MacDibble surrounds her with characters of all shades of grey, not letting sentiment get in the way of story and allowing the reader to experience the full range of Peony's emotions. She is feisty and determined, clever and kind, but strong-willed and stubborn as well. She behaves in a manner appropriate to her age and environment, and I loved that about her. Our protagonist, Peony, is not even 10 years old, and one of the best things about the book is the consistency of her world view. It really hits all the right beats and it made me sob more than once, and laugh out loud at times, and uses its setting - a near future Australia that verges on dystopic but doesn't quite tip over the edge - to excellent advantage. However, I didn't know I was going to love this book so much. I expected to like this book - Bren is a talented writer and Allen & Unwin consistently produce quality books for younger readers. The rest of this review can be found HERE!įantastic command of the English language, and I was completely lost in Peony's story. I dunno what’s higher than a king, but holding a hunk of fine oat bun with a pile of white baked meat, soft and falling apart in my mouth, juice running down my chin, I’m eating like that. The work lets up as the summer goes on, and Foreman puts a pig on a roasting spit to celebrate. She relishes the simple joys in her life. She loves her grandfather, her sister Mags (Magnolia), and her best friend Applejoy. She loves her farm, and the circle of life she sees there. Not like a girl that’s born in a shed and crawls around in the dirt till she learns to be a pest, and then could be a bee or a bagger or picker, or even a foreman one day. Not like a dog, which could be a sheep dog, or a cow dog, or a guard dog, or a dog that pulls a blind person around. Peony is a pest (one who picks insects from the fruit and gives them to her chooks, which in turn give the family eggs), who longs so terribly much to “bee”.Ĭhooks is born being chooks and that’s all they’ll ever be. No wonder the little bees stopped working and left us to starve. The circle can’t go nowhere but a dead end. Poison? That’s like cutting the circles right through the middle. I don’t understand how it went before the famine. People, bees, flowers, fruit, pests, chooks, eggs, people…all overlapping circles. Without bees, there would be no fresh fruits and vegetables, and the whole circle of life would be in trouble. Because without bees, everything else starts to fall apart. Since the bees died out, people have taken over their role, with kids climbing up among the branches to pollinate the flowers. ![]() The natural instinct to turn away from difficult discussions has not served us well so far.' "It's only by talking about it that children can express their fears and develop the critical thinking they'll need to create the solutions in the future. ![]() They are stories that don't mask the realities of the world children see all around them, but do offer hope, safe fictional exploration of climate issues and examples of resilience.īren grew up on the land in NZ, and hopes that while children enjoy these wild adventures with colourful characters, they're also acquiring ideas and language to express themselves in whatever future awaits. The Raven's Song (2022) written with the amazing award-winning Zana Fraillon, has recently been launched.Īll her novels are packed full of wild adventures and feature children surviving environmentally changed futures. Her first children's novel: How to Bee (2017) won multiple awards, The Dog Runner (2019) and Across the Risen Sea (2020) also won and were shortlisted in multiple awards. Bren lives in Kalbarri on the amazing Coral Coast of Western Australia.
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