‘My name’s not really Doner. It’s Yasmin. It’s just Doner at school.” Doner, as in kebab, is one of the many of nicknames 15-year-old Yasmin Laksaris has heard from her classmates over the years. Half-Turkish and 15 stone, Yasmin has no friends at Ashfield, with teachers and even the principal showing little goodwill towards the insular and moody teenager.
Yasmin's problems began five years earlier, when her beloved father died. Unable to face her grief, she shut herself off from society and sought solace in food. Chocolate Hobnobs, curry chips, deep crust pizzas and, her favourite, Cadbury's Dairy Milk Turkish Delight. Food is one of the many obsessions of Yasmin, the complex narrator of this engaging novel. With a dark and suspenseful plot that keeps the reader guessing until the final pages, Things We Have in Common is an assured debut narrated by an alarming and original voice.
Yasmin wins our sympathies quickly. Her observations about contemporary teenage life are related with humour and colour. Her situation as a loner misfit at school is compounded by the new marriage her mother has made to Gary, a well-intentioned alpha male who is embarrassed by his stepdaughter’s friendlessness and weight.
With so little happiness in her life, Yasmin becomes fixated on a popular girl at school. The beautiful and talented Alice Taylor, with her silky fair hair and green eyes, is everything Yasmin wishes she could be. Yasmin keeps a box of treasured mementoes in her bedroom – a drawing of a heart discarded by Alice, a foil wrapper from a snack, a trainer sock: “It didn’t smell of feet, if that’s what you think (even though she’d worn it) – just a soft cottony smell. I got a nice feeling when I looked at her things, when I held them. They made me feel calm.”
From the beginning, Tasha Kavanagh sets up a world of unease, where we understand Yasmin's plight, and her loneliness, but wonder how far her obsession will go. The infatuation initially appears harmless, with a darkly comic undertone to some of the scenarios. After a successful drama exercise, Yasmin pens a note to Alice, asking her on a playdate: "I wrote in capitals and left off names in case someone got hold of it." Star Trek references, a fixation with an ornamental dog, China Bea, and solitary bedroom moping all feature.
Shadowing the teenage fixation is a far darker story, alluded to from the outset: “The first time I saw you, you were standing at the far end of the playing field near the bit of fence that’s trampled down.” Yasmin is not the only one watching Alice. A loosely sketched adult is in the wings, unaware that his watching is being watched. This meta storyline, played out slowly, with light and shade, is at the centre of the novel. When Alice goes missing, Yasmin is the only one who knows how to find her.
An ordinary teenager would give straight answers to the police, but Yasmin is no ordinary teenager. She is a convincingly fragile and delusional character, going deeper into a world where her obsessive tendencies mushroom. The adult watcher, Samuel, is another believable character, at times kind and considerate, at others aloof and creepy. Kavanagh is skilled at creating multifaceted characters who don’t act in the way we expect. An affecting mother-daughter relationship is well drawn, with Yasmin’s mother caught between her new husband and a daughter she can no longer identify with.
The author has a background in film editing, counting thrillers such as Twelve Monkeys and The Talented Mr Ripley among her credits. Her knowledge of suspense comes through in Things We Have in Common, which fits the thriller bill but will also likely appeal to a young adult market. Although this is her first novel for adults, Kavanagh, who has a masters in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, has also published several children's books.
With the hunt for a missing girl forming a major part of the plot, comparisons will be made with Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Things We Have in Common bears a resemblance too, to Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal – although that deals with older female relationships – particularly in its theme of fanatical behaviour prompted by loneliness and a craving for connection, and to Lottie Moggach's excellent debut, Kiss Me First, with its disenfranchised protagonist obsessing about the life of a beautiful and extrovert woman.
At the heart of all these novels is an exploration of abnormal psychology. It is no wonder then that Yasmin's favourite poem is Robert Browning's Porphyria's Lover. The lines she quotes near the beginning of the book are an indication of the battle she will face to save Alice, and herself: That moment she was mine, mine, fair/ Perfectly pure and good: I found/ A thing to do, and all her hair/ In one long yellow string I wound/ Three times her little throat around,/ And strangled her.
