A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan review – an immersive but imperfect coming-of-age mystery
It's 1985, and 10-year-old Alix – a tomboyish, inquisitive girl who is never without her red Walkman and Split Enz cassette tape – is on holiday with her family, who have left their Wellington home for the nearby Kāpiti Coast. Her novelist mother normally prefers secluded spots, but this time she has curiously opted for a populous beach town. Between her parents' bickering and her older sister's burgeoning interest in boys and alcohol, Alix has often felt invisible. This has made her a keen observer, and she understands more than people think.
At the outset, Alix befriends a 12-year-old Māori boy named Kahu with whom she soon becomes inseparable. He invites her over to his house, which is full of cooking aunties, rowdy cousins and dogs – a contrast to Alix's loving yet somewhat siloed family. One day Kahu tells her about Charlotte, a young girl who drowned in the area a few years prior. The two children decide to search for her missing body, combing the beach and the nearby lagoon for remains. But as their investigation stretches on, other secrets begin to emerge. What is Alix's mother doing on her long walks? And who is the strange old man next door always watching them?
Alix grasps at the truth of things, but her perspective means only the reader parses the more adult story unravelling around her. This framing is craftily handled, with Trevelyan building suspense as the underlying narratives coalesce, delving into familial ties, a child's desire for harmony, and the pinballing of a child on the brink of adolescence. Innocence is deftly chipped away, and some unsettling revelations begin to dawn on Alix. 'Now I understood that a family wasn't a particularly solid thing,' she says. 'It was a bubble purely of our own making and just like a bubble, it could burst.'
A Beautiful Family is most enriching in Trevelyan's knack for character; Alix, Vanessa and her parents are all distinctive and familiar from the start, even with the story taking place from a single point of view. However, the novel stalls somewhat in pace and plot about halfway through, meandering into overwriting and a surfeit of detail – there are four consecutive pages on Alix's Walkman, for example. The novel's imagery also veers from tactile clarity ('the lagoon, flat and quiet as a bath') to lines a bit sensorially inert. ('The soup had a dusty taste, like the inside of a long unopened cupboard.')
There's also a curious undercurrent of racial microaggressions. Alix's mother says that 'Chinese people tend to look alike'. A school friend of Vanessa's, Crystal, mentions a boy with mixed parents has skin with the 'perfect mix'. And when Alix is invited to Kahu's house for lunch, her mother becomes overly concerned about whether there's enough food. Trevelyan handles these inclusions delicately, and some help evoke the flawed nature of her characters. But though they appear to build towards something – an evocation of internalised prejudices, of casual discrimination, of a white child's recognition of cultural difference – they ultimately never really say anything impactful.
By the novel's end, Alix and Kahu, having spent the summer playing detective, suddenly stumble across a much darker discovery. Treveylan pulls some of her threads taut while leaving others loose – and yet the secrets she does reveal are predictable and only end up undercutting her otherwise immersive story. Indeed, A Beautiful Family is a charming debut, bringing life to Tolstoy's adage that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but it gets mired in what turns out to be a lacklustre mystery. Hopefully, Trevelyan's next work will lean more on her evident strengths.
