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In London in 1950, Margery Benson is getting by as a middle-aged single teacher of domestic science. The war is over but the city is still reeling from its losses, and she is surviving, but just. She needs new shoes, for one thing. She’s alone: Her mother died when she was a young adult; her father died when she was a child; the aunts she and her mother moved in with years before have died, and even their housekeeper has passed on. Margery doesn’t enjoy her life particularly; one thing that made her happy was studying beetles, but she gave that up 20 years before. One day, however, an incident at her school leads her to snap, and she impulsively decides to go all the way around the world to New Caledonia to try to find a golden beetle that may or may not exist. She is going to discover it. She sells most of what she owns, aside from the apartment her aunts left her, and advertises for an assistant. She is looking for someone who speaks French and can be dependable help as she pursues her dream.
After the sensible assistant who applied backs out at the last minute, Margery ends up having to work with Enid Pretty, a 20-something woman who has bleach-blonde hair, wears lots of makeup, and sports the most ridiculous clothes possible for traveling and eventually exploring in the tropics. Enid drives Margery absolutely crazy for the weeks they are aboard an ocean liner and then as they have to change to other transportation in Australia, but her only other choice was a POW who was quite unsettling. So the unusual pair make their way to New Caledonia and then finally, finally, after many problems, to the tiny “bungalow” out in the middle of nowhere on the very end of the island where they will go up a mountain and hunt for the golden beetle.
Enid has some secrets, and Margery has a lifetime worth of grief and loss she bottles up. And slowly, slowly, the two women become friends, help each other to face the darkness from their respective pasts, and encourage each other to achieve their dreams.
This story pairs two very different characters and slowly brings them close together; it’s really only the last third of the book, I think, that I found to be particularly sweet. Both could be so frustrating that their time together leading up to that point was sometimes annoying, and I was definitely ready for them to start being friends. But the end was really lovely and poignant, and it made it worth going through those most frustrating bits. The book is so much about grief and loss, about finding one’s way in life; about friendship; about women’s lives and the limitations they have faced over the years. I’m glad I got to read it.
Rated: Moderate. There are five instances of strong profanity and about 15 instances of mild and moderate profanity. Female characters undress completely to swim in a pond alone. One female character alludes a few times to having been treated badly by men when she was a girl and teen; she has had a number of sex partners as an adult.
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*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
