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josiegz's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
"We're eating beans from a tin. Bisphenol A. And you microwaved them. What would Mom even say?
But Evangeline, their Mom, isn't here. She's wandering in the woods, pushing an empty pram, dangling medicine bottles and boxes from a tree, mourning the death of her youngest, beloved daughter, Pip, from leukemia. She is absent and so, in a way, is her teenage daughter Tess, who refuses to speak. Another daughter, Meg, draws trees in a fog: "You could not begin to count the trees Meg's drawn these past few months." Stefan, their Dad, is immersed in his own world of beekeeping, detached, it seems, from his own disintegrating family.
And all around them are signs of environmental blight. A two-headed bass, "angry purple, with tarnished scales," appears on the cover of the Bidgalong Bugle, a mutant fish caused by chemical run-off from macadamia farms, or rain washing poisons from gas mines upstream. Besides that local newspaper story, "a headline about fracking, methane emissions and poisoned aquifers." The Australian town of Bidgalong itself is partly populated by survivors of a fire at The Hive - a local commune once dominated by a charismatic leader who tried to barter the teenage Evangeline's newborn baby.
The World Without Us is a novel about love and loss, absence and presence, birth and death and rebirth, and notably, the disappearance of bees, the result of colony collapse disorder, or mites or pesticides or unknown environmental ills. But the novel also tells a more hopeful story of a family rebuilding itself from tragedy, writing and creating their way out of the darkness, and in the end, coming together with others to re-wild a ravaged landscape. Mireille Juchau writes beautifully and poetically of this damaged community, and its slow recovery from disaster. I highly recommend it.
But Evangeline, their Mom, isn't here. She's wandering in the woods, pushing an empty pram, dangling medicine bottles and boxes from a tree, mourning the death of her youngest, beloved daughter, Pip, from leukemia. She is absent and so, in a way, is her teenage daughter Tess, who refuses to speak. Another daughter, Meg, draws trees in a fog: "You could not begin to count the trees Meg's drawn these past few months." Stefan, their Dad, is immersed in his own world of beekeeping, detached, it seems, from his own disintegrating family.
And all around them are signs of environmental blight. A two-headed bass, "angry purple, with tarnished scales," appears on the cover of the Bidgalong Bugle, a mutant fish caused by chemical run-off from macadamia farms, or rain washing poisons from gas mines upstream. Besides that local newspaper story, "a headline about fracking, methane emissions and poisoned aquifers." The Australian town of Bidgalong itself is partly populated by survivors of a fire at The Hive - a local commune once dominated by a charismatic leader who tried to barter the teenage Evangeline's newborn baby.
The World Without Us is a novel about love and loss, absence and presence, birth and death and rebirth, and notably, the disappearance of bees, the result of colony collapse disorder, or mites or pesticides or unknown environmental ills. But the novel also tells a more hopeful story of a family rebuilding itself from tragedy, writing and creating their way out of the darkness, and in the end, coming together with others to re-wild a ravaged landscape. Mireille Juchau writes beautifully and poetically of this damaged community, and its slow recovery from disaster. I highly recommend it.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Child death, Miscarriage, Grief, and Cancer
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