Thora is a raw and unruly book. Lawless is communing with the experience of being a teenage girl on the edge of everything. Wanting to be touched, wanting to disappear, wanting someone to just see you properly.

Set on Gumbaynggirr Country in regional New South Wales, the story follows Rhiannon as she moves from the familiar closeness of Bellingen to the sprawl of Coffs Harbour. Unmoored in this new setting, she meets Vanora, a strange and magnetic girl who seems to carry her own private mythology. Their bond is immediate, obsessive, and gradually begins to unravel the structures of ordinary life in the way that only certain teenage friendships can. Consuming and unrelenting, equal parts refuge and reckoning. Their connection pulses with secrecy, particularly around the silences and shadows held by their mothers.

This book understands girlhood from within. The ache of watching your mother fall apart. The confusion of becoming the caretaker before you are even fully formed. The way shame creeps in and settles in the body, even when it was never yours to begin with. Lawless resists resolution. She writes through the long silences and unresolved hurt, exploring self-harm and sex as relief and as communication when no other language is available. The novel’s emotional truth is its greatest strength. The relationship between Rhi and her mother is a devastating and honest depiction of maternal rupture. There is no neat closure, no revelation or repair, only the painful and unfinished work of becoming someone who can hold themselves after growing up without someone who ever could.

Animals surface throughout the novel. Horses, snakes, eels and seals move through the narrative quietly reflecting something about the girls’ own instincts and volatility. There is something animal in unguarded girlhood, something sacred and dangerous, and Lawless writes into that feral tenderness with striking clarity. One image that has stayed with me is the sound of boulders shifting beneath floodwater, crashing into each other with deep, unseen force. When the waters recede, the riverbed has changed shape. This is how Thora moves, quietly rearranging what lies beneath. Grief, love and longing press against each other, carving out new emotional terrain.

The novel gestures toward the mythic, inviting something otherworldly into Vanora’s character. Though these elements remain more suggestive than fully formed, they add texture to the story’s exploration of mystery and identity. Thora is most powerful when it stays close to the body and the mess. What it does well, it does with a full and generous heart. The depiction of regional queer life feels both urgent and lived. The writing around friendship, desire and resilience is visceral, even when the structure strains or the prose wobbles.

This is not a neat book. It is not polished, but it is honest and brave. It speaks to the parts of us that never got to say what we needed to say at sixteen, when everything felt urgent, unfiltered and incredibly horny.

REVIEW BY: Sunni Hart