How to Bee by Bren MacDibble

This dystopian first novel won the Children's Book of the Year award in 2018. A famine in Australia has wiped out the bee population. Fruit is in scarce supply and children have replaced bees. The protagonist, nine-year-old Peony, lives in a shed on a farm with her Grandpa and her younger sister. Her mother is away for long periods, working as a cleaner in the city. Peony works as a pest, helping to keep bugs off the fruit trees. She aspires to work as a bee, leaping from tree to tree, pollinating flowers by hand. Peony's mother decides the time is right for Peony to join her doing menial work in the city, but Peony has other ideas.

I loved some of the characters in the book and the recurring theme around the importance of family. However, there are also incidents of domestic violence, betrayal and death that I found heavy going. The novel is original and timely, but I felt the combination of natural disaster and terrible parenting was a bit much for a Stage 3 book.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

I've recently been preparing for NAIDOC Week 2019 and watching the First Footprints DVD series. Dark Emu fitted well with both of these. The book attempts to debunk the myth that prior to colonisation, Aboriginal people were nomadic hunter-gatherers. This year's NAIDOC Week theme calls for truth about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history. The TV series First Footprints was an attempt to reveal the phenomenal achievements of the world's oldest and most adaptable culture, this book is another.

Pascoe thoroughly and systematically explores the evidence (using mainly notebooks of colonists) that shows Aboriginal people grew and cultivated crops, used technology to manage drainage and fisheries, had their own system of leadership similar to democracy, and managed the environment using a sophisticated process of fire-stick farming. Far from taming the land, within a few years of settlers arriving, much of the land that had previously been like a lawned garden, became dense forest or wilderness.

Pascoe suggests that Australian's would benefit from reintroducing some of the food sources used by the First Australians. This includes promoting kangaroo meat over beef and lamb,  reintroducing yams (rather than potatoes) and reintroducing native grains that produce particularly sweet and light flour. The idea that Aboriginal Peoples mainly ate Witchetty grubs and other 'things that make you go eww' is another misnomer.

There is a children's version of the book being released shortly and I've pre-ordered my copy.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

SPOILERS

I read this 2018 debut novel for a book club. It tells the story of Kya. She is the youngest child of a poor family growing up on the marshland outside a small southern US town (Barkley Cove) in the 1950s. After her mother walks away from Kya's abusive father, all the older siblings leave too. Six-year-old Kya is left with Pa, and soon he also leaves. Kya hides from the local truant officer and manages to support herself by finding muscles and selling them to Jumpin, who lives with his wife Mabel in  Colored Town. The local townsfolk shun Kya and begin to refer to her as The Marsh Girl. The chapters flick between Kya growing up, and a police investigation in 1969 involving the murder of a local sporting hero Chase Andrews.

Young Kya attracts the attention of Tate, an old friend of her brother Jodie. Kya and Tate share a love of nature, the birds of the marshland, and poetry. Tate teaches Kya to read. He breaks Kya's heart when he goes off to university; he promises to return and continue their relationship, but drops her. Kya seeks comforts in the arms of local jock Chase Andrews, who doesn't know anything about wildlife, but helps her endure her isolation and loneliness. 

Things turn sour with Chase when it becomes obvious he's never going to introduce Kya to his parents and Kya reads about his engagement to another girl in the local newspaper. Tate returns from university repentant, but Kya has been hurt too many times. Kya has been collecting and painting shells and feathers since she was a child. Tate encourages her to turn her collection into a book. Kya does this and is finally able to fix up the family shack she is still living in. 

On a night when Kya is meeting her publisher in Greenville (about 90 mins away by bus), Chase is pushed off a tower to his death. A shell necklace, given to him by Kya, that he always wore, is missing. Kya is suspected of pushing Chase off the tower.  

Kya is arrested and put on trial. The prosecution argues that Kya could have returned from Greenville at night, pushed Chase, and then returned in the morning. Kya's lawyer puts up a strong defence. She is acquitted and lives happily ever after with Tate. In the final pages, Kya dies of a heart attack at 63. Tate finds a box that reveals that Kya has been publishing poetry under the pseudonym of a famous local poet, and that she has the shell necklace belonging to Chase. 

