Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
At ten years old, she catches more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, her mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, she teams up with a new friend to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation community: they'll close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned two years earlier.
But things aren't quite as they seem, and as the children look for clues, they inadvertently dislodge information they wish they'd never uncovered. Are her parents happy together? Is her sister putting her trust in the wrong people? Is their vacation rental as safe as it seems? And when someone else goes missing, the family find themselves at the centre of an urgent police investigation.
‘Wanna help me find the body?’
Tweens Alix and Kahu are sitting in the sand dunes when Kahu makes this offer. A question wrapped in curiosity and innocence, rather than any ghoulishness that may have weighted it were it to come from anyone older. Both children searching for something to occupy themselves over a long, hot summer holiday, away from school, home, and their usual lives.
‘Her name was Charlotte… She was nine.’
Like Stephen King’s novella, The Body (adapted into the brilliant 1980s film Stand By Me), Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut novel A Beautiful Family uses the fate of a missing child as a MacGuffin to kickstart a layered coming-of-age story of adolescent friendships, fears, and dysfunctional families, that shimmers with tension and nostalgia.
Trevelyan turns back the clock to the 1980s, soaking readers in the times through her narrator’s recollections. That summer holiday begins with a surprise. Alix's mother, who always loves remote places with few to no people, this time specifically picked a popular, built-up area of coastal holiday homes. Why? Meanwhile their father oscillates between fun-loving adventurer trying to make the most of their annual family trip, and being consumed by sports watching on TV. The singing of cicadas. Clicking from their neighbour’s balcony. Unspoken hurts and simmering tensions.
Trevelyan does a marvellous job with the spaces in between. A Beautiful Family is rich with subtext, and things often aren’t spelled out or neatly tied up. Like lazy, hazy memories of our own childhood summers – where things may be amplified or overlooked at the time, or with time – how much can we trust what the narrator recalls? It’s a child’s-eye view of adult actions, or inactions.
Authors such as John Hart, with his Edgar Award-winning The Last Child, Edgar nominee Paul Cleave’s terrific A Killer Harvest, and Ojibwe storyteller Louise Erdich, with her National Book Award-winning The Round House, have successfully meshed a child investigator with multi-layered adult tales of crime, literary quality, and genre-blending. It’s a rare feat.
Jennifer Trevelyan has joined that club with this novel.
A Beautiful Family doesn’t move at breakneck pace but inexorably pulls you through the pages, like an unseen riptide as opposed to raging whitewater, compelling one to read on.
I’m looking forward to what Jennifer Trevelyan brings us next.
[This review is a condensed version of a longer review first written for and published on Kete Books]
Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.
No comments:
Post a Comment