‘Trading Tatiana’ by Debi Alper
ISBN 0-297-82991-2
Jo Cooper leads an uneventful life;
selling jewellery on a Greenwich market stall, babysitting her neigh-bours’ kids, and
trying not to pay too much attention to the noises made by the S&M devotees
who live across the hall in a notorious council block on the Old Kent Road. She
has a penchant for rescuing people but when her latest turn out to be a
Ukrainian refugee and a man in buttock-less leather trousers she finds chained
to the roof of her building, she gets herself into almost more trouble than she
can handle.
Debi Alper
brilliantly evokes the lives of people living on the fringe - ex-drug-addicts, a young man with
agoraphobia, and the seedy goings on in the world of people-trafficking and
prostitution. With subject matter such as that, the book should be bleak, but
it isn’t. The central character, Jo, is engaging and sparky
and the runaway teenage prostitute, Tatiana, is very believable in her
complexity. The blurb says the novel is ‘darkly comic’ and though I find little
to laugh at in the trafficking of young girls, Debi Alper writes with a lightness of touch that does leave room
for lots of gentle moments. The relationship between Jo and the two girls she babysits is particularly sweet and touching. This is a book
threaded through with the warmth of caring relationships and ultimately says a
lot about the triumph of compassion over sleaze. Full of fast-paced action and
tension, Trading
Tatiana
is a book I recommend reading. It opened my eyes to a thing or two.
--------
Ruth Wade
Debi has written four books based around
members of the Nirvana Cooperative in