A Little Bird by Wendy James

 

Josephine "Jo" Sharpe is our main narrator in this Australian novel.  She returns home to the backwater town Arthurville with a bit of reluctance because of her family's past and also to help her father as he is in poor health. 

Mick doesn't blink an eye when Jo arrives at the unkempt home desite the fact that they haven't spoken for over two years. They rarely commmunicate and yet they coexist and skirt the big issue about her mother and baby sister disappearing over 20 years ago.

Jo was a journalist in a large city and her new job at The Chronicle has her writing fluff material such as the grandparent's day gathering and who won first prize for their crafting assignments. In the dilapidated newspaper office she comes across old newspaper clippings with a gossip column called The Little Bird.  Eventually Jo discovers her mother had a hand in this anonymous column which shared salacious community information such as who may be having an affair or who may have dented the fences in front of the drug store, all without naming names of course.  

There are multiple narrators in this story and you will be taken back to the 1990's when Jo's mother Merry up and leaves with the baby Amy. Merry was from a weathy family and was destined for university in Sydney until she ran into Mick one day.  Mick is/was a working class man who would never have crossed paths with Merry in any social setting.  As it worked out, Merry became pregnant and all the big plans went up in smoke. Her family was....displeased.

You will go back and forth between the two time lines, mysteries are revealed and finally by the end of the book you'll discover what happened to baby Amy and Jo's young mother.

Overall it was a decent read but a bit slow here and there.  I was wanting more atmospheric details about the Australian setting but there is little of that.  There is the occasional mention of the extreme heat and dusty roads but that's it.

Publication date November 30, 2021 by Lake Union Publishing.  Genre: General Fiction and Women's Fiction.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced reader's copy of this book.  I was not compensated for the review, all opinions are mine. 

A Note From the Publisher:

Wendy James is Australia’s queen of the domestic thriller. She is the author of nine novels, including An Accusation, The Golden Child―short-listed for the 2017 Ned Kelly Award―and the bestselling The Mistake. Her debut novel, Out of the Silence, won the 2006 Ned Kelly Award for first crime novel and was short-listed for the Nita May Dobbie Award for women’s writing. Wendy has a PhD from the University of New England, and she works as an editor, teacher, and researcher. She writes some of the sharpest, most topical domestic noir in the country.

Sharing with Marg at The Intrepid Reader for the 2021 Historical Fiction Challenge.