'A harrowing off-beat novella about the ways in which young teenagers process trauma -- think
MY DARK VANESSA meets EARTHLINGS . A truly unique gut-punch of a read' Alice Slater author of
Death of a Bookseller ' The Crustacean isn't a novel it's an obsession . . . I would kill
and die for this book' ALISSA NUTTING author of Tampa The year's most spiky and powerful
novella "When I was 13 I knew nothing about anything. I only cared about love. And the
older man who I thought I fell in love with never told me he was divorced. I made that up
on my own." Chichirim is a plain 13-year-old girl. An ordinary misunderstood lonely
seventh-grader. A girl with a terrible secret. Her dad is worse than useless. And her mum
spends all her days tattooing thick ugly eyebrows on old women. Her parents forget her
birthday and her sister hates them so much she wishes they were dead. Chichirim does bad
things at school. And still no one cares. Until one day an older man picks her up on the
side of the road. He tells her she is pretty. Her tells her what to do. Underneath her hard
outer shell her softness is being exploited and destroyed by the people she trusts and loves
the most. "I want to come back as a crab. A crab's skin is made of bone and the flesh is
inside the bone. But we're the opposite. We have bone inside flesh." THE CRUSTACEAN is an
intricately crafted novella exploring memory exploitation and the lasting effects of adult
abuse and betrayal for readers of My Dark Vanessa and Tampa .
