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Wit and humour in seagoing adventure

14/4/2021

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Wild Seas to Greenland
by Rebecca Hayter

This book records a voyage under sail by the New Zealand author Rebecca Hayter and her sailing partner Ross Field. Starting from Lymington in the South of England they sail to Greenland and back. But it is much more than a record of a voyage.
    In relating their adventure Rebecca imparts awe for the changing moods of ocean and sky. She achieves freshness in her writing by the skilful use of original metaphor and simile while its occasional cheeky use adds sparkle and makes the book a delight to read. At times I almost believed I could feel the thump as their vessel came off the top of a big one and ploughed into the following breaking crest.
    This is a book that will hold a special appeal to members of the yachting fraternity. Readers unfamiliar with boats may have some difficulty with a few of the technical terms but this shouldn’t be considered detrimental to enjoying this delightful adventure.
    With extensive experience in ocean racing Ross persuades an initially reluctant Rebecca to transit the Northwest Passage – arguably the World’s most hazardous maze of islands, ice and ocean. It runs between Northern Canada and the Arctic Ocean – a graveyard of failed attempts.
    The preparation for the voyage started in France with the purchase of Rosemary, an elderly aluminium vessel notable for its hull strength rather than its equipment or standard of maintenance. At what must have been eye watering expense, the hull was refitted in preparation for the hazardous voyage ahead. Those with an interest in boats will find these preparations provide an insight into the character of Ross.
    The voyage starts from Lymington – a mariner’s port I personally know well. It’s a place where weekend sailors mingle with ocean going yachtsmen and merge into, and become part of, the history of sail.
    The book contains numerous excellent photographs relating to the voyage and took me a little way towards experiencing the spirit of Rebecca’s Wild Seas to Greenland. It’s a journey that along the way captures vibes of the Irish during a port call to Dingle before they face the North Atlantic storms, ice, fog and crazy compass readings as they get closer to the Magnetic North. Lacking a gyro compass meant they had to steer manually.
Knowing nothing about either Nuuk – the capital of Greenland – or Greenland’s fiords I absorbed Rebecca’s descriptions with fascination.
    With the Northwest Passage closed, lacking a gyro compass and up to date charts, Ross made the decision to attempt a return journey across the North Atlantic. Pressed hard by heavy weather they sailed along isobars rather than across them thus avoiding more severe storms. This technique was supported by weather routing the North Atlantic using meteorological satellite data transmitted to them. It got them home and resulted in an outstanding story.
    I recommend Rebecca Hayter’s book to any nautically obsessed readers and those interested in a seagoing adventure told with wit and humour.   
Review by Peter Thomas
Title: Wild Seas to Greenland
Author: Rebecca Hayter 
Publisher: Oceanspirit Publishing 
ISBN: 9780473544683
RRP: $39.95
Available: paper: bookshops
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Autobiography recommended for historical details

25/3/2021

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The Little Doctor:  The autobiography of Guy Scholefield

