The Burying Beetle

12-year-old Gussie is living with her mother in an isolated cliff top cottage in Cornwall. Her parents are divorced and her beloved grandparents recently died within a few days of each other. The cottage is rented and most of their possessions are in storage. Gussie was born with a rare heart disease and is often ill. She lives with the knowledge that she may die young although at the end there is the optimistic hope of a heart and lung transplant.

Gussie spends her days reading, observing the changing weather, the sea and the local wildlife. ‘Something exciting happens every day’ Gussie observes at one point. The postman calls; she meets the woman whose job it is to keep track of the peregrines; a hang glider gets into trouble and she calls the police. Later a newly arrived Australian boy looks like he might be her friend. Badgers arrive with their baby, she makes friends with a seagull and worries about her mum worrying about her.

‘Nothing interesting or exciting has happened’ she comments later. Gussie has become bored with her life in the remote cottage and so, I’m afraid, was I. There is an awful lot of watching and waiting in this book and little in the way of narrative drive. I’m not sure how many young readers will keep turning the pages unless they are keen naturalists or like a quiet, slow story.

Her illness and mortality are handled in a straightforward, unsentimental way and it’s beautifully written but perhaps not always in the authentic voice of a 12-year-old, even one who has lived with so much illness and worry. It’s being marketed as a crossover book with two different covers, although the one aimed at young readers with its grey and white picture of a cold, empty seascape seems pretty adult to me.