Brown Bird, Jane Arthur, Penguin Books, 2024
When a tree is hit by lightning, sometimes it bursts into flames on the inside. I read about it on the internet. A tree can burn for a long time, inside-out. If you glanced at it, you’d never know it was on fire at all
That’s how I felt sometimes.
Jane Arthur, from Brown Bird
A review
Rebecca is eleven years old and is a girl after my own heart. Jane Arthur has created a character that will haunt delight transfix you. Rebecca is awkward and weird. She has nightmares and tricky feelings, and loves reading and baking in equal measures. I still recognise myself in this girl, teetering on the cusp of adolescence, caring what other people think of her. I just love her!
I have a weak spot for how children books begin: the title, the cover, the first sentence, the opening paragraph. The cover of Brown Bird features an exquisite artwork by Devon Smith, the image of the girl resonant with feeling, especially the eyes. There is also a map of Rebecca’s new neighbourhood, showing everyone who lives in Mount Street. And the first sentence is particularly excellent. I love long sentences that flow like a honey river, establishing delicious rhythm and mood. Yes! Jane aces her entry point into the narrative with this beginning:
The morning I met Chester was hot and still, one of those very-summer-holidays kinds of mornings when you wake up early and see the day spread out ahead of you like a vast, glinting sea, if the sea was something calm and full of sensible options for passing the time, rather than a dark, deep pit of unknown danger.
We get a taste of what is to come: place, character, mystery (so who is Chester?), a spike of tension (‘unknown danger’), a cool simile (‘the day spread out ahead of you like a vast glinting sea’). Already I am hooked, knowing I am in the hands of a word artisan, in the company of a character I want to spend time with.
It’s the school holidays, but Rebecca’s Mum has to go to work, so she hangs out at neighbour Tilly’s place. Tilly sounds perfect – a novelist with loads of books to her name – she doesn’t pressure Rebecca to play board games or go on bush walks and talk talk talk. Rebecca can read a mountain of library books and do a solar system of of baking. Happy days! But these holidays, the sweet summer rhythm changes with the arrival of Chester, Tilly’s nephew.
Ah, the rocky terrain of childhood! What a difference doing things we love makes. What a difference friendship makes. What a difference family and neighbourhoods can make. Enter this gorgeous prismatic novel and you enter the delight and difficulty of being human. Enterprising Chester is inspired by Rebecca’s baking skills and invents the Odd Jobbers. They swap some yumtummy cookies for some odd job cash. And yes, food is such a comfort as you read the character-rich story: apple and cinnamon muffins, lemon syrup cake, carrot cake, pikelets, plum jam and whipped cream. But then we reach the tree-is-hit-by-lightning moment.
So much to love about Brown Bird – it’s warm and spiky, sad and glad. I love how we get to meet and know the neighbours a little, stepping into their lives as Chester and Rebecca catalogue paintings, pick plums, sow seeds, weed. I am so moved when Roxy the artist gives Chester a moonstone and Rebecca their painting of a girl riding a sparrow. Brown Bird is a book of self discovery, a book of of thorns and a book of roses. It is a book to treasure, whatever age you are.
Photo credit: Tabitha Arthur
A conversation
I am a big fan of your poetry and a big fan of Brown Bird. What drew you to writing for children?
I love children’s books! In fact, after working in bookselling and then in children’s book publishing, I co-founded The Sapling a few years ago because I wanted to spread the word about how cool they are. So it feels inevitable that I would write for children one day.
What are two or three key words when you write a children’s novel?
Character and emotional truth.
Two strengths of the book, I reckon! What were some delights and surprises in writing Brown Bird? Did you have a starting point?
The biggest surprise was, firstly, the fact I finished writing a whole novel, every single bit of it. Beyond that it has been the reader response. All the adults who’ve said they wish they’d had the book to read when they were eleven. And that it has made them both laugh and cry, which is so beautiful – and the fact they’ve all cried at different moments in the book. I find that fascinating. I didn’t even realise I’d written a single crying moment! The girl who wrote to me saying she felt like she was Rebecca as she read it: delightful.
My starting point was wanting to depict a very shy, anxious child. I wasn’t sure what would happen in the story but I knew I wanted to have the chance to show child readers, You’re not alone if you feel like this too.
Exactly! Children don’t fit into square living and learning boxes. I love how you thank librarians, book champions and books in your Acknowledgements page. Why does children’s literature in Aotearoa matter so much?
I possibly went a little mad with power in that Acknowledgments section! I thought it was such a good opportunity to showcase and thank all the many people who are involved in the making and promoting of books, from production and editing, to print and courier, to selling and recommending, and more. I love the book industry and the people who choose to work in it. I wish it were better supported financially by the government (that’s putting it mildly – I can go on about this for hours) so all kinds of book-related careers were more sustainable. People talk about how literacy matters, but they don’t back it up with investment in the arts. Who writes the stuff? Make it make sense. We want to be able to read, but what? AI-created or copyright-free business documents about rugby and mining? We want to measure our kids but deprive them of pleasure and aspiration? Argh, I don’t know. I’m just going to keep doing my emotion-centred, language-loving thing on the smell of an oily rag, I guess.
Good! We want to foster a love of learning and discovering, the joy of reading, the electricity of knowledge. I also loved this in your Acknowledgements page: “Thank you to other writers for writing the books that made me into a reader, which made me into a writer.” What captivates you as a reader of children’s books. What have you read in the past year or so that has really stuck?
I try to mix up my reading, alternating adult fiction and non fiction, poetry, and children’s fiction, and mixing short books and long, and serious and light, and different perspectives and voices. Which means I haven’t read as much children’s fiction over the past couple of years as I probably should have. Earlier this year I read all of the My Happy Life series (by Rose Lagercrantz) to my six-year-old and they remain perfect for his age – especially the first two in the series – and we could barely get through a page without him piping up with an anecdote from school about how entirely relatable things were. I was so impressed by The Grimmelings by Rachael King. Below by David Hill: riveting. The Observologist by Giselle Clarkson is singular and genius. Dazzlehands by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan: cackles on every page. Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai by Michaela Keeble and Tokerau Brown: groundbreaking.
Jane Arthur is a published poet, children’s writer and editor. She was born in New Plymouth, and lives in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Jane won the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, judged by US poet Eileen Myles. In 2020, she was awarded an Emerging Writers Residency from the Michael King Writers Centre, and was a “40 Under 40” inspiring alumni of the University of Auckland.
A founding editor of children’s literature website The Sapling, Jane has twice served as a judge for the New Zealand Children’s Book Awards (in 2020 she was convenor of the judging panel), and as a judge for the poetry category for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Brown Bird is her first novel for children.
Jane’s website
Penguin Books page
Poetry Box 