While the topics tackled here are important ones, I had some misgivings about this novel set in a school in Flemington. The ambition is significant - Middleton has a sprawling cast of characters, many of whom have their own plotlines going on - and more than one overarching plot line to boot. The problem is less that this gets confusing as, confusingly, it tends to get boring, as few of these people and storylines have enough invested in them to make them stick. The main exceptions - a teacher spiralling into burnout and a cop who is nowhere near the nice guy he imagines himself as - are outsiders to the community Middleton is trying to center. The young character with most pagetime, Tyler, a skinhead too angry to survive, often feels more like an exemplar come to life than a rounded character. The tempo of the book also feels slightly off, with the book never quite delivering on the crescendo it promises earlier on. 
The book has its strengths. A couple of the kids, Walid a young man trying to get on with his life, and Ali, a young musician who can think through beats, have real promise but don't get the space on the page to breathe. A story involving radicalisation and exclusion kept grabbing my attention as it flitted across the page.
Melbourne needs more literature set amid communities in public housing - hell, Melbourne needs more literature set outside the student, artist and community activist enclaves. It feels unfair to be overly critical one of the few authors trying to tell these stories, but that this is trying to do so much is largely symptomatic of how much needs to be done before we have the diversity of stories on the page that we have in the communities.