Nest is a strong up-close in-depth character portrait of nature-loving artist Jen who is the narrator. She returns home to a tropical Queensland country town mourning the loss of her partner Craig. She clings to the memory of the relationship and immerses herself in her art. Craig isn’t her only problem.

Her father left home when she was at primary school the same week her best friend Michael disappeared. A girl goes missing not long after Jen’s return. The police question her about the disappearances.

Nest is a story of waiting. The town is waiting for the summer rains and for the mystery to be resolved. Jen is waiting for ... well we're never quite sure what.

The missing girl is in the same class as Henry who Jen is teaching art. Henry is believable and entertaining. Jen is good to him and encourages him to enter a piece of work in a competition he wasn’t going to. It wins. The Henry sub-plot provides some relief from Jen’s psychological immobility.

The tension of the lingering relationship memory and the missing girl is immersed in long, languid and loquacious descriptions of various wildlife and the environment it inhabits. Jen builds herself a “nest” to where she retreats from the world unlike the birds who flit hither and thither, never staying in one place too long. The metaphor is clear though over-worked.
Jen’s past is revealed through numerous flashbacks that hinder the narrative flow in the first half of the book. In one of the flashbacks we learn about Jen’s aunt who plays a major part in Jen’s upbringing. The aunt reveals a surprise secret later in the novel that gives the narrative a renewal of much-needed tension.

The action culminates in a cyclone that reveals Michael’s remains. The investigation leads to the killer of the girl who went missing soon after Jen’s return. The police, who interviewed Jen about the missing girl, visit her with surprising news about her father.

Nest would benefit from another edit. The descriptive passages about the birdlife become monotonous; the flashbacks at the beginning of the book hinder the pace. The writing was good but not enough to sustain the lack of action and tension. Jen is a frustrating character about whom I ended up feeling indifferent.
( )

Australian author Inga Simpson is a writer enthralled with nature, that much is obvious from the first to the very last page of her novel, NEST. In fact the innumerable descriptions of the varied flora and fauna of her native Australia form a natural frame for a central mystery story of children gone missing.

The central character, Jen, is a fifty-ish artist and a lover of all things natural and alive - that flora and fauna I mentioned. She lives alone in a small house in the town where she grew up, on Australia's northern coast, after having spent years away in college, art school and teaching. Recently returned to her old home area, she is in a kind of hiding, grieving the end of a relationship and the recent death of her mother. And there is also the unsolved mystery of her dear childhood friend, Michael, who disappeared when they were only eleven years old. Jen's father deserted them at the same time, leaving a cloud of suspicion over his abrupt departure. Jen is now eking out a living with small commissions and by tutoring a promising young artist, twelve year-old Henry, when their small community is suddenly rocked by another child gone missing, bringing back old unhappy memories, as well as suspicion amongst the townspeople.

The story is broken up into short chapters of just a few pages each, often filled with lush descriptions of trees, plants, flowers and animals which fill the rainforest around Jen's cottage. And birds. Because Jen is especially enamored of birds, and her drawings, sketches and paintings are filled primarily with birds, to the extent that she has become known locally as the "bird woman."

Besides the mystery of the missing children, there is also the mystery of her father's abrupt disappearance, something Jen's mother never quite recovered from. Jen, who was very close to her father, has never stopped searching for and wondering what became of this father, a lumberman, who taught her so much about trees and the forest, as well as animals and birds.

"Her father had once taken her to see a koel's eggs in a figbird's nest."

It wasn't until years later that Jen understood -

"The koels were a parasitic cuckoo, knocking the host birds' eggs out of the nest and laying their own in their place."

This revelation later plays a part in Jen's understanding of her father's disappearance. But she never forgot how important the trees, too, were.

"The trees spoke to her ... They spoke to her still. They gentled her, had allowed her to put down roots, and extend them - albeit tentatively - into the ground."

Throughout her adult life, Jen studied birds, loved their shapes and their grace, wishing -

"... to see like a bird, be like a bird, in the end she was only a lumpy human ... She was barely coping on the ground, let alone going to fly, and there was nothing as sad as a bird without wings."

Jen's story culminates with the rains coming, floodwaters which will uncover the earth's secrets. And I found it ironic that I was reading this book during the time that Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas and the Gulf Coast here in the U.S. Here is Simpson's description of the Australian floods, eerily similar to what I've been hearing on TV and radio here for the past week -

"The coast had been declared a disaster area, whole towns cut off, roads caved in and washed away. Every river, stream and seasonal creek had broken its banks, and still the rain came down and water rushed off the land; there were flood warnings across most of the state. The worst in a hundred years, they said."

In NEST, Inga Simpson has written a mystery, but one that is folded into the lush beauty of an Australian rain forest, filled with the wonder of the natural world. This is not a book to hurry through. It's one to luxuriate in, to crawl into, to build your own nest in - to savor. Very highly recommended. (Four and a half stars)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

A really beautiful book about birds, nature, art, family and how to make a life. As a bird-nerd who grew up around the areas that this is set I might be particularly biased to love it, but it's bound to appeal to anyone with a passing interest in nature writing and literary fiction. ( )

I like Inga Simpson's work, although I can see that some people will consider that she writes too much detail about the Australian native flora & fauna. I'm interested in that stuff so I can relate to a character who is also interested. In fact, that's a lot of the reason I like this book - I relate well to the main character. I too listen to ABC Classic FM, and I'm comfortable being on my own. I'm somewhat older than her and different gender, but I can see myself in her situation if my life had gone slightly differently. I reckon Simpson is writing from her own experience a lot, and that's why a reader can find a lot of truth in her writing. Actually, I can see that she is drawing quite heavily on real life events in the recent past, but this isn't mere reportage; Simpson is adding a layer of meaning and depth which is what makes her contribution particularly valuable. ( )

Jen was once an artist and a teacher, but now she spends her times watching birds and working in her gardens. Her house is surrounded by her lush sub-tropical gardens which help keep her from being disturbed by other people in the small town that she grew up in. The only person she sees regularly is Henry who comes after school for drawing lessons. However a girl in his class has gone missing, which pulls Jen back into her past where she lost both her father and best friend in the same week. Now forty years later, the town is talking about those disappearances in connection to the newly missing girl.

If I went into Nest as a book on nature writing, I may have a completely different reaction to the book. For me I went in thinking this was going to be a novel revolving around the disappearances and possibly solving the mysteries of her past and what happened to this young girl. Nest focuses mainly on a life of seclusion and the birds Jen finds within her garden. It is a quiet and even gentle novel that I did not connect with at all.

The mysteries only served as a sub-plot and no real depth went into developing it. I found Jen was very evasive and did not want to explore her past or talk about the situation. This was meant to be a way to show the damage caused by the loss of her father and best friend but it was just over done. It was a useful technique for exploring Jen’s hurt and pain but because it was used so much the mystery plot really suffered.

I know I went into the book with the wrong expectations, and I eventually did enjoy the nature writing, and the quiet and peaceful sentences. I put too much focus on the sub-plot and this really highlighted the problems I had with the novel. Inga Simpson can really write and there are some great sentence structures to be found in this novel. Nest is beautifully written and if you love nature and bird watching, this will be worth reading; just do not read this for the mystery.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/literature/book-reviews/genre/contemporary/nest-by-... ( )