The Skin I’m In by Steph Tisdell is a powerful and emotional fictional story. Narrated by 17 year old Layla, it’s about her experiences during her final year of high school.
High school is hard for any teenager. There is the relationship with your parents, friend dynamics, teachers, parties and falling in love. When you are Aboriginal, as Layla is, there are difficulties dealing with racism and connecting to country.
Layla has a wonderful family, is trusted by her parents, lives in the city, and has a comfortable life. She achieves excellent school grades and plans to go to university.
Her cousin Marley has come to live with them for a bit. He has been in trouble, been to juvie and missed a lot of school. Marley is Aboriginal like Layla and her Mum.
Marley’s presence in Layla’s home life and at school causes her to look at the differences in their upbringing and experiences. Her life has been in the city, while he was brought up in the country by Elders.
As Layla questions everything she thought she knew she does rebel. Eventually she has a new understanding of who she really is and exactly what her dreams in life are.
The characters, Layla, Marley, her parents, the teachers, her good friends and those not so friendly are excellently portrayed and relatable. Layla’s character is brilliant and she narrates her life events with humour, confusion, and at times sadness.
Steph Tisdell, a proud Yidinji woman, respectfully covers so many social issues in this story. The writing is easy to read and you invest in Lalya’s journey in this crucial year of her life.
The story stays with you as you reflect on Layla’s perspective of events in her life. You think about how you approached situations in the past, and what you would do differently now.
This book is an excellent read for any age.
A selection of Beauty and Lace Club members are reading The Skin I’m In by Steph Tisdell. You can read their comments below, or add your own review.
I love to read, any book on any topic. I now love ebooks as they are easier to store, I was running out of bookshelves! My other interests are family, gardening and our beautiful King Charles spaniel dog who is my reading companion.
Steph Tisdell’s novel The Skin I’m In was one of my favourite reads for the year. It gives us that feeling and realisation of the end of what we knew I thought we knew and the start of new beginnings.
We are introduced to 17 year old Layla who is in the final year of high school (something I and many others would remember all too well).
She has plans – big plans to do everything right and get the great marks she needs to get into university. A spanner is thrown into the works when her cousin Marley (who had been in Juvie) comes to live with her and her parents. A unit about our first nations people in Laylas history class leaves Layla angry and feeling singled out (she’s the only Aboriginal girl in this class) – it spurs her on to learn about her culture and to rebel against everything she thought she knew about her life. What I really loved about Layla was how she developed her understanding of who she is and what her dreams truly are. The confusion and her sadness is so very relatable and her humour is admirable.
I love that this author – Steph Tisdell is a proud Yidinji woman and covers everything in this novel in such a respectful way and leaves me wanting to read more of her work. This book is suitable for all ages and I can’t recommend this novel enough.
Thanks to Beauty and Lace book club and Pan Macmillan Australia for my treasured copy of The Skin I’m In.
I feel absolutely privileged to have read The Skin I’m In. A raw, emotional roller coaster with so much information and happenings of young Layla’s life while completing Year 12 school. Layla is an aboriginal girl and the only one in her class year. This important year saw her really questioning who she is and where she belongs. Friends fall, new ones made, love for the first time and with the hopes of going to university she has some traumas in this important year! She struggles but the. Asks for help when the reality of her study marks appear. Can she still make university?
I love this book and will happily pass it along for others to read and learn. Thank you Steph Tisdell. I hope our paths cross in the future.
This explores the experiences of a young Indigenous woman growing up in Brisbane, with a particular focus on a period in which she starts to become more aware of the complexities of her identity. I found it interesting and absorbing, but also sometimes just a little too close to a lecture.
Layla is in Year 12. She’s always been a good student, and now she’s on the brink of the next phase of her life, she has big plans. She’s going to go to uni, and she’s going to make the world better. But she is also a teenager, and that comes with testing boundaries and starting to figure out who she is.
This process is made more acute when her troubled cousin Marley comes to stay. Seeing how different his experience of being Indigenous has been sets Layla on a path to explore herself in more detail.
Much of this novel is vivid and well portrayed. In particular, I felt Tisdell really hit the mark in scenes touching on issues like teenage uncertainty around sex, conflict in friendships, and the feeling that adults just don’t understand. Her characters are vibrant and most readers will either recall or be experiencing these feelings – they’re vividly portrayed.
I found scenes where Layla was beginning to acknowledge her heritage more strongly, and to push back against the way others saw it or treated her, powerful and realistic. Although this is specific to the experience of Indigenous people in Australia, others may see links to their own experiences around race or gender. Many will recognise echoes of Layla’s experiences.
