Cassie McCullough

And I thought that, I mean, in quite a positive way, because I think Craig Silvey is being very careful of his audience and his both telling stories in a novel that works as a novel and is quite engaging and easy to read.

But some of the explanations and the context, I think, were very much aimed at a YA audience.

So some things that in another book you might go, did you have to spell that out?

Could you have been more subtle about what a Dungeons and Dragons character might do?

But for this audience, I could see why he did it.

Yes, and that's true of Jasper Jones as well.

I think, you know, it is written in an adolescent voice and like the way, as I've confessed to you in the past, Kate, I love watching high school drama, teen drama, I'm just a sucker for it.

you get sucked in by the world that he creates through Sam's eyes.

And actually Jasper Jones was likened by some to To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's American classic, which does the same thing.

I mean, it's seeing the world through younger eyes.

I actually caught up with Craig Silvey recently and he mentioned one of the books that influenced Honeybee and

It's a book by the American writer Willie Vlaughton who wrote Lean on Pete and Craig Silvey said that book meant a lot to him over the last couple of years and in fact allowed him to embark on writing a book like Honey Bee.

Here's a little of what he said.

That's Craig Silvey talking about Lean on Pete by Willie Vlaughton and giving us a clue, Kate, as to what he was doing when he sat down to write Honeybee.

Well, that was a great explanation, I think, of the way in which he's created this naive voice to make sophisticated points with a whole lot of warmth and humour.

And I mean, this book made me cry.

What about you, Cassie?

Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit.

I mean, I thought also there was a balancing between the violence and the lost people and this, well, growing cavalcade of amazing people that enter the book one by one and people who have generosity and who have different worldviews and have lives that are healthy and not drawn to the darker side of human nature and relationships.