New Guinea Moon (Kate Constable, A&U)

Kate Constable’s latest novel has much in common with her CBCA award-winner Crow Country, but unfortunately fails to meet the same high standard. Set in 1974, the novel follows 16-year-old Julie McGinty, who leaves her sheltered home in mainland Australia to spend the summer with the father she’s never known: a pilot based in lush, colonial New Guinea. Motifs of maturation and flight run throughout the novel, and Julie’s newfound independence parallels the future of the country itself. New Guinea Moon is for an older age group than Crow Country (early- to mid-teens), but, if anything, the characters are less sophisticated and the plotting less complex. Particularly in the beginning, there are fewer of those keen observations and incisive remarks that are characteristic of Constable’s writing. Her negotiation of feminist and postcolonial ideas, however, is frank and (mostly) free of didacticism, making New Guinea Moon a likely choice for middle school curricula. More importantly for adolescent readers, she has a gift for restoring the realism to scenarios that have become worn out from overuse: a first kiss, a love triangle, a family tragedy. She makes you feel as though you are experiencing everything for the first time, which, for a coming-of-age novel, is precisely the point. Kate Constable on a bad day still beats the competition.

Samuel Williams is a creative writing graduate and a part-time bookseller at Mostly Books in South Australia

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews