"We've been so wrong about everything for so long - pulling them all out to make way for houses and roads that look exactly the same and make the soil so soft and unstable that it just blows away. Mega shopping malls are the only things keeping us cool these days because no one can afford the power it takes to keep us cool in our own homes. .. Everything is broken. ... Nothing feels permanent or certain."
"Bea had told me how Hobart used to be green. And so full of trees and life and that there were cool places, and shadows. There was even snow sometimes, in people's gardens. Now it's just scorched earth and nothing grows."
Two girls "meet" across time. One is living now in 2023 and the other seventy years into the future. Both live in Hobart, Tasmania but Nyx lives in the Tasmania of 2093. Life is almost unbearable with all the changes brought about by global warming, climate change, and degradation of the environment. It is hot, dangerously hot and the land is ruined by fire and flood. Water has to be treated before it can be drunk and food comes in a dehydrated form. Nyx and her father are preparing to evacuate but they have left it too late and now they are trapped. Nyx finds solace in an old tree growing hear her home. One of the very few trees left. Climbing the tree one day she discovers note from a girl named Bea. Nyx really wants a friend and it seems so does Bea who is badly bullied at her school but what neither girl expects to discover is that they don't just live physically apart from other another - they live decades apart.
Through their tree letters the two girls begin to make some sort of sense of their strange circumstances. Nyx tells Bea all about the Hobart of the future. Bea understands there are things she can do now, not to alter the course of history perhaps, but to make things slightly better for her friend. Bea begins to plant trees - native species - that should survive into the future. When Nyx tells Bea that things have escalated and are now critical, Bea decides to ask her community and previously hostile school mates to help her bury survival supplies for her future friend.
This book has a clever premise. It is very contemporary and so may not stand the test of time (think references to Harry Styles) but I did enjoy the build up of tension and the powerful descriptions of the landscape and buildings of 2093. Readers who live in Hobart are sure to recognise their city. The open ending is also perfect. I am so glad Rebecca Lim and Kate Gordon only hinted at a happy ending and didn't feel the need to wrap everything up neatly.
This is the second joint author novel I have read over the last month. The other was The Raven's Song. I wonder if these were projects that started over COVID - I know it does take a long time for a book to reach publication. The Letterbox Tree from Walker Books Australia is due out May this year. The publisher recommend this book for 8+ but I think the concepts and storytelling are too complex for that age and I would say this book is for readers aged 10+ and for readers with some reading stamina not because it is a long book but because it is quite a complex plot where readers have to piece together fragments of information to work out that one girl is in the present and one is in the future and also to make sense of life in 2093 such as communications sent directly into our brains.
Huge thanks to Beachside Bookshop who have passed this book and other advance reader copies of middle grade novels onto me for over six years.
I have previously talked about these books by Rebecca Lim and Kate Gordon:
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