Reviewed by Horam Kim
6.19.07

It’s hard being a ten-year old drug dealer. Kids keep punching you in the face and stealing your drugs. It doesn’t help that your mom is a junkie prostitute and her lover pays you in Barbie dolls to deal “happiness” on your school playground. Thank goodness for the psychopath boyfriend who’s always there to poison and set fire to those who’ve done you wrong.

Kerrie-Ann, the protagonist of Nicola Monaghan’s gripping debut novel, suffers through a childhood one might sadly consider typical of someone growing up in the council estates of Nottingham, England. Comparable to the worst housing projects in America, the council estates are a breeding ground for delinquency, drugs, and violence. Kerrie-Ann’s troubles start out innocently enough with her helping Uncle Frank, her mom’s new boyfriend, deliver his packages. She admits the job was better than a paper route because the pay was “..enough to buy a whole load of fresh cream cakes.” Her mom and Uncle Frank fail to mention, however, that the packets she delivered door-to-door and sold outside her school were really dime bags of heroin.

After getting arrested for smuggling guns and narcotics, she is sent away to a boarding house for girls, where she experiences her first coke high and starts using on a regular basis. Not surprisingly, things get progressively worse for Kerrie-Ann. After she is molested by her teacher and later has an abortion, her mother abandons her and her younger brother. At fifteen, Kerrie-Ann can either starve to death with her brother, or she can make a comfortable living selling smack. She learns quickly that in order to survive she must fight back. Survival, however, comes at a price. The vengeful brutality that she inflicts upon a girl at the boarding house surprises even herself: “One time I got Paula on her own…I grabbed that hair and slammed her face against the tiles…I don’t know to this day what brought out this nastiness. It wasn’t like me. I was no psycho...Maybes it was being left to fend for me-self like that, without no one I knew.”

Kerrie-Ann is not alone for long. She soon falls in love with Mark, a gentle thug with psychotic tendencies. At first he appears to be a sensitive dreamboat: “His big grey eyes were wide open, his mouth held in a tight little ball like he was trying to stop from crying.” He comforts Kerrie-Ann after her mom leaves, and he beats up the drug addict who punched her and stole her drugs. But each redeeming quality is offset with something cruel and vindictive. Long after he beats up the drug addict, he douses him in gasoline and sets him on fire. His own growing addiction to heroin eventually takes over and pushes him to full on psychopath, much to the horror of Kerrie-Ann. But even after he punches her in the face and almost brains her with a hammer, she doesn’t leave him. She swears she’s not the “abused-wife type,” but nevertheless stays with him out of fear and love: “But Mark did love me, in his own way. His own way was a bit psycho, that’s all.”

Having grown up in the council estates, Nicola Monaghan knows the language of her characters (the story is told entire in Nottingham dialect) and their destructive desperation. She powerfully conveys the crushing hold that drugs have over the characters and doesn’t shy away from describing the horrors of addiction: “And he grinned this crackhead grin at me, his eyes all shiny that way coke makes them. Then he winked like it were all the biggest joke in the world.”

Monaghan successfully balances the tragic with the transcendent in Kerrie-Ann’s small moments of grace, adding beauty and light to an otherwise dark and heartbreaking story. However, even beautiful scenes are rendered with raw, painful imagery: “The sun rose, casting more blood and pus into the mucky air up round the clouds. I grinned my head off. It were beautiful, I knew that.”

Although Kerrie-Ann is trapped in The Killing Jar, she is able to step back and see glimmers of hope. “I walked away thinking… how lovely the sky was.” Her neighbor, Mrs. Ivanovich, who taught her about butterflies and the Amazon rain forest, introduced her to a world more hopeful than anything she’d ever known. Still, by the end of the novel, we’re left wondering if hope alone will be enough for her to break free.