Dr Scholefield’s eventful working life took him to all parts of New Zealand, Australia, the islands of the Pacific and to Britain and Europe. The editor of the book, Ian Grant, discovered the unpublished manuscript in the Alexander Turnbull Library. It has now been published by the Wairarapa Times-Age.
    Scholefield’s mother encouraged his love of literature and he hoped to earn his living through creative writing. There were few job vacancies when he completed grammar school in Milton, Otago, but he found work as a compositor for the Bruce Herald newspaper. A conscientious worker, he was soon given the extra responsibility of reporting on local meetings.
    In 1899, he moved to Wellington – a two-day sea voyage from Dunedin – to take up employment with the New Zealand Times. He describes the North Island as a frontier land, half unopened with practically no trunk railways. There he made his mark reporting on a wide range of events and issues from local meetings and agricultural shows, to shipping accidents and national politics. It was an eventful period for journalists: Prime Minister Dick Seddon died during a voyage from Australia to New Zealand, the Russo-Japanese war took place and New Zealand became a dominion within the British Empire. 
    Scholefield’s work took him to all parts of New Zealand, much of it on horseback, and twice to Australia. After becoming Chief of Staff on the newspaper, he found very little time for creative writing, though he did manage to publish a booklet about the main trunk line and lay the beginnings of a New Zealand Who’s Who.
    In 1908 Scholefield took a position as London Correspondent with New Zealand Associated Press, providing world news to New Zealand newspapers. Before departure he married Adela Bree, who accompanied him to England, where their three children were born. He spent the next ten years in Europe, covering the First World War and travelling into France as a war correspondent. During his time abroad, he wrote his thesis – The Pacific: Its Past and Future – for which the London School of Economics awarded him a doctorate in economics and political science. Before leaving England, he was awarded an OBE.
    On return to New Zealand, he was invited to join a government group to visit New Zealand’s Pacific dependencies and determine requirements for their administration. Barely back on home soil he was seconded as official historian for the Prince of Wales’ tour of New Zealand. This was followed by a period of running the Wairarapa Age in Masterton, chairing the local school board and involvement in numerous organizations and committees. He was appointed Parliamentary Librarian in 1926, and worked there for 21 years, initiating the Archive Division which became our National Archive. During this period he broadcast popular weekly radio talks. He also wrote and published several books, including his third issue of New Zealand Who’s Who.
    The Little Doctor is only 130 pages long but packed with detail. As a reporter, Scholefield was involved in the important issues of the day – economics, education, politics – and recorded significant developments. Possibly his greatest contribution was indexing and preserving national records. His autobiography lists the names of a large number of colleagues, many who may be unknown to readers. While this interrupts the narrative, it could be useful to anyone researching New Zealand history. We are told very little about his own family. There is a brief comment about his wife visiting wounded New Zealand servicemen in hospital. This, in part, may have prompted him to accelerate the planned publication of the New Zealander a news sheet which was distributed to all servicemen serving abroad during the remainder of the war.
    I would certainly recommend Dr Guy Scholefield’s autobiography to anyone with an interest in New Zealand history. It has encouraged me to explore the ten other works listed in his Select Biography.
Review by Ian Clarke
Title: The Little Doctor: The autobiography of Guy Scholefield
Author: Guy Scholefield
Publisher:  Fraser Books/Wairarapa Times Age
ISBN: 978-0-9941360-8-4
RRP: $30.00
Available: Softcover only, from bookshops, Fraser Books website
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Novel a pleasure to read

18/3/2021

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The Remarkable Miss Digby 
by Patricia Donovan

This book of 97,500 words in 257 pages supports the relevance of the aphorism concerning truth being stranger than fiction, for it builds an entertaining novel upon the biography of a nineteenth-century female aristocrat who jumped the fence erected by the conventions, mores and expectations of her peers to follow her inclinations in living life exactly as she wished. More precisely, the book traces her life in Syria, whence she went in 1853 as a woman in her fourth decade of life, an age when she “ought” to have been grandmothering  another generation of the Ellenborough dynasty into which she had married at the age of seventeen.
    That we do not find Jane Elizabeth Digby, ex-Lady Ellenborough, doing this is due to the fact that she has lived her life as a remarkably sensual being, and her appreciation of the fragrance of campfire woodsmoke; the clarity of the desert air; the feel of goatskin tent-walls; the enormity of the desert and, hardly surprisingly, the freedom from stays, corsets and petticoats afforded her by the decision to adopt Bedouin clothing simply underlines that sensuality.
    An opening premise of the book is that, in wishing to view the Roman ruins at Palmyra, Digby is ‘going boldly where no (woman) has gone before...’ but, as noted, she has been doing that very thing all her life and in her own words, “... marriage must be to a man who will let me be myself.” This feature of her character is at once the strength of Ms Donovan’s book and its great weakness, because on closing it, one wonders why this volume isn’t the third of a trilogy, for Miss Digby was remarkable for many more than the last thirty years of her life.  
    In her story previous husbands, lovers, fiancés, relatives and children enter and flash past in a manner often bewildering and sometimes mystifying. Four husbands and a dizzying procession of lovers, two of them royal and the others a mixture of the aristocratic and the military, ending with a cross-cultural marriage to a Bedouin sheikh certainly indicate her determination to do as she wishes, even as it points to the irony of her ‘finding herself’ in a culture not known for emancipating its women.
    Similarly, one of her purposes in residing in Syria is to establish an Arab horse stud and one feels that her love of horses and expertise with them deserves a fuller treatment, while it is hard to ascertain where she gains sufficient familiarity with firearms to down a bird with a pistol from horseback while at full gallop.
    Technically, the book is a pleasure to read for the prose is taut, well-written, splendidly proof-read and edited. Some of the dialogue is suspiciously twentieth-century; the formality of someone “...proffering greetings...” sitting uneasily with his next assertion that ...”the name’s Watson, Reverend Watson...”, while his wife’s use of the term “We hail from the same neck of the woods...” is a little American for a 19th century vicar’s wife. However, such lapses are rare and more than balanced by Ms Donovan’s dedication to helping the reader to visualise times past through the eyes of her characters, such as when Jane experiences her lessons in Arabic, or goes shopping in the Damascus soukfor native clothing.
    Again— there is enough material here, and sufficient resources, to make the story of this remarkable woman, her life, times and sentiments, into a trilogy and one hopes that Ms Donovan will one day treat us to a prequel, at least.
Review by MJ Burr
Title: The Remarkable Miss Digby 
Author: Patricia Donovan
Publisher:  Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473546717
RRP: $29.95
Available: paper: bookshops
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Novel shows 19th century life

