The Hunt for the Nightingale

Sarah Ann Juckes walks a fine line between high emotion and sentimentality but never wavers in this intense and entertaining story. Jasper is 9 years old and his twin passions are birds – especially nightingales – and his 18-year-old sister Rosie, with whom he listens to and watches them. They are always together and the Book of Birds is not only their co-authored record of what they have seen and learned but Jasper’s anchor when anxiety and panic attacks threaten to disrupt his life. Their parents do not share their interest in birds – indeed, they are so focused on developing their new business that they often seem to have no time at all for Jasper, despite their many promises to him.

It is Rosie who takes their place and her departure for university is leavened by her assertions that she will come home to see Jasper and continue bird watching with him to find the nightingale which has recently disappeared from their favourite tree. When she fails to arrive on the designated weekend, his parents’ preoccupations, frantic activities and references to funeral arrangements tell a story to the reader which Jasper is denied. His father manages to tell him that Rosie has gone to ‘a better place’ but the euphemism simply confuses him and he decides that she has gone to search for the missing nightingale in the copse next to the motorway services, several miles away, where she had last heard it.

He resolves to find both his sister and the bird and, after what he is sure are careful preparations, he undertakes a journey which becomes a metaphorical pilgrimage, signposted by the people who offer him both practical and emotional support, the support which his parents, absorbed firstly in their business and latterly in their grief, failed to see that he needed. When his journey ends with both the discovery of the bird and the realisation that he has lost his sister forever, Jukes writes with such clarity and honesty that there is no sense of the maudlin or the too easily resolved in the eventual reconciliation with his parents, but instead a heart-wrenching  and humble acceptance from them that their self-absorption in their own financial problems and worries almost cost them something infinitely more precious.

There are additional treasures in this fearless book: Sharon King-Chai’s characterful illustrations and snippets of information about the birds which Jasper and Rosie loved so much draw the reader visually and intellectually into their precious Book of Birds, their lives and their love for each other.