Reflections: The Innocence of Roast Chicken by Jo-Anne Richards

I hate dual timeline books. There is a ridiculous absurdity of WW2 stories featuring a dual timeline, all of which are remarkably similar – its so common its probably its own genre at this point. And I have never seen the point of it. It gives me two characters I don’t give a shit about. With the modern descendent always being utterly shocked at how terrible their ancestors experience was. Like bitch have you never watched a holocaust movie?

Reading this book however gave me a epiphany about why a author might use a dual-timeline. In this book, Richards leads us, in the one timeline, through the catastrophic loss of innocence of a 8 year old child. The other timeline shows the dawning of the new South Africa, and the period of intense political turmoil that came with that change in the social order.

The suspense to the big reveal is expertly built. With the older timeline, counting down the days until the reader is in a fever pitch of expectation. While the later timeline gives us glimpses of a woman still broken by those childhood experiences. But we also see along the way how it was not one single event that broke this girl’s perception of the world but the cumulative effect of many small actions.

It is a story about a child realising, too soon and too quickly, that the world is a cruel and violent place. She sees both the capacity for it in the natural world, with animals she otherwise thought of as goofy or kind. And even worse, how in humans it’s there but can be hidden under a facade of bonhomie or goodwill. How it can fester under the surface, or erupt and then be soothed away as if nothing had ever been said.

But its the subtle way the loss of a child’s innocence is contrasted to that of a country’s that makes this book a knockout. Add to that some subtle observations on toxic masculinity and enforced social roles.

My only critism is that the author sometimes gets carried away with long descriptions that bogged the story down in places, but its really doesn’t hold back the story meaningfully.

Its a book that will stay with me for a long time to come. I would highly recommend.