11/3/2021

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The Nine Lives of Kitty K.  
An Unsung Heroine of the Goldfields
by Margaret Mills

This, the life story of a South Island identity, can be read as an allegory. Arriving as a baby in the Otago of 1856, ‘Kitty’ Cameron owes her past to the moral taboos of the Old World and her present and future to the mores of the New. Her pregnant mother, Catherine, is forced into marriage with a homosexual relative of the baby’s nobly-born father and sent to the colonies on remittance, thereby removing three embarrassments to the family at one blow.
    Catherine proves remarkably resilient as both mother and dairymaid after the planned disappearance of her husband, and manages to see out Kitty’s early years in the young colony of Dunedin before taking up with would-be farmer George Kirk and moving with a now ten-year-old Kitty to Wakatipu.
    Adept with animals of all sorts, Kitty’s life is lived out in the Wakatipu, thereafter between Kinloch and Fairlight and, even as she grows, marries and starts a family, she maintains a near-legendary status as a horsewoman. She is cursed in areas of personal relationships and essentially marries to escape an acrimonious relationship with her mother, who never gives up her Old-World determination to get her spirited daughter to ‘know her place’ in the world despite an elevation to the status of landowner that would have been impossible for Catherine herself in her native Ireland.
    Sadly, Kitty’s choice of husband isn’t a good one, and John Greig emerges as a controlling bully with a drinking problem, but the clarity of his depiction tells the reader a good deal about the social attitudes of miner society. Tragedy also haunts Kitty in the loss of three of her children and the estrangement of a fourth consequent on her decision to leave the unhappy marriage and, after a brief interlude in a happy relationship, she ultimately enters a downward spiral that is better read about than described because of what it leaves unsaid about Kitty.
    At several places the book offers good and valid glimpses of life, manners, morals and expectations in 19thcentury New Zealand’s mining societies, but the first point to be made about it is that, at over 150,000 words it is over-long. In part this is because, up to “Life” 4, Kitty’s story is a construct unfounded on fact, and while the author has undoubtedly researched widely to create what is basically a novel to that point, she has given way to the temptation to include all of it. An outstanding example of this is the inclusion of the life and disappointments of ‘Mr Rees’, which a reader struggles to accept as necessary. Sometimes, knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to put in, and aspects of the work badly need the sort of editing that keeps a story moving and buoyant.
    As contrast, the story from “Life” 5 onwards is much tighter and closely-drawn, and it is no coincidence that the references listed by the author appear to date from that point of the story. It is also not without significance that the person who appears to have been the architect of Kitty’s story, Mary-Jane Mulholland, appears in it at that time. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Kitty’s story ought to have begun at Life 5 when, with sympathetic editing, the back story that currently takes up some 50,000 words could have been expressed in many fewer.
    Part of the problem in writing about the past is the necessity of avoiding anachronism. Halfway through the 19th century, people did not ‘sign off’ on documents, nor did they ‘take his answer on board’. Life did not ‘just get a whole lot better’, and if anyone was ‘blown away’ it was probably by explosives and not by the beauty of Lake Wakatipu.
    Consistency of character underpins a story for a reader, and while we learn that the tomboy Kitty is unusually mature for her years in thought and vocabulary, by the same token it is unfortunate that the Catherine established early on as capable and resilient becomes a person who dissolves in tears at each and any setback.
    As in any work of history, though, seeing events through the eyes of the people of the time only enhances the experience and promotes understanding, and none of the technical issues mentioned in connection with “The Nine Lives of Kitty K . . .” detract significantly from its contribution to a much-needed and important body of New Zealand literature.
Review by MJ Burr
Title: The Nine Lives of Kitty K 
Author: Margaret Mills
Publisher:  Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473542030
RRP: $34.95
Available: paper: bookshops
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A book for families

