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YA novel with local setting

30/7/2022

Just Keep Going
by Donna Blaber

Since Becky arrived in New Zealand recently, she’s felt she is in a foreign country, far from the UK home she knows.
True, her Dad is here, but his focus is on his second wife, Becky’s stepmother, and their baby. She has no friends her own age and the pandemic with its lockdown, and the added complication of the MIQ draw, increases her sense of isolation.
She does, though, have a windsurfer and there's a great local beach where she can use it. Not only does this entertain her, but it presents challenges and leads to a mystery.
The story is a very readable light adventure featuring, as well as the joys of windsurfing, environmental concerns, a dolphin that seems to want to communicate something, and a couple of baddies to add to the intrigue. Add to those, a mystical/magical element – not overdone, so acceptable even to sceptics.
The language is colloquial and chosen for the intended audience of 11 to 14 years – yeah na, chur bro.
Just Keep Going is set in Northland, in the Whangarei-Tutukaka-Ngunguru area.
For those who may need a little help with some terminology, probably overseas readers, there’s a short glossary at the end. The book is attractively produced.
Though Just Keep Going fits into the ‘Just’ series of YA titles, this is a stand-alone book.

Ed note: Just Remember, another title in the series was reviewed by FlaxFlower in August 2021

Review by Emily R

Title: Just Keep Going
Author: Donna Blaber
Publisher: Lighthouse Media Group
ISBN: 978-1-927229-78-1
RRP: $25.00
Available: bookshops

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Standing on the shrinking shore

14/7/2022

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No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand
Editors: Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy, Essa Ranapiri
with a foreword by Alice Te Punga Somerville and afterword by Rod Carr

We are all children of the land. Most of us have long, long forgotten the fact, and this collection is an emphatic reminder of where we came from and where our responsibilities lie.
Appropriately, the call is led by poets of the Pacific, the people who are standing on the shrinking shore, watching the waters crawl up around their ankles; Karlo Mila says, ‘we are the canaries in the coal mines of climate change’ (p 93, ‘Poem for the Commonwealth’).
The collection of 91 poems is a response to a call in 2020 for submissions giving experiences of our threatened world, specifically in New Zealand, when bushfires across the sea were visible here and the pandemic began to take off. It is not a how-to guide on correcting the past, nor is it for the most part an exercise in laying blame: it is a collection of experiences and impressions.
The poems themselves have shapes that range from formal to informal: there is Brent Cantwell’s terzanelle ‘the sounds of Mallacoota’ (p 74) and Craig Santos Perez’ recycling of a Neruda sonnet (p 43). There are concrete, experimental poems from, among others, Tate Fountain (p 157, ‘Countdown’), Tru Paraha (p 134, ‘in my darkling universe’), and Frances Libau (p 199, ‘Escape the Weather’).Tara Black (p 168, ‘Just Right’) presents scenes from a graphic novel. And there’s everything in between: the collection could be used as an illustration of styles.
The poems’ awesome variety of images speak from the vocabulary of Aotearoa, the vocabulary of islands all over the Pacific, the vocabulary of the world-weary, and the vocabulary of an iPhone world. There’s a huge variety of conditions and situations described, and many ways of describing them. Cindy Botha vividly illustrates the awfulness of it all in her image of ‘Hermit Crab in a Doll’s Head’ (p 102); Roman Parrott’s ‘Burn’ (p 138) gives words to a scary and uncompromising over-soul.
So what single message does the book have? The word if floats through the poets’ remarks but goes all over the place from there: if we do this, if we change that, if we stop doing the other.My (personal) reading keeps coming back to a failure of faith: since we can’t erase consuming greed from the human race, retroactively or otherwise, we can at least try to honour each other, even if we do have a private grumble once we get home.
   There’s too much expressed here to pick and choose evidence from individuals; rather, I’ll just quote (in its entirety) Craig Santos Perez’ sonnet mentioned earlier, ‘Love in a Time of Climate Change’:
   I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals,
   conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause
   war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
   species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

   I love you as one loves the last seed saved
   within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots,
   and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens
   from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue.

   I love you without knowing how or when this world
   will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.
   I love you like this because we’ll only survive

   in the nitrogen-rich compost of our embrace,
   so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
   so close that your sea rises with my heat.

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand
Editors: Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy, Essa Rana
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 955 5
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops

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Simple tale will appeal

4/7/2022

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Kororā and the Sushi Shop
by Linda Jane Keegan
Jenny Cooper, illustrator

You’ll likely remember hearing and seeing in the news a while back about penguins that took a liking to the shelter provided by a Wellington sushi shop. It’s the sort of lighter item that we latch onto to help balance the usual heavier fare, and this one was picked up and reported in several overseas countries as well as here.
Three years on, the story pops up again, in the form of a picture book, promoted as “a New Zealand story inspired by true events”.
Over 24 pages, the basic story of a pair of little blue penguins, kororā, is told in rhyming couplets –
              Waddling her way to the sushi shop door,
            she found a wee gap to squeeze under the floor.
      Kororā tucked herself in for a rest,
      and transformed the hideaway into her nest.
It’s a simple tale that will appeal to small children. They will learn from it too – the last page of ‘penguin particulars’ contains facts about these little seabirds.
The illustrations are excellent, setting the scene for the events very well.

Review by Emily R

Title: Kororā and the Sushi Shop
Author: Linda Jane Keegan; Jenny Cooper, illustrator
Publisher: Scholastic NZ
ISBN: 9781775437185
RRP: $19.99
Available: bookshops

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YA novel with local setting

Standing on the shrinking shore

Simple tale will appeal

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