A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan is out now in Australia (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), UK (Pan Macmillan, £16.99, £15.29 on the Guardian Bookshop) and the US (Penguin Random House, US$28)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
‘Take that risk': the New Zealand teen author named one of Time magazine's girls of the year
When New Zealand teenager Rutendo Shadaya was nine years old, she wanted to create the perfect birthday present for her best friend – an act of kindness that has helped land her on the front of Time magazine. 'I was very good with gift giving, and I knew she liked reading … so I was like 'why don't I write a book for her?',' Shadaya tells the Guardian. Two months later she had her fantasy novella, Rachel and the Enchanted Forest, in her hands, and, despite having previously 'despised' writing, had enjoyed the process so much she wanted to push it further. After finding out it was 'unrealistic' for a girl her age to find a traditional publisher, Shadaya self-published, winning over a young local audience and going on to sell hundreds of copies. Shadaya, now 17, has since published two more books in the series, and has just been named one of Time magazine's girls of the year for featuring strong female leads in her work, and for using her platform to lift up other budding writers. Shadaya, who was born in New Zealand to Zimbabwean parents and lives in Tokoroa, a rural town in the central North Island, does not know how she ended up on the magazine's radar. It was such a surprise, she thought their first email was fake and did not immediately respond. 'What are the chances they would reach out to a 17-year-old in Tokoroa?' She only started feeling the enormity of the recognition in the lead up to it becoming public. 'It's surreal,' Shadaya says. 'I'm being featured with these iconic young women and I feel like its such a privilege being honoured and [seeing] my hard work paying off'. Shadaya is one of 10 girls from around the world to feature in the magazine's new list, and is the only girl representing Oceania. Her series traverses themes of adventure, friendship, mental health and perseverance, as her protagonist, Rachel, overcomes challenges through pushing herself out of her comfort zone, using her magical powers for good and surrounding herself with supportive friends. Shadaya wants 'young girls to feel empowered when they read these books' and says it is 'really cool to see people are interested.' Since publishing her books, Shadaya has used her platform to encourage other young writers, including appearing at community talks and events, and more recently running a competition for writers and artists between 8 and 13 years old, the winners of which will feature in a soon-to-be-released book. Shadaya is also a keen netball player, a student volunteer, a YWCA young leader, and is considering a future in dentistry alongside a writing career. Until then, Shadaya hopes her work will inspire others around her, particularly young women and girls. 'Never let your background or age define you,' she says. 'You'll always face a lot of challenges but those challenges are built on to your journey … take that risk, you won't regret it in the end.' Time's girls of the year list is the magazine's first list to highlight girls' achievements, and builds on its existing women of the year list. Other entrants on the list include 13-year-old Scottish inventor, Rebecca Young, the Olympic skateboarder Coco Yoshizawa, 15, from Japan and an organ donation advocate, Naomi S DeBerry, 12, from the US. Time senior editor Dayana Sarkisova said the girls featured in the list 'prove that changing your community and inspiring those around you can send ripple effects around the globe'. 'These girls are part of a generation that's reshaping what leadership looks like today,' she said. 'Their generation understands that change doesn't require waiting for adulthood – it starts with seeing problems and refusing to accept them as permanent.'
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
‘An undercurrent of impenetrable sadness': the tragic TV debut of Katie Price and Peter Andre's daughter
There is something slightly sweet about the new ITV2 show The Princess Diaries. It is a reality series about a girl nearing 18, trying to figure out what she wants her life to look like. Which is perfectly relatable. The girl is awkward and self-conscious, doing her best to navigate a world more complicated than she expected. Except the subject of The Princess Diaries is Princess Andre, AKA Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther Andre, AKA the daughter of Peter Andre and Katie Price. This immediately makes things less relatable, because Princess has grown up under the spotlight, with the tabloid furore that her parents delight in whipping up on a daily basis. Would you be that well adjusted if newspapers flew drones over your bankrupt mother's mansion to show the world how unkempt her garden was? Or if your dad found himself in the middle of a cultural appropriation storm after wearing a dreadlock wig for a film called Jafaican? Or if one of your middle names was Tiaamii? This is the bind The Princess Diaries finds itself in. On the one hand, Princess desperately wants to appear as a regular teenage girl. But on the other, there is a distinct possibility that the show was made to capitalise on all the rubberneckers who want to see what sort of trouble Price has got herself into now. If you are one of those hoping for news of Price's exploits, you are going to come away disappointed. Because the main takeaway of The Princess Diaries is how relentlessly boring Princess's life is. She is a 17-year-old girl whose job involves being an influencer. This means that her entire life is spent on her phone. She has 'content days', when she roams about, attempting to look carefree, in enough outfits to eke out a month's worth of Instagram posts. She makes vague plans to launch her own beauty