A gorgeous coming of age novel about two young girls trying to grow up too fast..
From the day Sissy fights a boy in the playground in front of Tegan, they realise they are not like the other girls. Both raised in unusual families, they become so close they feel like one being, wrapped around each other in bed at sleepovers, sending photographs to men they meet online, scaring each other with reports of the girls being snatched at night in their town. But as their rituals push against the boundaries not only of childhood, but of possibility, Sissy feels herself transforming into something strange and terrifying.
Tyler Wetherall is a fine writer and a great storyteller. Her debut novel is unlike anything else I have read. As a tale of childhood friendship, it brims with sex and violence and threat, and moves to a crescendo of strange and magical beauty. I recognised the strangeness of my own girlhood in it, and I am sure that other readers will do the same. Amphibian will stay with me for a long time. Tyler's art is to weave together a weight of observatory realist detail with the surreal - what Elizabeth Bishop called the 'surreality of the everyday'. The result here is terrific. - Rebecca Stott, Costa Award winning author of In the Days of Rain