It would be easy to be cynical about The Artificial Anatomy of Parks. It might also be fun. So I’ll have a go.

This is a novel about a poor little rich girl with serious daddy issues. One strand of a dual narrative tells how Tallulah (yes, Tallulah) had quite a few problems in her family, but lack of money wasn’t one of them, so they packed her off to boarding school where she fell in love with a very handsome boy with a good chin who grew up to be a lawyer. She also demonstrated her rebellious nature by smoking cigarettes and sometimes drinking vodka until, for reasons that only emerge late on in the narrative, she dropped out and went to live in glamorous poverty, working as a waitress in London, living in a (very sketchily portrayed) “hostel”, smoking more cigarettes and staying away from her family.

But this all changed when her father had a heart attack – at which point the second, present tense, narrative begins. In the now, Talullah is trying to come to terms with her father’s illness, rebuild bridges to her other remaining relatives and find out all the secrets she never quite uncovered in the past – but about which she has been dropping massive hints throughout the story.

In short, it’s like Malory Towers only with a little more booze, sex and violence and a few clumsy reflections on medicine and mortality.

And that’s probably enough of that. I mentally revised that last sentence as I wrote it. Originally, I planned to say that this book is like “Malory Towers for grownups”. But really, I can’t imagine many fully-fledged adults wanting to pick up this story of adolescent angst and unthinking entitlement and privilege. I certainly can’t imagine it making many other prize lists – or even getting any kind of detailed review in a broadsheet newspaper. It comes from quite a long way outside my comfort zone, and I suspect the experience of most literary hacks. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Now that I’ve read the book from cover to cover, I can say a few things that are less cynical and more pleasant. For a start, although it is 400 pages long, I breezed through The Artificial Anatomy of Parks. Kat Gordon has a light, easy style and while there are moments of foreshadowing drawn with the dark subtlety of a toddler wielding charcoal, there are enough mysteries and questions to keep you going. There’s also a deft sidestep and extra revelation towards the end that makes it feel like it’s worth the trouble of getting there.

There are, though, forests of period detail to hack through. Every few lines the narrator feels a pressing need to remind us of her setting: “Aunt Gillian mentioned a party their neighbours were throwing because Nelson Mandela had been elected the head of the ABC, or some other letters I couldn’t hear properly …”

There are also great wide acres of inconsequential childhood reminiscences:

‘Yes. And when I look at something then shut my left eye and look at it out of my right, then it looks the same, but when I shut my right eye and look at it out of my left then it moves a little bit, like I’ve moved my head, but I haven’t.’

‘Well,’ my mother said. ‘That means your right eye is stronger than your left.’”

But at least the net result of all this laborious scene-setting is that Talullah’s world feels solid – as does the narrator herself. Gordon never quite manages to convincingly portray her other characters. The men in particular have to chew on thick stumps of wooden dialogue.

But she certainly inhabits Tallie, whose emotions and fears feel real. She even shows a charming self-awareness. She admits she’s naive. She knows her name is daft. She understands her immaturity. All of which makes this book slightly more interesting than an Enid Blyton boarding school fantasy. It feels like the genuine and sincere expression of a troubled young soul. That includes solipsism and woeful ignorance. But it also includes a certain kind of truth and psychological insight. There are far worse books in the world.