When the teenage Amisa leaves rural family life behind in the 1960s for the bustle of urban Singapore, she entrances those she meets.
Her beauty sees her plucked from her job cleaning the grubby aisles of a cinema by a visionary director intent on making her a star.
Amisa fronts a trilogy of ill-fated horror movies which end up destroying her marriage and shredding her psyche beyond repair.
Thirty years later she is left with daughter Szu who bears the brunt of her unabating ire.
They reside with an "aunty" and live on the takings from the seances performed in a darkened room of their ramshackle house.The story flits from Amisa’s prime of the 1970s to Szu’s formative years in the 2000s at high school where she meets her lone friend Circe.
Circe is everything she is not — rich, witty and brilliantly sarcastic.
Beneath it all, though, she too has her insecurities and the pair develop a symbiotic relationship.However, like Amisa’s dreams, it also shrivels.
Nearly 20 years later, the story is told from Circe’s perspective as a hotshot social-media type.While she is coming to terms with the breakdown of her marriage, a new project arises at work — the remake of the cult classic, Ponti!
Having been adopted into the strange lives of Szu and her mother Amisa, the enterprise throws her life into further disarray.
The plot really shines through Sharlene Teo’s humour.
Circe, it is revealed, has a tapeworm.
"How I picked up a tapeworm in a first-world country like Singapore is a mystery to me ... Tapeworm eggs are spread through faeces. Somewhere along the line, during the past two months, I must have been too busy to realise I had eaten shit."
Teo is masterful at juxtaposing a pointed description with a sharp comic twist.
"Singapore lies just one degree north of the equator and it feels like the bullseye where the sun is aiming a shot at the earth with the intention of killing it," she writes.
"The classroom is so sweltering that all thirty-three of us sweat out half our body weight, a form of suffering which the girls most committed to their eating disorders view as beneficial and beautifying."
Somehow, within 300 pages, Teo manages to boil down the innocence of childhood, the awkwardness of puberty; and the pain, emptiness and futility of adulthood.
It is light and yet broodingly heavy in equal measures.
Ponti will be one of the most talked about debuts of the year, and it may just have the best cover too.
- Rob Kidd is an ODT court reporter and books editor.
Win a copy
The Weekend Mix has five copies of Ponti, by Sharlene Teo, courtesy of Macmillan, to give away. For your chance to win a copy, email playtime@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email and "Ponti" in the subject line by Tuesday, June 26.
WINNERS
Winners of Nagaland, by Ben Doherty, courtesy of Wild Dingo Press, are Hope Gadd and Christine Quested, of Dunedin, and Lynn Murphy, of Palmerston.