4/3/2021

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This is Where I Stand 
by Philippa Werry
& Kieran Rynhart 

Standard picture-book format – 30 pages with full page illustrations, simple text. But what is the target age group?
    The colours are mainly muted, with the emphasis on greys, browns, sepia, the people pictured mostly adult, not smiling, sad.
    Even more unusual in a picture-book apparently intended for young children are the images of warfare and weaponry.
    So to the text by Philippa Werry – first person ‘thoughts’ by the figure central to the images. A stone soldier standing on a plinth, hat in hand, rifle slung over his shoulder. He remembers –
    “the sand of the desert, the bustling streets of Cairo, the beaches and steep cliffs of Gallipoli, the ruined villages of France.”
    Since then he has stood on his mounting and seen life since – back in this, his homeland, over the decades between then and now. Not dwelling on the horrors of the trenches and battlefields, but viewing the anguish of those who lost loved ones in those far places, seeing the figures of fellow soldiers who returned but with body-parts missing – passing time marked year by year by Anzac Day observances.
    From his vantage point he is an observer – in contrast to his form, largely avoiding taking a concrete stand on the morality or otherwise of past events. In this case there is something of an enigma in the title.
    Who is he, then? Rather than being the portrayal of a specific warrior or representation of an unknown warrior, the figure identifies himself as “I am memory.” 
    So it’s a book not so much for children as for families. Parents, even better perhaps grandparents, are needed to introduce, read, explain history and concepts.
    While the wording of the text is chosen for easy reading, there’s poetic lyricism in the lines and depth in the ideas.
    The text and the illustrations by Kieran Rynhart are well integrated in this thought provoking book.
Review by Bronwyn Elsmore
Title: This is Where I Stand 
Author: Philippa Werry, Kieran Rynhart illustrator
Publisher: Scholastic NZ
ISBN: 978-1-77543-384-2
RRP: $27.99
Available: bookshops
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Fitting climax to trilogy

11/2/2021

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Have You Forgotten Yet? 
by A N Arthur

