One Hundred Days

September 1, 2023
A story of teenage pregnancy, immigrant experience, and the mother-daughter relationship by Australian author Pung. Karuna Kelly is the child of an unhappy marriage. Her father, a white, working-class Australian, dotes on her but has little regard for her mother, his mail-order bride from the Philippines. When they divorce, Karuna must live in a subsidized flat with her mother, whose narrow idea of health and success leads her to be critical and harsh. At 16, Karuna exercises her limited independence by having a fling with a local 19-year-old, becoming pregnant. The novel is written in Karuna's first-person voice as addressed to her baby, and the tone is raw and lyrical, hopeless and hopeful at the same time. Her mother controls her to an abusive extent, limiting her access to the outside world and rejecting medical advice in favor of old-time traditions. Karuna increasingly chafes against this treatment, aching for help but stymied in her attempts to get it. For such a slim book, the story is deeply complex. Pung shows people of different heritages mixing in this poor community, the insular quality of diaspora, and the different expectations placed on Karuna for being biracial. She also shows--and Karuna is aware of this to varying degrees--that Karuna's mother's actions are driven by trauma and love, not maliciousness, and that this both excuses them and doesn't. Karuna's experience of pregnancy is intimately, vividly detailed. As it progresses, she becomes resigned and depressed, but when the baby is born, there is the possibility of change. Subtle, difficult, lovely, and gorgeously written.

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October 1, 2023
A calamitous yet optimistic contribution to the coming-of-age genre, Pung's novel explores how a soon-to-be teen mom grapples with her own mother's controlling nature. Addressing her expected child in the second person, the narrator, Karuna, records her experience living under different forms of control, including financial constraints and forced confinement, at the hands of her mother, who claims this control is love. Karuna's mother's background as an ethnically Chinese woman with Filipino roots is central to Pung's presentation of a racially diverse but also segregated Australia, where immigrants working long hours to survive express both internalized racism from and criticism towards the dominant culture. Karuna's confused emotional complex of pain, fear, attachment, and guilt, is accompanied by an emerging sense of individuality best captured through her declaration that "[t]he fear is there, but my love is stronger." Especially good for readers interested in a suspenseful story of resilience that delivers the possibility of reconciliation with those who hurt us deeply.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 9, 2023
In the nuanced latest from Australian writer Pung (Laurinda), a teen mother-to-be reflects on her ill-fated pursuit of freedom in 1980s Melbourne. Karuna Kelly, 16, lives with her unnamed mother and carries on a clandestine relationship with Ray, a slightly older boy who’s also her homework tutor, until she gets pregnant by him. Her mother, a Chinese woman raised in the Philippines, would have disapproved of the relationship if she’d known about it, and reacts by locking Karuna in their apartment to keep her out of more trouble. Karuna’s narration, addressed to her unborn baby, chronicles how her mother was a bridal makeup artist before her parents’ divorce, which prompted her mother’s business to dry up for fear of bad luck, and resulted in their move to public housing. She also reflects on her decision to pursue the educated Ray, who turned her onto the poetry of Walt Whitman. Throughout, Pung effectively channels her protagonist’s restless outlook (“This guy wrote in the same way my mind seemed to meander these days,” Karuna says of Whitman). This is worth checking out. Agent: Clare Forster, Curtis Brown.

April 8, 2021
Is there a right way to love? Karuna feels suffocated by her mother—and her entrapment multiplies when her dad leaves and she’s forced to move away from private school and into council housing in Melbourne’s south east. Somehow, her mother controls her every move, even while working two jobs. Then, when Karuna becomes pregnant at 16, her mother locks her in their 14th-storey flat, with no key and no way out. One Hundred Days is a heartachingly personal story about love, motherhood and the different forms they both take. Alice Pung deftly approaches the colourism present in Asian communities and the confusing reverence that mixed-white children are viewed with, capturing the perplexing doublethink in communities where people maintain a strict adherence to white beauty norms while also sneering at ‘White Ghosts’ (Karuna’s mother’s term for white people). Though not a story explicitly about race, One Hundred Days expertly manoeuvres themes of classism, racism and sexism through the narrative framework of Karuna’s pregnancy. Written in her characteristic first-person direct perspective, Pung’s first novel for adults is a biting exploration of Karuna’s journey as she fights to gain independence from her mother’s suffocating love while learning to be a mother herself. One Hundred Days is a must-read for fans of The Mothers by Brit Bennett and Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Marina Sano is a bookseller and owner of Amplify Bookstore. Read her interview with Alice Pung about One Hundred Days.