Then Napoleon's troubled life takes another detour, resulting in him forming a relationship with a teen whore named Sammie. Despite her dire circumstances, she is the girl of his dreams, and before too long the pair are hopelessly in love. Complete with all the doubt and fragile passion that first love entails.

The author, Ranulfo, is himself a Filipino living in Australia, and has developed a rather surreal style of writing. Nirvana's Children abandons clearly defined chapters in favour of brief descriptive segments and small paragraphs. More often than not with enchanting, highly evocative titles; Son Of Dog, The Ghosts Of Luna Park, and Astro Girl's Lover being prime examples. All suggest a short story, and often that is what they are, but cleverly woven into the patchwork fabric of the whole. On its surface, the plot is simple, but the ideas explored within are complex and large as life. Ranulfo's skillful technique never gets bogged down with too much adult philosophising. Instead, he has his narrator present his arguments in relatively short, stream of consciousness style rants. While easy to understand, they provide much food for thought. Another plus is that this is a novel with no dud characters. Everyone who appears is there for a reason, and comes across as believable. Adult readers and older children may find it easy to condemn Napoleon for some of his immature decisions, until Ranulfo makes it impossible not to care about his rebel without a clue life, and the tragic result.

Nirvana's Children is the kind of book where what happens is less important than how that point is reached, and what is learned on the journey. One negative is the author's use of teen spelling, such as nite, sed and skool, plus Napoleon's incessant use of '&' instead of 'and.' But these are minor problems, and more than made up for by the inventiveness, charm and provocative nature of the plot. One example which has stayed with me, is a side story of someone Napoleon encounters on his travels. The Pigeon Lady is a middle-aged woman who he finds crying in the park, as pigeons flock around her feet. We learn that her son killed himself, by jumping off a roof, and she believes that his soul was reincarnated as a pigeon. The problem is, she cannot tell which one. So every day for the past 20 years, she has come to the park to feed them all, treating every bird as her lost child. There's also a lot of hope in what happens, plus scatter-gun blasts of teenage humour, and more subtle, observational witticisms.

Ranulfo's next work is said to be written entirely in cat language, and if this first effort is anything to go by, we should all start taking lessons.