This story of the inter-War period is a massive book; at 439 pages, each of an average 350 words, it tops out at 153,650 words, over half as many again as the accepted length of a novel.
     The story opens in the aftermath of World War One and moves through the effects of the Great Depression upon New Zealand’s urban poor and a farming family in Murchison just getting by in the relatively benign rural economy, and contrasts that life with the Nazi Party’s takeover of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
     This latter story is admirably done, with outstanding images of the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Republic crumbling before the brutal vigour and nationalism of the Brownshirts while its contributions to art, literature, architecture and democratic politics were denigrated and swept aside.
     This is the third volume of a trilogy that began with ‘Orphanage Boys’ and continued with ‘Between Two Worlds’, and that consideration has shaped the book. From the very beginning we meet droves of characters and for a reader new to A N Arthur’s work the relationships – and even the surnames – are hard to pick up. Given the number of words to which the book runs, one feels that some of them might well have been employed in setting the scene to greater effect.
     As example, while the relationships between the protagonists in Wellington and Murchison are never spelled out, the appearance of Wilhelm in Germany is tidily and comprehensively explained in only a few words.
     Again, Alex and Jeannie/“Tyke” are major figures in the story but it is some time before it becomes apparent that Maudie, with all her growling lower-class speech, attitudes and a heart of gold, is a surrogate mother and grandmother to the pair.
     Tyke is a heroine “up against it” all her life; whether from a violent and abusive father to whom she is a symbol of lost manhood; rejection from her mother’s well-to-do parents or a period of mixed messages from her eventual husband, Moss, Tyke’s empathetic and caring nature doesn’t evoke a lot of luck. Some of Arthur’s most heart-wrenching writing occurs in the context of the little girl’s rejection by her mother’s family.
     Technically, the story is a big one and one wonders if a narrower focus might not have been desirable. Matt in Murchison has much the same formative experience at school with Drover as does Tyke with Emma in Wellington; surely one or the other would have been enough to underline the essential decency of New Zealanders.
     There is a discernible emphasis upon class and the growing divide between urban poor and the rich. This serves the story well in the harrowing descriptions of life in the relief camps – blistered and bleeding hands, insufficient food, brutal working conditions and a total lack of empathy towards the plight and care of those forced into unfamiliar and back-breaking work.
     Again there is good writing here, but the author’s determination to use large brush-strokes to gild the lily of working-class misery quite fails to chronicle the fact that relief work was an accepted and understood expression of 1930s economic orthodoxy in rejecting welfare without work. In this, New Zealand’s policy mirrored the ‘alphabet soup’ schemes of Roosevelt’s USA and, in passing, if Gordon Coates did indeed express the contention that the unemployed could always eat grass, this reviewer was quite unable to find the reference.
     The ascent from the depths of the Depression throughout the decade of the Thirties and the pioneering work of the first Labour government helped by the foresight of the Coalition government might well have provided less abrupt transitions to London for Tyke and Moss and to Singapore for Matt, but the driving-home of the maxim that ‘war is hell and causes people to behave hellishly’ required all three to relive the experiences of the generation before them.
     “Have You Forgotten Yet?” impresses as a fitting climax to AN Arthur’s trilogy.
 
Ed note: reviews of the first two of the trilogy can be found in FlaxFlower archives — Orphanage Boys,  June 2017;  Between Two Worlds,  December 2018
Review by MJ Burr
Title: Have You Forgotten Yet?
Author: A N Arthur
Publisher:  Rangitawa Publishing
ISBN: 9780995116672
RRP: $35
Available: Rangitawa Publishing. Can be ordered at any bookstore. And through Amazon. Or the author at holly.tj2020@gmail.com
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London Blitz brought to life

4/2/2021

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The Healing Hands 
by Chris Davies Curtis
 
‘Nurse Alice Baker always knew she could draw pain away from her patients with her healing hands, but not the price she might pay.’
    I don’t read romance novels and wasn’t expecting this to be one so I began reading with a different mind-set, looking for the fantasy aspect. A few pages in, it became clear that romance came first, or rather, romance-style writing. 
    Curtis writes mostly in the tell not show style, which is fine but through the first third of the story it did leave me wanting more depth. Once she had laid out the back stories sufficiently though, she showed us the story and it became more interesting. And actually, leaving the romantic aspects to one side, the idea was intriguing.
    A woman with the ability to heal and time travel? Who doesn’t love the idea of time travel? I love fantasy so Curtis’s blending of the factual historical events of London in the Blitz and time travel was interesting. 
    Not being a reader of romance, there may be things that I misread. For example, the speed of developing romances made it difficult to trust there could be real depth invested in the relationships, an expectation I felt was expected of the reader but not sustained by that rapid matchmaking. I never like being retold someone has stunning eyes or gloriously coloured hair or resonating deep brown eyes. These things became repetitious, but again, that could be my failing – it could well be a romance staple. 
    There were great ideas introduced – time travel, alternative universe, but the speed we were introduced to the concepts and the way we were told about them, not shown, meant there was little in the ideas themselves that didn’t feel forced. These themes were offered as exposition only, so remained under-developed. There were several cases of vital information being overheard, too, which again allowed for a quick push of the plot but gave little to individual character or plot maturity. One oversight niggled – Alice had already proved she could summon John by telepathy so the business of her and Freda wondering how to let him know urgently he was needed and then have someone fetch him was a fairly big hole in the narrative.
    Curtis did a lovely job of bringing Blitz London to life and she had some wonderful domestic touches which made those parts real. She obviously knows her stuff here. The heart-breaking tragedies consuming those years was well realised, too. I also learned some things, which is utterly ideal in historical fiction writing. I feel Curtis has allowed for future volumes with her main characters and she has given herself a universe to roam in.
    Some great ideas and some lovely visual retelling of the Blitz. Much thanks to Chris Davies Curtis for the opportunity to read and review her novel.
Review by TJ Ramsay
Title: The Healing Hands 
Author: Chris Davies Curtis
Publisher: Chris Curtis Books
ISBN: 9780473540852
RRP: $25
Available: Paperback from Amazon and cedcurtis@gmail.com; ebook from Amazon or other formats via Smashwords
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Dark humour in gothic novel

