Karuna is a teenage girl, daughter of a controlling mother, whom she calls Grand Mar. Grand Mar comes from a village in the Philippines, and is like a fish out of water in urban Australia. When Karuna gets herself pregnant, Grand Mar's controlling behaviour goes into overdrive.

The narrative voice of the book is Karuna writing her story for her child to read in the future, and she recounts her frustrations at Grand Mar's insistence that all modern medicine and expected behaviour of mothers-to-be be ignored in favour of the way things were done in her village. It's a splendid account of a fraught mother-daughter relationship that also perfectly captures the experience of the first-generation children of migrants who never really left home in their minds. ( )

Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days is a searing book exploring the tensions between a protective, guilt-tripping immigrant Asian mother whose “ghost” husband left two years earlier, and her wilful 16-y-o daughter seeking to stretch into some space not dominated by her mother. The subject matter of teenage pregnancy makes for some graphic content.

It’s very well written and, as an audiobook, very well read. The interchanges are highly credible to me.

Having recently read Pung’s Laurinda, I couldn’t help but notice the same use of the artifice of the chief character writing to someone absent. ( )

I read this book in a day, as only you can in lockdown. I thought it excellent. ( )