cyphomandra

It's also that I am really unfond of the trope where there's a very literary description of a holiday where the adults have affairs and the children do their own thing and, inevitably, one of the children ends up dead (for a while, almost every new piece of acclaimed NZ literature had this; the most irritating example I remember had a child electrocuted by faulty Christmas tree lights).

In this case one of the children has an allergy to bee stings and the siblings use his antihistamines to knock out the annoying youngest child so he won't bother them (they leave him in a pile of laundry). I liked this detail, actually, but then, of course, the brother is stung and dies extremely slowly and there's all this massive guilt about the lack of antihistamines causing it. Epinephrine kits would have been available in the time period and would have saved him; antihistamines wouldn't, and although the kids might not have known that when young, they would as they got older (as should the adults). The kids have also spent most of the summer toting round a gun as a sort of red herring (finding out how the brother died is a late revelation), which irked me.