Dear Bookclub,
One of us 'struggled with the book initially', another thought 'beetle! please make it something else', and yet another 'didn't want to like the book', but all came around and enjoyed Rachel Joyce's quirky "Miss Benson's Beetle". The overall tale became predictable but the inner tale revealed gem after gem of witticisms, beautiful prose, laugh-out-loud dialogue and a glorious audible. Martha, Lori and I enjoyed our summer-night-out bookclub meeting at the Winery, indifferent to the nagging heat, respecting Margery and Enid's New Caledonia climate tolerance. Please enjoy the above re-imagining of our gathering à la 'clean-up', apologies to Slim Aarons.
Miss Benson's elusive golden beetle may be related to the golden tortoise beetle, 'native to the Americas and broadly distributed'. Check out the interesting characteristics of this 'gold bug':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charidotella_sexpunctata
Unable to verify a golden beetle in New Caledonia, I did peruse 28(!) pages of the 46 pages on the iNatiralist website under the country's insect species before giving up:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/new-caledonia#page=1&taxon=47158
But I did find a:
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| striped lady bug! |
Finally, a word about Rachel Joyce. The author has a long list of accomplishments, including writing many afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4, as well as major adaptations of all the Bronte novels, and Henry James. In 2007 she jointly won the Tinniswood Award for best original audio drama. We loved her 2018 novel, "The Music Shop"! Explore more here:
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| https://www.rachel-joyce.co.uk/ |
Chosen for an upcoming read:
"My Friends" Fredrik Backman
Up next:
Happy reading,
LK
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