JENNIFER TREVELYAN A Beautiful Family. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut novel is both a coming of age story and a mystery full of secrets set within a 1980s New Zealand beach holiday. 

All sorts of things might have happened to the girl’s body after it had drowned, Kahu said. It might have been carried out to sea and battered by the hulls of big ships and nibbled at by passing fish. Or it might have been eaten whole by a shark, or got snagged on a boat-wreck, or stuck on a reef.

Kahu, a Maori boy, is 12, two years older than Alix, and she has decided that he knows a lot, and tells her things without making her feel stupid for not knowing them, as her sister Vanessa does. Vanessa, at 15, has started to be interested in boys, and has become ‘too cool for us, and the boring way we spoke to each other in complete sentences’.

Kahu is fun. He and Alix met on the first day after she and Vanessa and their parents arrived at a holiday house near the beach. She had seen him probing the lagoon behind the house with a stick, looking, he told Alix, for the body of a nine-year-old girl who had gone to the beach without asking her mother’s permission and never returned. There were big waves that day, his uncle had said, and she was thought to have drowned, so Kahu thought her body might have ‘slipped through a crack somewhere’, and been swept into the lagoon and caught in the reeds.

‘Her name was Charlotte,’ Kahu said … ‘Have you seen the memorial?’ …

‘Of course,’ I lied. ‘I’ve seen it.’

‘Wanna look at it with me?’

I did, very much. With my mother walking me to and from the beach, and my sister only interested in sunbathing, I hadn’t had much chance to explore. I had only the vaguest idea what a memorial was. Something to do with birth, or marriage, or death. Something churchy.

Kahu persuades Alix to help him in his search for Charlotte’s body, and together they also explore the dunes. ‘I didn’t want her to be washed up in the surf, not far from where I swam,’ Alix says, imagining the dead girl’s hair tickling her toes. ‘I didn’t want her to be anywhere we were looking – but I wanted to keep looking. It was fun.’

Jennifer Trevelyan captures Alix’s voice and the puzzlement and the confused emotions she often feels learning about the adult world of her parents and sister. She discovers that her mother, who goes for long walks when she claims to be watching them at the beach, has secrets. So, too, does Vanessa, but Vanessa’s are known to Alix, who worries about them and knows her parents would disapprove of them but is too loyal to ‘snitch’. She has her own secret when her treasured Sony Walkman, with her only cassette tape (a Split Enz album that she listens to all the time), is stolen from her towel on the beach. She daren’t tell her parents, because her father had brought it back specially for her from a business trip to America and she knows he would be angry, so she has to invent reasons why she isn’t listening to it as usual, and she feels guilty about this.

With sun, swimming, picnics, friends and adventures, A Beautiful Family could be a simple story of a happy family holiday, but Jennifer Trevelyan exploits the adult reader’s awareness of the dangers that Alix, as a naïve ten year old, unknowingly faces; and she allows the underlying tension to build throughout the book until the dramatic and frightening end. We listen to Alix and follow her actions, fearing at times for her safety, but, as in every good mystery, Trevelyan manages to surprise us.

Strange things happen. There is a man living in the house that overlooks their holiday house, and Alix instantly dislikes him. Looking for the source of a strange clicking sound, she first sees him on the second-floor deck of his house holding something in his hand which he quickly hides behind his back.

He didn’t smile. That’s what I noticed – he didn’t smile. Adults usually smiled at little girls like me. I didn’t smile, and I didn’t run away either. I stood there looking him straight in the eye until I heard my mother calling me back, because when you’re ten and a girl it’s important not to show your fear.

Later, this man appears in the dunes where Alix is exploring alone, and scares her. But when he rescues Vanessa from the sea, where she appears to be drowning (Alix thinks she is pretending, so that one of the local boys will rescue her), her parents think he is a hero.

Strange things happen. A tube of mascara Alix knows Vanessa has hidden under her bed goes missing, and Vanessa accuses her of taking it. When she comes across a weirdly dressed woman putting flowers on Charlotte’s memorial cross among the dunes, she turns and runs, even though she knows the woman ‘isn’t a witch’. Then she sees her schoolfriend Lucy at a picnic table with her Chinese family, and tells her mother she has seen her, and her mother is adamant that this can’t be true. Most frightening for her is an incident in the local pharmacy, when a woman assistant insists that she recognises her. Alix is terrified that one of Vanessa’s secrets will be revealed, but she can’t tell her mother why she is trying to hide behind the shop’s display of sun hats:

The blonde lady was already smiling, laughing even, saying, ‘It’s nothing to worry about, I was just saying to your daughter that I recognise her from the photos.’….

‘Are you the photographer in your family? Or your husband?’

My mother said, ‘Um, I … those aren’t ours.’

After falling-out with Kahu over a misunderstanding about her stolen Walkman, Alix misses his company, but then he suddenly turns up outside her bedroom window. ‘I found it,’ he tells her, and she thinks it is about her Walkman, but it is not:

‘No, I found it. The thing we were looking for, I found it, last night, at the lagoon. Except … it was late … getting dark … I think I found it. You have to come with me. You have to come see.’

What they do find is shocking and the police are involved. There are surprises, half-expected revelations, more mysteries, family upsets and unresolved puzzles, but this isn’t the end of the story. Alix’s description of her experiences on the last days of this family holiday is dramatic and scary, and her own resolution of the big problem she is left with, is satisfying and unexpected.

A Beautiful Family is Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut novel. Alix is a believable and likeable character, and parental disagreements, sibling rivalries and loyalties, friendships and teenage rebellion are carefully woven into the story, along with the underlying sense of danger. This is a finely written and enjoyable tale.

Jennifer Trevelyan A Beautiful Family Allen & Unwin 2025 PB 336pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: 1980s, coming of age stories, Jennifer | Trevelyan, mystery, New Zealand writers