Dawn Bundy is 15 and, by her own admission, totally unattractive and doesn't give a shit. She lives with her mum and two dachshunds, and is a Jesus and Mary Chain fan. Her life is deeply ordinary, except that her father disappeared two years ago leaving a bag full of money under the floor. Her father got religion, so Dawn blames God (hence the title). She spends quite a lot of the time trying to disprove His existence with the help of bibles purchased in Waterstone's and a garden full of divinatory snails. So far, so quirky. Dawn is a likeable, quirky heroine, doing her best to make sense of what has happened and struggling to keep the household together as her mother sinks into an alcohol/pill induced haze. Soon, Dawn has more to worry about than the existence of the Almighty, and the unlikely attentions of the school bad girls and local drug dealers inject a sense of building unease.
In Dawn, Kevin Brooks establishes a credible, down-to-earth heroine. The story is told in her voice: uncompromisingly honest, instantly compelling and immensely readable. There is a tendency to go for shocks, from the startling title to one gritty issue piled on another. He saves the best until last. It would be wrong to reveal the ending, but such an important subject deserves more attention than it gets here. So does Dawn, for that matter. I would like to have seen her when she was not grappling with a range of social problems. She does not need issues to show her character, she's engaging enough in her own right.