Beatrice and Croc Harry
Lawrence Hill
Harper Collins, 2022
Review by Edie Reaney Chunn
Palaver
Bumfuzzled
Honey bucket
What do these words have in common? Each of them is in The Saint Lawrence Dictionary of Only the Best Words, Real and Concocted. And if you haven’t heard of that particular dictionary, well…it’s probably time to pick up a copy of Lawrence Hill’s (The Book of Negroes, The Illegal) first middle-grade novel, Beatrice and Croc Harry.
Beatrice, a no-nonsense girl “of uncertain age,” can cook perfect oatmeal and fire a slingshot with incogitable accuracy. The novel opens when Beatrice wakes in a treehouse in the forest of Argilia, with no recollection of her past or of how she got there. The treehouse contains all the essentials for her survival, including cooking supplies, a comfortable bed with a purple duvet, and a bookshelf holding thirty-six novels.
As Beatrice explores this strange, fantastical world, she learns that the Argilian forest blurs distinctions between human and animal—and between friend and foe. All the animals—down to ants crawling through the moss—can speak, and many of them have secrets, stories, and advice to share with the forest’s only human resident. Among these animals is Croc Harry, a King Croc with an expansive vocabulary and a special interest in befriending Beatrice. We meet Croc Harry when Beatrice accidentally slingshots a stone into his “scutes”—the bony ridges on a crocodile’s back. The slow return of Beatrice’s (and Croc Harry’s) memories reveals the heartrending story that connects them.
Throughout the novel, Hill offers readers a gentle humour and a sense of delight in the everyday. Beatrice’s oatmeal crafting is explored at length, and Hill supplies answers to questions such as, “How can one go to the bathroom in an immense forest in the middle of the night, where there might be predators for whom one would be a tasty midnight snack?” (Answer: that is where a “honey bucket” comes in handy.) This playful attention to the everyday is a grounding element to the novel, and helps tie together its episodic, quest-like structure.
Beatrice and Croc Harry is full of strong messages about accepting and loving yourself the way you are—and firmly expecting the rest of the world to do the same. Characters give clear and caring corrections when others make unwanted comments to do with skin colour or hair, or when one offers unnecessary help to another. For instance, Horace Harrison Junior the Third is a rabbit who has trouble pronouncing his “r’s.” When Beatrice offers to give him speech therapy, he politely refuses, maintaining that that is not the kind of “lessoning” he would like.
More than anything, though, Beatrice and Croc Harry holds a profound admiration for storytelling, and explores the importance of listening carefully to the stories others tell us. Beatrice is never far from her thirty-six books, which range from classics like The Hobbit to contemporary titles like The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen. These books are sources of powerful connections between the characters in Hill’s novel, which harkens back to the novel’s origin: Beatrice (whose namesake is one of Hill’s children) and Croc Harry were the subjects of bedtime stories Hill made up for his family. After years of being asked to turn those stories into a novel, Hill has given the world a story that weaves together lessons in caring for one another, experiences with racism and violence, and a reverence for storytelling and language. As the animals in Argilia frequently remind Beatrice, the stories we read stay with us in our hearts—as Beatrice and Croc Harry surely will for its readers.
Edie Reaney Chunn is based on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Edie enjoys working collaboratively and inefficiently on theatre projects, and other pursuits.