28/1/2021

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​Bush Sick Land
by Julian Barrett

It is the late sixties in south Waikato, a region of small towns and settlements, farmland and hydro-dams and exotic and native forests. Colin Coates is sole-charge constable in one of these small settlements, one where he has himself grown up. Two macabre deaths are about to cause problems for the policeman, and the investigations into these deaths are to reveal hidden secrets concerning other members of the community.
    The unravelling of the mysteries surrounding these two deaths is, in essence, the plot of this novel, which is driven on mainly through dialogue. Coates has personal problems of his own, some of these exacerbated by the fact one of the dead was an old friend and the other is the son of an old flame, Phyllis. He drinks too much, he doesn’t seem to fully appreciate his extraordinarily understanding wife, and he is in danger of losing the confidence of his pre-teen son. He also has to deal with a know-it-all detective from Hamilton who is assigned to the case.
    As events unfold, we are introduced to a number of other characters, including rival motorbike gangs, a wealthy forestry entrepreneur, a pharmacist with two personable daughters, a farmer who is convinced that his trousers left hanging on the washing line were incinerated by a passing sputnik, and a man who seems to have taken up residence in the loft of his house, obsessed with locating a non-existent leak in his roof. We learn of various goings-on, including strip-tease dancing at the local milk-bar, drug-taking of various sorts, an aborted rape, the possible sighting of a ghost, and an illicit love affair.
    The book opens with a recounting of the legend of Hatupatu and his encounters with the fierce bird-woman, Kurungaituku/Kurangaituku. (In Māori legend, Kurungaituku captured the young man and kept him in her cave amongst her eviscerated prey – though he later escaped and led her to her death in the thermal springs.) This bird theme is revived at times throughout, with reference to the Harpies, to dismembered carcases, to an amateur taxidermist’s collection, and even to the self-destructing Phyllis’s boozy bird-themed drinking glasses. 
    There is certainly a lot going on in this book, and the author holds it all together rather well. There are moments of dark humour as well as horrifying descriptions. The prose is lively with some slick metaphors, most of which come off. The dialogue is carried on a little too long at times, but it mostly has a distinctive authenticity and is a reminder of just how bigoted and uninformed New Zealanders could be fifty or so years ago – and not only in rural communities. It is a bleak picture of life that is depicted here, with many of the accepted routines being fundamentally destructive. 
This is a bizarre and gothic novel– yet oddly entertaining despite (or because of) that. And it has the perfect twist at the end. Nuff said.
Review by Tony Chapelle
Title: Bush Sick Land
Author: Julian Barrett
Publisher:  Independent
ISBN: 9798633647822
RRP: $ $24.99
Available: Formats: ebook and paperback. Available as a Kindle ebook (worldwide) and Amazon paperback (overseas only). In NZ, paperbacks are available from Browsers Bookshop and Auteur House in Hamilton or contact the author directly www.thepaintedclou.com  julian.barrett8@gmail.com
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Entertaining and well written

21/1/2021

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Addressed to Greta
by Fiona Sussman

