After a night of thunderstorms, the air is as fresh as clean laundry. The chilly mist...swept away, lifting like stage curtains to reveal the coastline in its spring colours...[Cristabel] discovered a dead whale washed up on the pebbles...[She ] has just turned twelve; there isn't much she doesn't know. She had read nearly all the books in the house...She admires things done in an adept manner...the feeling of being up in front on her own...high on her whale, looking down at Digby and the Veg." The Whalebone Theatre will soon be born. "Their most-loved books have been read so many times...But the worlds contained within the books do not remain between the covers, they seep out and overlay the geography of their lives."

The cottage on the Chilcombe property is described as “a house of flora and fauna; half consumed, half alive” (142). How does the estate grow and evolve over the course of the novel, alongside the human characters? What characteristics would you give this home, if you were to describe it as a person?

The blub on my copy led me to believe the story would be about Cristabel and her beached whale, that there would be spying adventures, and some Nazi-punching. That wasn’t really what I got. I got the story of three kids who don’t fit in, who grow up in an eccentric household and who define themselves through this and through how they will live through the war. This is very interesting, and well executed as we follow Crista, her half-sister Flossie and “cousin” Digby through those few years.

But as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. And when the war finally takes centre stage, they find themselves cast, unrehearsed, into roles they never expected to play. Overall, this is a good read with a fresh premise of the children’s creativity, especially around the dead whale.

Beautifully compulsive ... The Whalebone Theatre will feel like a much-loved book even if you're reading it for the first time' Red Magazine I find myself unable to critique the last few acts of the novel, because they are so absorbing that I abandoned my critical reader and surrendered to wholehearted emotional entanglement with the novel and the characters. I also feel that I can't say too much about the penultimate acts because I'd be giving away (even the smallest) secrets that need to be lived through as they are read, with immediacy. I will say that, having finished the novel just this moment, I am simultaneously wrung out and filled up. A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre in the gargantuan cavity of a beached whale into undercover operations during World War II—a story of love, family, bravery, lost innocence, and self-transformation. The second chunk is more looking at the daughter she finds in the household already, and the events of one hoity-toity, plummy summer, where the estate is riddled with the foreign and the potentially lesbian and the bohemian and the bed-swapping arty types, amidst which the girl – Cristabel – decides there are enough bohemian-minded drop-outs to help her present a play. Thus slowly – oh, how cussedly slowly – we get to the title construction finally being mentioned, a third of the way through this lumbering stodge. Oh, and then it becomes a war novel. The arrival of the whalebones at Chilcombe is an event in and of itself. What is the significance of taking something that technically “belongs to the king” (197)? Did the transformation of the theatre into a garden during the war actually change anything about what the theatre is being used for by the family?

This is a great book about a whale that washes up on the shore of the English Channel. And they build a Theatre from the bones.Why do you think the novel is broken into “Acts” as a structural device? How do the novel’s events map onto the typical five-part structure of a Shakespeare play? Discuss the way that Taras sparks the children’s creativity and imagination. How does he complicate the male presence in their lives up until that point? It didn't take me long to fall in love with the story and the main character. Heartbreaking moments but also ones that warm your heart. At the core I'd call it a family drama but there are so many elements that make it a unique read. A bit of an enchanting reading experience. A dysfunctional, rather unusual family. A large home on the coast. A whale washed up and turned into a theatre. A large cast of characters. A generational saga that takes the reader through the years between the wars, into World War Two and beyond.