Magic Beach 35th Anniversary Edition

Wonder-mongers (working title only) is a Young Adult novel describing 14-year-old Benedetta and her mother Avril arriving in Sydney from a New Age commune called Cornucopia where Avril has been a queen-like cult figure. The book traces Ben's reactions to the squalor, excitement and commercialism of a big city as well as her experience of Cornucopia - its good points and its excesses and hypocrisies. We also see Ben's fixation on a mythic 'ice-father' challenged, as she finds out more about her real father, and we see her learning how to be a teenager mixing with other teenagers rather than a precocious, too-adult observer of other people's lives. This is a challenging book with much to say about people's foibles and fantasies, and about different ways of living in the world.