’t managed to understand. Yet.
Speaking of sheroes, Dr Gay Lynch presides over this tale like that grandmaternal presence, tending a potion that’s been two decades on the stove. You can tell how loved these characters are, how they’ve stayed with the writer all this time.
I am so glad they are getting their chance to be loved by others now.
Harm None by Gay Lynch is available at www.hemburybooks.com.au
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