This Strange Eventful History

Chloe is seven years old and lives with her parents and nine-year-old sister, Loulou, in Australia. Her mother is in law school and is often tired and busy. When she can’t find a babysitter, the girls must accompany her to campus and wait alone in the cafeteria until she finishes her classes. Chloe fears that a stranger will approach them, as happened once in the park, but their time waiting for their mother remains uneventful. Their father often travels for work and jokes that in the three years they’ve been in Australia, he hasn’t spent more than three consecutive weeks in the country. Because Chloe’s parents are so busy, her grandmother comes to stay. The girls enjoy their grandmother, who provides a greater variety of snacks for tea and is a generally comforting presence. School is a mixture of good and bad: Some teachers are nicer than others. Chloe prefers teachers who let her throw away the bananas from her lunch, but the lunch monitors often force her to eat them. One of her classmates’ brother dies, and Chloe wishes that she could rewrite the story of his drowning (in the family pool) to have a happy ending.