Janine Galloway (2011) All Made Up.

All Made Up is a play on words. In what can be described as a follow up to  This is not about me, which took Galloway to the cusp of adolescence and won her Scottish Book of the Year.  For me it was a shocking discovery, somebody that could write and was more gifted than Alice Munro—and was Scottish.  Play the bagpipe music and wheel on the shortcake. The ‘villain’ was Cora, Janice’s sister, who is twenty years older than her, and I use that word lightly, because these are real people, facing a poverty of choices. All Made Up, with nowhere to go, describes Cora in the follow up book. She’s thirty-three, settled into a routine of going to work as a glorified typist in Glasgow, coming home, and her mum waiting on her hand and foot. Janice still shares a bed with her mum, but it’s no longer a Dickensian garret. It’s the council house, with all mod-cons, they shared with Eddie Galloway, her dad, at the beginning of This is not about me. Eddie is dead. So he’s no longer there to interfere. And her mother, whose fifty-six now and has a coveted job as a dinner woman, is getting on with things, which is what real people do. In the follow-up book Cora is keeping Janice on her toes with threats and casual violence. Janice, for example, repeats a line, ‘Up yours’, from the Wednesday Play which is on the telly in the living room. Her sister head-butts her on the nose and her mother calls Cora ‘a bad bugger’ and asks herself ‘what did I do to deserve this?’ The answer Cora gives is she’s made herself a doormat for Janice. Later, her mum says to Janice it would have been best if she was never born. Janice tells her she’s already told her that, but continues to try and to prove both of them wrong by being the A-student and the perfect girl her mother hoped she would be. The dynamic has not changed from the first book, but Cora has become more a pantomime villain.  The head-butting episode doesn’t quite ring true. There’s less of Cora and more of Janice. The latter has discovered the power of music in the Adrossan Academy Orchestra and the power of boys. With all those hormones washing through her body there’s plenty of trouble. Galloway can conjure up trouble from a used lipstick so the nooks and crannies of her boyfriend’s bodies are easy meat. It resonates with meaning, for those that have once been young, which I haven’t, of course. When I grow up I want to marry Janice Galloway, because she’s a genius.