The shopping centres, secondary schools and backyards of Perth’s western and southern suburbs form the backdrop to tales of the cruelties of female adolescence and adulthood in West Girls, the darkly compelling third novel by WA-raised, Melbourne-based author Laura Elizabeth Woollett. The book takes the form of a series of interrelated stories about a group of characters loosely centred on Luna Lewis, a teenager who brushes off both her high school exams and her existing friends in pursuit of a career as a model — and a route out of her hometown — after attracting the attention of Caitlyn, a classmate who is a member of a clique known as “the Blondes” and has signed to a local modelling agency.
Modelling allows for a transformation of identity that underpins Luna’s success in the fashion world. After realising her Maltese ancestry and her Indonesian stepmother allow her to “pass” as racially ambiguous, she reinvents herself: no longer a white girl named Luna Lewis but “Luna Lu — seventeen-year-old Eurasian beauty, discovered while dismembering an octopus at a southern-suburbs fish-market”. (In truth, she works behind the counter at a deli.)
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