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YA novel a lovely read

27/8/2021

Just Remember
by Donna Blaber

Em Rogers’ life changed forever when she got her first after-school detention. If she’d known Dad would die in a traumatic accident on the way to pick her up and Mum would suffer a nervous breakdown, she would never have talked in class that day. Was it her fault? After losing friends, confidence and hope, Em moves north to Matapouri to live with Nan and finds a future with the help of new friends, a mermaid and a magic rock.
This is a lovely read. A New Zealand fairy story with strong characters and well written dialogue. I would have loved this as a young reader and have to say, I enjoyed it as an adult.
I noticed an edit miss on p 25 – a lapse into first person but that was all. Apart from that the chapters flowed nicely and their short length made it a very easy read.
There was good depth to the storylines, too with a great bit of detective work as Em chases down a criminal. If I have a complaint, it’s that Jessie and Mia’s own stories are brushed away in one paragraph. I’d have liked to have their stories told about these magical happenings too. At 106 pages, ‘Just Remember’ isn’t a challenging read lengthwise and I felt these stories would have added more about these two who become so important in Em’s new life.
I received this as lockdown hit again and it was a lovely escape.
A heart-warming and life-affirming read. Much thanks, Donna.

Review by TJ Ramsay

Title: Just Remember
Author: Donna Blaber
Publisher: Lighthouse Media Group
ISBN: 978-1-927229-72-9
RRP: $22
Available: print from https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/just-remember

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A real kiwi hero

20/8/2021

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Batkiwi
by Melinda Szymanik
pictures: Isobel Joy Te Aho-White

Celebrating another Scholastic Publication by New Zealand author Melinda Szymanik.
This story focuses on helping friends in need, or at least trying to. Sometimes we are unable to do what we really want to, simply by being too short or too round or, in Kiwi’s case, having tiny wings. That’s when we might need a friend to assist us.
One night, as the moon rose high, a call came over the bush telegraph,
     tweet by tweet, from tree to tree. “Help! Emergency! We need a hero!”
Kind-hearted Kiwi wants to rescue any forest friend in need, but he can
  never quite make it on his own. Who will help Kiwi be a hero?
     Melinda’s writing is to the point and graphic. It includes many of New Zealand’s forest creatures, highlighting that what one can do another maybe cannot.
     So this is a story about accepting who we are and helping others to the best of our ability, including asking for help too. A great learning perspective for youngsters.
     The cover art immediately captures the reader’s attention; Isobel Joy Te Aho-White’s pictures are vivid and the expressions and emotions shown draw the reader into the pictures.
     I’m unsure what age group this book is targeting. Some of the words and expressions suggest an older group while the simplicity of the story and pictures indicates a younger group.
     It is also available in Te Reo as Pekakiwi.

Review by Susan Tarr

Title: Batkiwi
Author: Melinda Szymanik, pictures by Isobel Joy Te Aho-White
Publisher: Scholastic
ISBN: 9781775437116
RRP: $19.99
Available: paper: bookshops

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A little treasure

12/8/2021

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Gaps in the Light
by Iona Winter

This is Iona Winter’s third collection of poetry. The dominant format is the prose poem, and short creative fiction, not the ‘traditional’ poetic set-up of structured four-line stanza and verse scheme. This allows her to better express her emotions as they splay from her soul, rather than having to measure them out, and thus to stall their delivery.
Accordingly, there is tremendous mamae, loss, hurt displayed throughout these pieces, an honesty of expression and sometime rage, that sets her work well away from the so-called majority mainstream stream of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry. Thematically and often, as noted above, formatically. As here, in the intense rave titled Gregorian, which is a dense paragraph of diatribe against the agents of cold capitalism,
                                                                              I doubt you will ever
have a sense of life as it is for the minorities (who are really the majorities if you look at the world’s pyramid charts on the distribution of wealth); most of us struggle week to week, day to day, to survive everything you have created…             (pp. 10-11)
Winter is unafraid to spew her innermost emotions, and the collection is stronger for this. Take, as just one example, the lengthy Forest Clearings, which is a fifteen-page paean of pain concerning a lover who has permanently absconded from the responsibilities of an intimate relationship. The poet doesn’t let lexical niceties get in the way of her anguish either,
fuck I missed you
long before you left              (p. 75)
After all, as the poet stipulates elsewhere,
if you say what I write is too dark/too confronting/
too unpalatable
for your sugar coated tongues
then your alignment with shiny new things
discounts the rage of our mothers  grandmothers
mothers…                                  (from Learned it, p. 62)
Winter recognises too, the ‘shared history of women’ (from The wife of the tree-shaker, p. 59) and her entire collection is a litany of the several crises women have had and continue having to endure – splintered liaisons with thankless men, serious body maladies, the death of tamariki, are just some of such themes threaded powerfully through the collection.
In the end, though, love is the strength which allows Winter to survive,
I prefer to choose aroha.   (from Natives, p. 22)
This concentration on candid reality is not to say she does not deal in lyrical niceties, for there are several fine examples of potent word play here. For example,
shame stained her face like port wine
                                       to leach down her arms into fingertips   (from Crosses, p. 69)
Throughout, she interpolates ngā kupu Māori as an intrinsic component of her existential Being, Again, she must do so, as she strives to fully express her innermost angst. There is a glossary provided at the end of the collection (given that I did note a couple of errors here, as for example the collocation of kāti ake ne in the glossary, yet kāti ake nei in the text. The latter is correct).
For as she captures in the piece titled Mōteatea,
The mōteatea enclosed in my chest aches to be released (p. 51)
Ultimately, too, it is grounding in our whenua which salves the winter of discontent here (no apologies for the pun either).
She needed to listen to the earth, to hear the secret things that lay buried beneath
   Papatūānuku.                       (from Grannie, p. 38)
Given that we all must respect Earth and all her constituents – or else,
It makes me laugh, how we have treated our mother like shit for eons and nowadays can’t stop complaining because she’s finally retaliating. I always knew violating her would have consequences.   (from Lost symphonies, p13)
Even more reason to appreciate the demanding cogency imbuing gaps in the light.
Tēnā koe mō tēnei pukapuka e hoa. Ko whakamiha ana ahau i tāu pononga, i tāu māia, i tāu kupu. He taonga iti tēnei.

Review by Vaughan Rapatahana

Title: Gaps in the Light
Author: Iona Winter
Publisher: Ad Hoc Fiction
ISBN: 9781912095049
RRP: $27.99
Available: Ad Hoc Fiction; Amazon (paperback and ebook formats); Victoria University Books & Unity Books Wellington; libraries. Or contact the author.

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YA novel a lovely read

A real kiwi hero

A little treasure

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