Chantelle Atkins is noted for her raw, gritty, earthy writing, often exploring life’s underbelly up-close-and-personal, and often behind closed doors. This is exemplified by her short novel, The Mess of Us, the sequel to her equally powerful, The Mess of Me. The first novel introduced us to Lou, a conflicted but durable young protagonist entering the early adult years of her life. She continues her challenging journey in this mesmerizing tale, dealing with her ongoing relationship to Joe,  the young man beaten senseless by his brother in the first book and still plagued by demons, and even more with her internal emotional and mental conflicts haunting her sense of self-worth. Lou struggles with her role in the ongoing messiness of life, unburdening herself to the one subject grounding her survival: her unborn baby, to whom she is telling this tale of burgeoning adulthood.

Chantelle Atkins uses Lou to convey some hard-won wisdom - raw, gritty, earthy, and life-serving. One passage, in particular, grips the reader by the throat as Lou gives her unborn child a potent lesson on surviving the messiness of life.

“But do you know what sucks most about life? How you can’t duck out of stuff, no matter how bad you want to. How you can’t just say no, fuck off, not doing it. How you have to get on with it, again, and again and again.”

Gritty, raw, and true, this inadvertent morsel of sage advice sidles up to another suggested revelation by the author as she edges toward the story’s climax. A kind of redemption seems to find its way naturally into one’s transition from youth to adulthood, even if that redemption is complicated, incomplete, and messy. The reader is left rooting for (if uncertain about) the futures of Lou and her group of wayward friends.