Kindle. On the strength of her book reviews for the Sydney Review. This is apparently her third novel.
Briefly we're thrust into the mythical Bidgalong Valley (just think Nimbin) where the local commune (the Hive, of course, ruled over by a despotic King) has been razed and its denizens are still dealing with the fallout perhaps a decade later. (Time is not one of the themes of this novel.) We are given an outsider's sense of the place via escaping cross-dressing teacher Jim Parker, who desires his neighbour, free woman Evangeline, and stumbles upon her performing some rites of memory in a state of undress. Later on, she makes the move. Her husband, seemingly taken casually or prevailing upon her at a moment of forgetful weakness, is Germanic ex-surfer/libertine Stefan, who aspires to keep bees as well as his grandfather did in post-war Berlin. Other characters present as survivalist preppers, drunken nymphs, mute schoolgirls, dying daughters.
At some point I realised that the plot is at best secondary; too many points are left to simmer for far too long, and too much time is spent manipulating the epistemic states of the characters. Why are these bitchy women spilling these secrets now, or suppressing the facts then? Each may or may not learn anything or unknowingly spill some beans but us readers don’t learn a thing. In any case the stakes are too often too low. Needy city-girl Sylvie is impossible to warm to, and taxes Jim's loyalties not at all: he knows what he doesn’t want. Similarly I had to wonder if his opinion of Evangeline's pregnant belly ("Has he ever touched anything more erotic in his life?") was justified by any field research. I still don't know why he'd be embarrassed by being allergic to bee stings, and it's a stretch to have him move next to a bee farm. The final part has the big revelatory deck-clearing moves of a soap opera's season ender.
Overall this novel is frustrating. It sometimes fires, sometimes misfires. The quotes from literature are tedious, apart from some gold by Maurice Maeterlinck. There is the odd good observation, for instance, that the use of GMO and pesticides has made the country as filthy as the city. The author is on a first-name basis with much pharmacology; using proper nouns to connote authorative knowledge is shallow. Is this chick lit, or have we gotten to the point where all Oz lit sounds like this? The writing is mostly fine, but a hefty edit and narrower focus would have helped.
Andrew Riemer baldly states he's talking it up. Just maybe it will be turned into a soap opera. Juchau spent some time working on this at the Bundanon Trust. Julieanne Lamond does the literary analysis. Lisa Hill. Goodreads. And many other local boosters who helped get it onto the long lists of many prizes circa 2015.