Pearl Beach

Billie spends her summers with her great aunt near the Australian resort of Pearl Beach in a house called Yatchzka. The name is significant, although it takes Bille and the reader much of the book to discover why. Billie is fourteen and things are changing. Her body is changing. She has started her periods. And her friends are changing. Andy, her holiday best friend at Pearl Beach is now more interested in fashion and boys than the simpler seaside pleasures that brought her and Billie together in the past. Billie is not coping too well, but gradually a closer relationship develops with her aunt Edith, who offers her own teenage journal to Billie, with the promise, ‘I think you may find you are not as alone as you think.’ Billie has always known that Edith is a Holocaust survivor, and the journal records Edith’s journey aboard ship in 1948 from a displaced persons camp in Germany to Australia, a journey haunted by memories of the past, good and bad. Eventually, Edith herself takes over the account from the journal and tells of the loss of her family: ‘It is both an easy and difficult thing to see beauty in the world/when you know/the very worst that humans do.’ This is an ambitious debut verse novel that deftly bridges the experience of young women growing up in vastly different circumstances with sensitivity and perceptiveness. There is perhaps a little too much going on here, including a dramatic rescue involving Billie and Andy that brings about their reconciliation. But at its heart is a story of the healing power of family, friendship and memory, perhaps encapsulated in the almost last chapter when Edith, Billie, her mum, and endearingly capable little brother Sammy cook lokshen kugel together.