All I Ever Wanted

All I Ever Wanted is quite unlike any other Aussie YA book I’ve ever read – in the best possible way.

Sixteen-year-old Mim has grown up in a deadbeat family in a down-at-heel suburb, and she’s determined not to end up in prison like her two brothers. She has a long list of rules designed to keep trouble at bay: don’t do drugs, hang onto my virginity, don’t turn out like my mum … But when the novel begins Mim has agreed, against all better sense, to courier a package for her mother. And all too quickly, she finds it hard to keep on keeping her precious rules. Old friendships will be lost, new friendships made, family history revealed, boys seduced, and people will turn out to be not who they initially seem to be.   

Mim is a fabulous not-perfect protagonist: sarcastically funny, smart, brave, inexperienced, stubborn, gullible and hopeful. And I could almost feel the boredom and wilting heat and madness and ugliness of Australian suburbia wafting off the pages! All I Ever Wanted is an entertaining, touching, pitch-perfect and darkly funny read.

Leanne Hall is from Readings Carlton. She blogs at