The one flaw of the novel, though, is that sometimes it sounds a little bit like a lecture. It’s true that I read this novel partly in hopes that I’d gain another perspective on Indigenous people’s experiences. I did get this through Layla’s experiences, and her reflections on the experiences of other Indigenous people she knows.
However, there were some sections where Layla’s voice faltered, and I felt that I was receiving a lecture, not seeing a teenage girl become more thoughtful about aspects of her cultural heritage and experience. These (short) sections were also the least interesting to read.
This is a thoughtful novel. As well as providing a strong perspective on Indigenous culture and the experience of racism – including what you might call inadvertent racism – it’s a novel that portrays the late teenage years well. It may also encourage young readers to be more thoughtful about their own cultures, and about how they react to others who come from cultures different to their own.
The Skin I’m In, by Steph Tisdell is a well written glimpse of teenage life in current times. Not only is teenage,Layla, having to encounter and interact with a Year 12 curriculum and all it entails, there is the social influences to navigate and experience also.
Pressures to achieve a high enough HSC score to guarantee university entrance, teenage first love and subsequent first sexual encounters, friendship groups changing and waning, witnessing a traumatic suicide attempt by a family member….Layla has to endure many obstacles.
Hard lessons were learnt at an early age, as most of us can attest, having encountered those teenage times.
However, Lalya’s journey gives us a wonderful chance to encounter the struggle of the First Nations people to feel comfortable in current society. Tisdell provided great and valuable insights into this struggle.
I thank all responsible for providing the opportunity to read this book. It was extremely easy to read, if fact it actually felt like the author was merely talking to me exclusively about her life. I look forward to reading more from this author.
Congratulations Steph Tisdell, I loved it from beginning to end.
The Skin I’m In, by Steph Tisdell is a well written glimpse of teenage life in current times. Not only is teenage,Layla, having to encounter and interact with a Year 12 curriculum and all it entails, there are the social influences to navigate and experience also.
Pressures to achieve a high enough HSC score to guarantee university entrance, teenage first love and subsequent first sexual encounters, friendship groups changing and waning, witnessing a traumatic suicide attempt by a family member….Layla has to endure many obstacles at this very formative time of life.
Hard lessons were learnt at an early age, as most of us can attest, having encountered those teenage times.
However, Lalya’s journey gives us a wonderful chance to encounter the struggle of the First Nations people to feel comfortable in current society. Tisdell provided great and valuable insights into this struggle.
I thank all responsible for providing the opportunity to read this book. It was extremely easy to read, if fact it actually felt like the author was merely talking to me exclusively about her life. I look forward to reading more from this author.
Congratulations Steph Tisdell, I loved it from beginning to end.
I was hesitant to read this book at first, feeling that it was really a Young Adult book and not for me.
It was interesting to read about these Aboriginal teenagers life, starting high school and in general. It seemed much harder for them to settle in and get good marks, more so than the white kids.
It was a revealing story, one that opened my eyes to these problems.
I was glad that I had read it in the end.
I just finished reading
The Skin im In by Steph Tisdell .
I found the story very interesting especially the main character layla an aboriginal teenager who wants to finish high school and further her career she wants to leave a Layla Legacy and she wanted to Ace year 12 .
She wants to fit in with all the other teenagers but things change when her cousin Marley moves in with them and her mum speaks differently to him he was to start year 10 he was very black and he had a difficult past .
Mum asked me to look out for him but layla didn’t want to be associated with him she didn’t want to be responsible for him either
What a great book and an indepth look at what it’s like to be different.
Layla also tackles resilience ,identidy and family love
The Skin I’m In by Steph Tisdell is a coming of age story about fitting in while letting your true self stand out.
It details the struggles felt by teenagers about growing up in a world geared towards ‘normal’ while coming to terms with who you are.
As Layla’s world changes through school, family and friends the way she adapts becomes forefront in the story. Her struggles are those felt by many teenagers and this book details them well, showing that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I found parts of the book a little slow which left my attention waning, but this may be as it is geared towards a YA audience, which sadly I am not.
I think it’s a book that teenagers, especially those struggling with identity, will get a lot from.
I really enjoyed this book, The Skin I’m In. Steph Tisdell accurately captures what it is like to be a teenager and the pressures that it involves. Layla is the main character and the struggles she feels to find her place in her friendship group and within her family when her cousin comes to live with them is the centre of the book.
Layla’s world is turned upside down as she tries to grasp what it means to be a First Nations person within a mostly white world, and the slanted perspective of history as told in her school classes. She realises that as she explores who she is, she’s able to identify and grow as a person and identify relationships that are meaningful and important.
The book covers drugs, alcohol, sex and youth crime which are all relevant to teenagers today.
Thank you Beauty and Lace, and Steph Tisdell for providing me the opportunity to read this book.