12-year-old Sophie is stuck in a nightmare that no one ever wants to become a reality. She waits patiently in the waiting room of the police station hoping they put her in jail for the crime she feels she committed. Finding her mother dead in their house when she was supposed to be watching her and taking care of her makes Sophie shut down and not say a single word to anyone. Sophie didn’t call the police for about a couple days and blamed her mother’s death on herself and still believes if she had been home and hadn’t run off then she would have been alive still. We later find out that her junkie mother died from falling and hitting her head and then choking on her own vomit because she wasn’t able to get up. The first 130 pages of the novel slowly uncover more about Sophie and her trying to find her new normal in the Australian foster care system. As a 12-year-old and a daughter of a junkie, she had never once tried alcohol and when the opportunity presented itself from some of the kids in the home she was living in, she found herself on the bathroom floor with vomit all over the place. After this experience, Sophie becomes a different person who runs away from every home she is placed in and finds an interest in collecting all different kinds of pills. From all the houses she moves from, her collection just continues to grow and grow. From the pink ones, to the blue ones and the white ones in different shapes and sizes, Sophie just continues to collect as many as she can. As the first part of the novel comes to a close, Sophie ends up taking a handful of pills from her collection and completely blacking out.
2 years later and Sophie has gone through over seven different social workers and is making friends with the other kids in her home. She still doesn’t work or go to school, but this doesn’t seem to bother anyone other than her social workers. Sophie has turned into someone who is independent and has an “I don’t care about anyone or anything” attitude. Her new friends Gwen, Spiral, and Matty spend their days hanging at the park, drinking all the time and dodging the cops. She never makes curfew and finds herself being in more trouble than not. Her social workers all get fed up because she doesn’t want to do anything and doesn’t care to follow the rules so she is a lost cause. She slowly develops feelings for Spiral, one of the boys in the home with her. Gwen makes a huge deal about it given she thinks he is ‘cold-hearted’ and shows no emotion so that when he kisses Sophie long and hard, it gets a reaction out of Gwen. Sophie thinks nothing of it other than a little crush not a serious relationship. Although she seems relatively happy to everyone else because she has people to hangout with and things to do, she always seems to be struggling on the inside for acceptance and answers. She wonders a lot about what if Scotty, her mom’s boyfriend, wasn’t in the picture and didn’t get her hooked to drugs? What if she hadn’t run away to her friend’s house and was home with her mom before she died? She doesn’t like to show weakness or emotions which leads to her calling herself ‘Stone Girl’. The second part of the book comes to end with Sophie strolling onto the beach still struggling with figuring out who she is, but now with all her friends gone. One in jail, one missing and one at her grandmas.
The third and final part of the novel is all about choices. Sophie is the only one who can choose the path of her own life, however, it isn’t until the end of the novel that she chooses the right path. The last part of the book is all about Sophie’s bad life choices and struggles with an abusive relationship not only with Spiral, her boyfriend, but also drugs. She finds herself in the beginning just helping everyone else with shooting up meth and not taking part in it at all, but come to the end, that is all she wants to do is shoot up more and more meth into her veins. She stops eating and going to the home she is supposed to be living in. She spends her days with Spiral and all the other junkies at the so called beach house and shooting up and smoking all day. She ends up going to Scotty’s house, her mom’s boyfriend before she died, and chucking rocks at his face when he gets home. She takes all the built up hate and anger and tries to take it out all on him. He ends up talking to her and shows that he hit rock bottom when her mother died and has been clean and sober since. This doesn’t help Sophie it just makes her more and more pissed off. Sophie keeps choosing to go down the wrong path until the very end of the book when she hits rock bottom. She is higher than a kite and gets hit by a car that doesn’t stop, she makes her way onto the train where people try to help her but all she wants is Spiral and more meth to stop the pain. She makes her way back to him only to find that he is also high and angry and starts to chase her down. When he finally gets ahold of her, he bangs her head into the concrete and continuously punches her. This is the moment that Sophie knew she needed a hospital and help as soon as possible. She was no longer Stone Girl and no longer able to make her own life choices.
Picture Citation:
“Stone Girl by Eleni Hale.” Penguin Books Australia, www.penguin.com.au/books/stone-girl-9780143785613.