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INTERMEDIATE FICTION
Lim, Rebecca , Gordon, Kate

The Mailbox Tree

240 pp. | Walker | August, 2024 | Trade ISBN 9781760659417 $18.99
(2) 4-6 Furious at her father's plans to move them to the Northland away from her home in Tasmania (sea-level rise is making the island uninhabitable), Nyx scrawls an angry missive and shoves it into a knothole in her favorite pine tree, the only tree still alive in her battered neighborhood. The note reaches Bea, a lonely "weirdo" bullied at school, who is also about to be involuntarily moved away from Tasmania. The two begin a correspondence, but when several attempts to meet go awry, they discover an unbelievable truth: Nyx lives seventy years in Bea's future. Now, with Nyx's unwanted but necessary escape route from wildfires, floods, and critical food shortages cut off, Bea attempts to overcome her own social alienation and rally her school to create a shelter and cache of food in time to save Nyx in the future. The time-slip reveal is intriguingly teased out with hints and incongruencies that readers will eagerly pick up on, and both Nyx's bleak life and Bea's specifically Tasmanian leafy suburb are convincingly drawn. And although (as with most time-travel plots) one must willingly overlook a few plot holes, and Bea's transformation from bullied weirdo to climate change activist is rather rapid and wrinkle-free, the climactic scenes should motivate eco-minded readers to plant their own gifts for a hopefully less dystopic future.
Reviewer: Anita L. Burkam | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2024

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