The Botanist's Daughter

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The Wasbies endured the same hardships as the soldiers, tough terrain, tropical weather, leeches, mud and Japanese armies harassment. Told partly in 1944/5 and partly in 1999 we discover what life was like for young (Bea started in the Wasbies when she was only twenty) girls from sheltered homes who had to endure the heat and humidity of working in a jungle with only rudimentary housing and equipment. five women keen for an adventure, serve at a mobile canteen during battle whilst dealing with the horrors of war. Our two leading ladies were a treat to spend time with, but if I’m honest, I preferred Anna, our modern day heroine to Elizabeth, our 19th century botanist. It took the friends awhile to settle in but with Lucy from Australia and Joy from the United States, the three others from London, they became as close as sisters.

As the new millennium is about to arrive, a group of women reunite at a New Years Eve party to confront the secrets they have kept hidden for more than fifty years. The story is narrated from Bea's point of view - smart, hard working, a real asset to the team and to the Wasbies. The Botanist’s Daughter is a time-slip narrative, or dual perspective if you prefer, where one character in the present day discovers a link to a person from the past and we become privy to two stories moving along within different eras. Kayte recreates the type of work the servicewomen would have been undertaking, all of it playing out against a backdrop of the war in Burma, an overlooked war that has been dubbed “the forgotten war”. I read a bit about plant hunters in the 19th century, and some of their experiences made for terrific stories.Employing a dual timeline, Nunn seamlessly combines historical fact and fiction that centres on the unique role women played in the ‘forgotten war’, in The Last Reunion. Perhaps there is some natural human instinct that does recognise the danger of this off-balance ecosystem, even if it takes a closer focus to realise the implications of these senses. I really appreciated the way in which she used both timelines – WWII and 1999 – to demonstrate this. There is a third timeline at the opening of the novel, but I’m not going to say too much on that except that it was a cracking good way to start the story off and it hooked me immediately. Historical fiction has been a bit hit and miss for me lately, and from the description, THE LAST REUNION could have gone either way.

Known to the troops as the Wasbies, these hard-working women ran mobile canteens for the 14th Army in the Burma campaign during WWII and operated in the same tough conditions in dense jungle as the allied forces. They ran mobile and static canteens in the dense Burmese jungle, battling the monsoon rain, mosquitoes, treacherous roads and deadly enemy fire. The Monsoon scenes in the girls’ camps and trucks are wet and muddy and miserable, but when there are bigger buildings and halls, they sing and dance with the soldiers, boosting morale. Bea, Plum, Bubbles, Lucy and Joy are all such different women from different backgrounds and they formed a bond like no other. The story alternates primarily between the Wasbies and Olivia working for the art dealer and meeting Bea.As 1999 wound to a close, Australian born Olivia was doing an internship with an art dealer in London when she was asked to visit Beatrix, owner of some pieces of Japanese art which had belonged to her late husband. The novel moves along briskly with a full cast of characters, all doing their bit to tie the threads of this story together.