My Year in Books 2024: March

Just one book on this month's list. It's been a busy few weeks, and I haven't had a lot of time for reading. It's a good book, though, and one I'd definitely recommend!

If you'd like to see my other reviews from this year so far, they're here: January, February

Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce (2020)

I’ve really enjoyed the other books by Rachel Joyce that I’ve read, particularly (as will come as no surprise) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. I was a little trepidatious about this one as it’s not set in the present day, and I’m not a massive fan of historical fiction. Okay, the 1950s isn’t the most historical you can get, so it wasn’t too much of a worry. The Miss Benson of the title is Margery Benson, a woman in her mid-forties who has led a pretty mundane and unfulfilling life. Margery works as a domestic science teacher, earning very little money and absolutely no respect from her colleagues or her students. Since she was a girl, Margery has dreamt of travelling to New Caledonia in search of a golden beetle that may or may not exist. One day, pushed to the edge, Margery walks out of her job, places an ad in the paper for an assistant, and starts making plans to go. Unfortunately, her advert doesn’t get the calibre of applicants she was hoping, and she somehow ends up boarding the ship with a younger woman called Enid Pretty, who is literally the antithesis of Margery. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say these two women will discover an unexpected friendship, and it’s also not a spoiler to say (in a book by Rachel Joyce) that this discovery will be both joyful and melancholy. But mostly joyful. The ending made me cry as well, as expected.