The novel crosses over into magic realism when Amadea then sleeps underground for ten years, and emerges aged 19 in a nine-year-old body, with a locust embedded in her brow. The stars go out because their camp is being bombed in reprisal for some of the men trying to cross the border. I was his only daughter and I did not have a mother. I was the daughter of number 425 living in tent 425, where there was no 425b or c or d. I was in my blue dress, also rationed like the number and letter inscribed just beneath my right ear: 425a in blue ink. I’d just had dinner when the stars went out. The sun and the wind rippled the blue cloth and we thought, water! And drank up the thought. We lived in the desert of many tents, Our halfway homes between heaven and earth, the blue box said, so we should be grateful. Our tents were also blue like water and rationed. We were warned on the box, a tiny blue square that kept us hoping, kept us on the line. All must know darkness and light must be rationed equally. When the sky was taught a lesson that no one should shine or outshine anyone. In the dry dust of the desert, the girl Amedea ekes out an existence with her father…

The rulers justify their actions by blaming those on the outside as impure, inferior people who have brought their troubles on themselves.įrom this unsettling political premise, Bobis has woven a beautiful, compelling story. In an unspecified place at an unspecified time in the future, a privileged people police the border to their lush enclave so that the undeserving on the other side must survive in a parody of equality on meagre rations in a drab, futureless environment. Locust Girl is such an exciting find, I hardly know where to start…īobis has written an astonishing allegory, one that grew, surely, out of those infamous words: We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

Locust Girl by Merlinda Bobis