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Fast paced historical novel

24/2/2023

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Dead Before Curfew
by Jenny Harrison

Dead Before Curfew is an absorbing, fast paced novel. It is written in the present tense with new developments coming rapidly, one after another.
    Set during the Second World War, the main protagonist, Matthew Flint, is a British soldier with a flair for languages. Flint’s poorly trained and equipped regiment is posted to France. They expect the war to be over by Christmas but are caught off guard when German tanks break through the allied defences. Flint tries to get away but is eventually captured by the German army. The allies retreat through Dunkirk but the prisoners face a long gruelling haul as they are transported by train to a Prisoner of War camp in Poland. This is where the main story begins.
    Matthew Flint is assigned to a vehicle maintenance workshop, where his ability to speak fluent German is noticed by the Polish mechanic he is working with. He manages to escape, and the mechanic arranges temporary shelter in various people’s homes, until he and other escapees can be smuggled out of Poland. Flint develops a great regard for the Polish people and decides not to leave but to help the local people and their “underground army”. He gains their confidence, carrying messages at first but over time is given increasingly difficult and dangerous assignments. He also meets and falls in love with Olivia, who is doing equally hazardous work, rescuing Jewish children from the infamous Warsaw ghetto.
    The story includes a lot of characters, many of whom do not survive very long, and the reader has to keep alert as to who is who. Flint goes under several Polish aliases.
    Both Flint and Olivia are well drawn and empathetic characters, who take great personal risks for the sake of others. The atmosphere of fear in the city under occupation is well defined – the presence of an overbearing police force, ordinary people walking in the streets with eyes downcast, the scarcity of life’s necessities. Despite all this, there is the generosity of people left with little or nothing, risking all for the sake of strangers as well as fellow citizens. Yet many still lived in hope, as represented by the sunflower, the symbol shown on the book’s cover.
    The events and atrocities described took place over 78 years ago. Many would wish them consigned to history. But the atrocities did happen and are too terrible to be forgotten. Dead Before Curfew should help ensure they are not.

Review by Ian Clarke
Title: Dead Before Curfew
Author: Jenny Harrison
Publisher: Lamplighter Press
ISBN: 979-8-8353-0396-0
RRP: $32.99
Available: Piako Stationers, Te Aroha, Tea Rose Crafts, Te Aroha, Alo Gifts Morrinsville. Also from author at www.jennyharrison-author.com
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Novel is outstanding work

14/2/2023

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Peace Stick
by Stephen Johnson


This story is thought-provoking in several ways, not the least of them being the fact that it opens at the time when the ‘White Knight’ of postwar politics, John F Kennedy, is becoming accustomed to the taste of humble pie. Since Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1962, the Eastern bloc led by the wily Nikita Kruschev had seized the limelight and all the prizes in international politics through Yuri Gagarin’s triumphant spaceflight, the Bay of Pigs disaster and the overnight erection of the Berlin Wall. These events admirably set the tone for a period when Russia in general, and the German Democratic Republic, in particular, seemed to own all the aces and most of the answers in the struggle between capitalism and communism.
    Stephen Johnson uses these events to create a world-view that is unassailably communist, but he does it without ever stooping to the lecture. Johnson’s use of the ‘show, don’t tell’ writer’s maxim is little short of brilliant, and he does it through the medium of two East German teenage schoolgirls living through the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year. 1962 was a year when Kennedy could not afford to drop another match in front of the American public, and this imperative throbs through the story like the bass line in a musical score, underpinning the tension as Eastern and Western blocs move towards a confrontation that neither side will win in any sense. 
    Heavy stuff indeed, but the author presents it through the childish eyes of two just-teenaged girls who fasten upon a humble piece of the natural world—a small branch—and endow it, in their minds, with prophetic powers to avert nuclear war over Cuba as long as the stick remains where they hide it, to work its magic in secret. In this way the girls pin their hopes and dreams of a future firmly (and completely credibly) on the talismanic ‘glücksbringer’.
    Johnson sets his pictures of the superstitions of these teenagers against the monochrome background of the totalitarian state. He sketches a world in which the secret police, the dreaded ‘Stasi’, are all-powerful; in which police ‘suspects’ are routinely beaten up for real or imagined infractions of the state’s rules or preferences; a world in which school students begin their day by springing to attention and saluting; a world in which authoritarian mores pervade society so that younger schoolchildren may not contradict older ones, and a world that has apparently never moved on from the doctrinaire processes of the Third Reich.
    Socially, Ingrid and Sylvie live in a world split between East and West, and Johnson masterfully suggests, without ever making it explicit, that citizens of the Workers’ Paradise would gratefully inhabit the decadent West if only they could. In that context, both opening and conclusion indicate that the girls realised their potential after the Wall came down. Given that Ingrid’s parents played a prominent part in their daughters’ formative years, it would have been nice to know what became of them in the years between the Crisis and the tumbling of the Wall.
    But none of that detracts from Stephen Johnson’s superbly-written story. The author is clearly at ease with the thought-processes of teenagers, and his depiction of Ingrid and Sylvie as two ordinary, non-rebellious, non-problematic, hopeful, loving and ‘ordinary kids’ living through a defining moment of the twentieth century is as accurate as it is reassuring.
    And anyone interested in more recent defining moments really ought to read the concluding sentence of this outstanding work . . . .

Review by MJ Burr
Title: Peace Stick
Author: Stephen Johnson
Publisher: Stephen Johnson
ISBN: 978-0-473-63801-6
RRP: $25
Available: Wheelers, Paper Plus, Time Out Bookstore, Unity Books, The Little Book Shop, Poppies Howick, Wardini Books, Writers Plot Bookshop, Good Books, Scorpio Books.  Amazon: eBook and paperback.
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Mystery in picture book

3/2/2023

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There Are No Moa, e Hoa
by Melinda Szymanik
illustrator Isobel Joy Te Aho-White


This one came with a sticker attached, marking it as having a Storylines Notable Book Award. To be honest, I was surprised.
    Considering how almost everyone pronounces moa, I could imagine how they’d say the whole title. On the other hand, if it teaches the correct pronunciation, that will be a good thing.
   To appreciate the storyline, it would be helpful to be aware first of the author’s previous title BatKiwi, and know about the pairing of two creatures to form an unlikely superhero.
    This time there’s a scenario that seems just as unlikely to my adult eyes, though I'm thinking little ones will love it. And I would like to think there's a chance it could be true.
    It’s always a pleasure to find New Zealand animals in a picture book, and in their natural environments rather than in houses with furniture, and not wearing clothes. These characters do talk, though – there doesn’t seem to be any getting around that.
    The illustrations are just right – simplified and effective.
    It’s promoted as a “story of mystery, magic and forest friendship”. I’ll go with that. In the end it won me over.

Review by Emily R
Title: There Are No Moa, e Hoa
Author: Melinda Szymanik, illustrator: Isobel Joy Te Aho-White
Publisher:  Scholastic
ISBN: 9781775437833
RRP: $21.99
Available: bookshops
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