line, which at this stage means looking at pictures of other people's beauty lines. She intermittently screws up her nose because a middle-aged man has DMd her a grotty message about her feet. It is excruciatingly monotonous. Princess lives with Peter Andre and his second wife. Andre and Price do not get along. So while we do get glimpses of Price, they are via video chats (of which we get only the audio, not least because Price is undressed in some of them) and descriptions (such as when Princess reveals that Price got the date of her birthday wrong). There is an undercurrent of impenetrable sadness. A little like the recent Alec Baldwin reality show, in which the scrappily chaotic idealism of his home life kept dropping away in segments where he addressed the accident when he shot and killed his cinematographer, there is a deep vein of melancholy to The Princess Diaries. For every film premiere and Ibiza fashion show, there is an introspective cutaway where Princess tells everyone how unhappy her childhood was, how she was picked on at school, and the feelings of self-hatred she experienced. But as soon as these bubble up, they are brushed away, because, look, a dog has just dribbled sausage grease on her new Louis Vuitton flip-flops! Everything's fine again, promise! It was inevitable that Princess Andre would get her own show. After all, as she points out, reality TV is all she has known since she was born. She has been sucked along in the undercurrent of her parents' careers – she has either appeared in or been adjacent to Katie & Peter: The Baby Diaries, Katie & Peter: Unleashed, Katie & Peter: Down Under, Katie & Peter: Stateside, Peter Andre: Going It Alone, Peter Andre: The Next Chapter, Katie Price's Mucky Mansion, Peter Andre: My Life and Katie Price: My Crazy Life. However, on the basis of this series, it might have been worth waiting until Princess got her own gig. She is clearly smart and self-aware, and far better adjusted than you might expect. One day, when she has managed to clear the orbit of her ridiculous childhood, Princess Andre will be able to look back and put everything she has experienced into perspective. That day has yet to come. Instead, we have four hours of a 17-year-old girl looking at a phone. Surely that is too much reality for anyone. All episodes are available to stream on ITVX now.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
Terence Stamp: the mesmerisingly seductive dark prince of British cinema
'A stranger arrives, makes love to everyone and then leaves,' said Pier Paolo Pasolini to Terence Stamp, outlining the plot of his 1968 classic Theorem. 'That's your part.' Stamp exclaimed. 'I can play that.' It was the role that the man was born to play and would play, with subtle variations, throughout his career. From his first appearance as the eerily beautiful sailor in 1962's Billy Budd through to his last manifestation as 'the silver-haired gentleman' in Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho, Stamp remained a brilliantly, mesmerisingly unknowable presence. He was the seductive dark prince of British cinema, an actor who carried an air of elegant mystery. 'As a boy I always believed I could make myself invisible,' he once said. He showed up and made magic, but he never stuck around for as long as we wanted. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion Stamp's talent was timeless but he was a creature of the 60s, forged in the crucible of postwar social mobility and as much a poster boy for the era as his one-time flatmate Michael Caine. 'Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night,' Ray Davies sang on the Kinks's Waterloo Sunset and while he wasn't necessarily singing about Stamp and Julie Christie – at least not consciously – the actors and the song have now become intertwined, part of a collective cultural fabric, to the point where that mental image of the two of them by the Thames is almost as much a part of Stamp's showreel as his actual 60s pictures. He was born in London's East End, the son of a tugboat coalman who regarded acting with horror, and his rough-hewn swagger lent a crucial grit and danger to his refined matinee idol aesthetic. He gave a superb performance – full of seething chippy rage – in 1965's The Collector, a role that won him the best actor prize at Cannes, made an excellent dastardly lover in Far from the Madding Crowd and whipped up a storm in Federico Fellini's uproarious Toby Dammit. But he was always a more febrile movie actor than his compatriots – Caine, Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole – and so his career proved more fragile and never truly bedded down. 'When the 60s ended, I almost did too,' he once said, ruefully acknowledging a decade-long slump that only came to an end when he was cast as General Zod in 1978's Superman. In the subsequent years he played too many off-the-peg Brits – thuggish gangsters, evil businessmen – in subpar productions, although this only made his occasional great role feel all the more precious. Stamp was at his full-blooded best in Stephen Frears's 80s crime drama The Hit, sparked briefly as the devil in The Company of Wolves and was fabulous as Bernadette in 1994's Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. But his great later role – and arguably the ultimate Stamp performance – was in The Limey, Steven Soderbergh's 1999 revenge tale. Soderbergh casts him as Wilson, an ageing career criminal who haunts LA like a ghost. It's a film that is implicitly about Stamp's youth and age, beautifully folding the present-day drama in with scenes in Ken Loach's Poor Cow to show what happened to the golden generation of swinging 60s London – and by implication, what happens to all of us. Somewhere along the way, wending his way up the coast to Big Sur, Stamp's knackered criminal stops being a ghost and becomes a kind of living sculpture, a priceless piece of cinema history, returned for one last gig to seduce the world and set it spinning before heading off towards the sunset.
