Maria Papas

At the jetty all these years later, something long past seemed to ripple through me in the same way a skimming stone sends waves long after it sinks. (p.143)
Skimming Stones is a beautifully written novel about the childhood experience of a sibling's potentially fatal illness. If you know anyone who's had this experience, you probably know something of the conflicting emotions that siblings feel, long after the event. Maria Papas captures these emotions superbly in a thoughtful, wise and wholly engaging story.

Grace, an oncology nurse in Perth with long suppressed memories of her little sister Emma's leukaemia, finds these memories resurfacing when a child called Zoë has a medical crisis on the ward. Grace takes a rare day off afterwards, to confront her demons and also to make a difficult decision about her current messy relationship. So the narration and the settings alternate with ease between Grace's childhood and her adult life.

She drives south from Perth to Lake Clifton, one of her childhood haunts, near the home where her parents' fragile marriage was tested by Emma's cancer. At the very beginning the family all went to Perth for the initial diagnosis and the harrowing treatment. Later, Grace went home with her father — a selfish, irresponsible, lazy man who put his own needs ahead of his family's. What really struck in my craw was that on her return after months away, the mother has to spend her days cleaning the grubby, neglected house because it was so crucial that the immuno-compromised Emma was not exposed to germs at that time.

What this mother could not restore was Grace's equanimity.

Grace at this time lost all her certainties. During the long absence she lost touch with her mother and missed the daily tenderness that she had always had. She lost her language, the Greek mother-tongue that she heard and spoke only with her mother. She lost the easy intimacy she'd had with Emma, and she lost faith in her father as well. At school, she lost her identity: she was 'the girl whose sister has cancer'.

Grace loves her little sister dearly, but she is frightened, alone and burdened with too much responsibility. She also felt resentful and guilty...

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