‘Jeez, Buttercup,’ he said.
‘It’s all in the genes,’ I managed, before I threw myself on him, burst into tears, cried till I was spent.
It’s bucketing down at Otira, as Gran would say. The windscreen wipers are on frantic. I’d like to sleep, like Gran, the rain as lullaby. But I’m holding several conversations in my head at once.
‘First the bad news,’ I’ll say to Finn. And I’ll tell him Sonny’s story, from beginning to end.
‘I think I reached a watershed,’ I’ll say to Brenna.
I can just hear her answer.
‘So it was raining on the Coast. Surprise, surprise.’
Love, Charlie Mike is set in Christchurch in the early 1990s, fifteen years before the earthquakes that irrevocably changed the city. Christy’s home is beside the river, in the northeastern suburb of Dallington, where today there are no longer houses and weeds push up the footpaths and streets.
Christy’s boyfriend, Sonny, is part of the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War, a bloody ethnic conflict fought between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs from 1992–1995.
Kate De Goldi writes fiction for all ages. She has been the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and twice winner of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year Award. Her novel The 10 PM Question won the Corine International Book Prize in 2011 and has been translated into many languages.
Also by Kate De Goldi
Like You, Really (1994)
Sanctuary (1996)
Closed, Stranger (1999)
Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story (2004)
Uncle Jack (2005)
Billy: A Lolly Leopold Story (2006)
The 10 PM Question (2008)
The ACB with Honora Lee (2012)
From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (2015)
PENGUIN
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Penguin is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 1997
This edition published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2018
Text © Kate De Goldi, 1997
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Design by Rachel Clark © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Cover image © MarioGuti/iStock
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN: 978-0-14-377203-3
THE BEGINNING
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Love, Charlie Mike Page 17