Hailee Moxie, aged seventeen, has just left high school. On New Year’s Eve her boyfriend dumps her, by SMS – not an auspicious start to the year but a good opening for Ruth Starke’s new novel, Fill Out This Application and Wait over There. Hailee records the events of the next twelve months in her diary as she applies for jobs intended to augment the paltry balance in her ‘Escape to Asia’ bank account.

The diary form is popular in teenage fiction but can sometimes offer too limited a perspective on the fictional world and the characters who populate it. In Starke’s witty novel for young adults, the narrative is raised well above those limitations by a combination of Hailee’s infuriating, endearing, self-centred charm and the way in which the writing assumes an intelligent reader. It expects us to look beyond Hailee’s view of the world. In most of the situations Hailee describes, our understanding of the bigger picture and our ability to read between the lines are crucial elements of the complete unfolding of the story.