The book is full of amazing descriptive language and imagery. It unwinds slowly, much as life on the marsh must have done for Kya. The murder investigation chapters are more pacy. The courtroom scenes are reasonably uneventful. Kya's ongoing loneliness and need to connect with nature is shown through her relationship with the courtroom cat and her constantly looking out of the window. 

Overall, the book was a bit slow for me. It included the descriptive language of authors like Sonya Hartnett and Jane Harper, but there just weren't enough plot twists or second storylines to justify 370 pages. The themes of the book include middle-class prejudice against poor people and dark-skinned people, sexual relationships in nature compared to humans, the impact of domestic violence on families and the impact of isolation and loneliness. 

I'd assumed the crawdads in the title were birds, but they're actually a type of shrimp.

Book club questions: 

How would you feel if you were Tate finding the box?

Have you ever met a Kya? Who was rejected when you were at school? 

What would Kya have named you if she'd been at your school? (e.g. AlwaysWearsPearls)
Who would play Kya, Chase and Tate in the movie version?

What other books or movies does the story remind you of?

What does finding Kya was the poet add to the story?

Was Chase too much of a stereotype? 

Did becoming beautiful make Kya's life easier or harder?

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This prize winning first novel tells the story of a smart but dull 30 year old officeworker who has poor social skills and a facial scar. Her lack of knowledge about social conventions (how to order a drink at a bar or what gift to take to a party) makes for an amusing story. However, unlike a number of other novels, Eleanor is not on the autism spectrum; she is the victim of trauma, neglect and poor parenting.

Eleanor prides herself on her extensive vocabulary and good manners. She is satisifed with her life, completing her job efficiently, never socialising and downing 2 or 3 bottles of vodka each weekend. A new IT support person, Raymond, begins to talk to Eleanor. Gradually a friendship develops and new doors begin to open.

The book includes themese of lonliness and friendship. It also highlights the difference between good manners and social skills. Knowing how to correctly address someone is different from being able to make small talk. Nor should good manners be mistaken for good morals.

I enjoyed the book. Many of the characters are believable salt of the Earth types who remind the reader most people are basically good. As Eleanor makes progress the author gradually reveals her past.

The Au Pair by Emma Rous

This tells the story of the well-to-do Summerbourne family. Twenty-five year old twins Seraphine and Danny have lost both parents. After finding a baby picture with only one baby in it, Seraphine starts to wonder if the gossip and rumours she's heard in the village over the years are actually true. This leads her to track down a former au pair, Laura, who lived at the Summerbourne Norfolk estate and looked after the twins elder brother Edwin around the time of their birth. The chapters alternate between Seraphine's story, set in the present day, and Laura's story set back in 1992.

There were times when I wondered if the author really needed 400 pages to tell a fairly straight forward story, but the second half of the book opened up more questions and I really enjoyed the last 100 pages. There were plot twists that didn't seem particularly credible, and some of the characters weren't well-developed, but overall the book was a good holiday read.

The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton

This is the first book I've read by Kate Morton. It tells the story of a group of young English artists and their models who spend the summer of 1862 at a country house. Two of the party are killed. The story jumps between different people who lived in the house after them, up to the present day, and slowly reveals what happened to the two. Much of the story is narrated by the ghost of one of the victims. This provides an unusual perspective. 

I enjoyed the book. I found it wasn't one to put down and come back to, as I started to forget who was who. I also felt like there were a few unanswered questions at the end. The story reminded me of The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild.

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

This is the fourth book in the Strike series written pseudonymously by J.K Rowling. Each book improves on the last; every one of the 650 pages was packed with story.

The book begins with Robin's wedding to Matt. The intricacies of Robin's love life and Strike's are just as compelling as the crime they're investigating.

The pair has been hired by an MP who is being blackmailed. The story is complex. It moves between a socialist thug and his girlfriend, the MPs posh horsey family, and other politicians.

My only slight criticism is that Strike has problems with his amputated leg throughout the book. I'm hoping he gets a new state of the art prosthesis in the next book, because I wouldn't want to read another one about it. Other than that, I can't wait for the next one.