‘Good on you, love,’ the old fellow said, his Adam’s apple tracking up and down his bristly neck. ‘Bloody nuisance, pukekos.’
    Greta blushed. ‘I didn’t mean to kill it,’ she said, horrified that he thought the act deliberate….
    A modest hero, too.’ The man gave a gruff chuckle…
    That’s how we meet Greta Jellings – the first sentences of Addressed to Greta establishing setting, tone and the central character.
    By just a few more pages into the novel we’re well acquainted with her – background, fears (many of those), and her self assessment. Greta is certainly modest, but no hero. 
    By her own confession she lacks any degree of sophistication. She doesn’t even have a middle name to distinguish her from any other Greta Jellings wherever they may be. And, as though to give final proof of her lack of worldliness, hadn’t she gone and fallen in love with a gay man.
            Who was she? That depended on who was asking. She was an amalgamation
         of who her mother, her boss, and her few friends had wanted her to be.
     She does know her way around the office of Blue Sun Spas, Pools and Pipes and the suburbs between that and her Devonport home. She has extra-large feet and a pet chook called Marilyn Monroe. As for the rest of the world, she’s very much an ingénue.  Whatever happened to her plans for fame?
​    But things are about to change.
    To her own disbelief, no spoilers here about how, Greta’s life is upturned. From the safety of the North Shore, we accompany her and those distinctively large feet to distant shores, all the way both despairing at and sympathizing with her lack of sophistication.
    Addressed to Greta is entertaining and well written.
    I’m always wary of sequels, series even more so, but I wouldn’t mind meeting Greta again.
    As Walter might have written to her – you’ll understand that better when you’ve read the book – ‘Hey Grets [sic], it’s been good knowing you’.
Review by Bronwyn Elsmore
Title: Addressed to Greta
Author: Fiona Sussman
Publisher:  Bateman Books
ISBN: 978-1-98-853860-0
RRP: $34.99
Available: bookshops
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Witty entertaining short stories

14/1/2021

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Life Sentences: Shared Short Stories
by Peter Beatson, Tony Chapelle, David Fountain

The idea behind Life Sentences is three writers use the same sentence or paragraph to start a story and then finish it. The result is 38 short stories, each averaging 500 words.
    The starters were provided by a member of the group or a friend. The result proves that if three writers use the same starting point each writer will find a different way to continue the story. Apart from the start, no story is the same. They are fun, tongue in cheek, and creative. There are some that are serious but mostly they entertain. For those who like to read about other places there are stories that take readers to other countries. However, most are set in New Zealand. 
    There are stories of extraordinary beauty such as those found in Harmony where the writers are given this short sentence: Despite the harmony, he shuddered.
    This short sentence becomes a story about the crafting of an aeolian harp in Spring Wind Song (88).  Music, Metempsychosis (89) is extraordinarily beautiful with a comparison to the Gods and the birth of Stephen Hawking. Requiem teleports the reader to another world where a recording of Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’ plays.
    The interesting thing about this exercise is that it inspires the writers to experiment with genre. For example, this sentence: Imprinted on the yellowing pages of the old book, just at the beginning of the third chapter, was the outline of a fern frond that must have been used as a bookmark generates stories from three different genre: romance, historical, memoir.
    This book is perfect for anyone who aspires to become a writer. The prompt that sets each story in motion can be used by writers as story starters. Encouragement to do this is at the end of each completed set of stories. 
    Some may say that providing the start to a story is prescriptive and could compromise the writer’s creative spirit. However, when you read the outcomes of the exercise from these three writers there is no question that the opposite happens. The supplied sentences trigger their imaginations, and it is interesting to see where that takes them.
    Exercises like these train writers to keep to topic, expand an idea and explore one’s own creativity. The 500 word limit also keeps the stories tight.
    It is hugely entertaining with some of the stories causing me to laugh out loud as in The Moment by Tony Chapelle. Other stories revealed a skill in developing character as in Peter Beatson’s Bless ‘em All and for political comment as in The Leader Grieves by David Fountain
    It is essentially a book of witty, thoroughly entertaining short stories.
Review by Suraya Dewing
Founder: Stylefit, suraya@stylefit.co.nz
Title:  Life Sentences: Shared Short Stories
Author:  Peter Beatson, Tony Chapelle, David Fountain
Publisher: Rangitawa Publishing rangitawa@xtra.co.nz
ISBN:  978-0-9951406-2-2
RRP: $30
Available: in print from bookshops and online bookshops or from publisher. Available on kindle through Amazon
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