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Different viewpoints add insight

30/11/2017

Air Born
by J L Pawley

As a child I longed to fly, and I often experience intense flight dreams, where I soar through the sky without limits. Many readers will relate to this book’s concept as they, too, have dreamt about the freedom of flight. Later in life, I experimented with the adrenaline rush of skydiving, so I totally connected with the pre-flight suspense, and heart-stopping opening sequences of Air Born.
Generation Icarus is a new breed, engineered by science, revered by religious fanatics, and subjected to maniacal social media coverage. Relentlessly hunted, ‘The Flight’ strives to master their emerging abilities, and find answers to their predicament.
     Multiple alternative points of view are used in first person, but each character and change is clearly marked at the start of the chapter. The different viewpoints add insight and depth to the storyline with emotional perspective, and reveal the characters’ backstories.
Set in the USA, the cast of characters is racially diverse, including a ‘kiwi’ connection.
     The story flows well with appropriate pace, and includes: entertaining banter, teenage angst, and crushes.
     The black matt background of the cover, especially on the back, overshadows the dark wing, and potential readers may overlook this cover and the plain spine, as they could blend into the line-up of books offered on the shelf, and that would be unfortunate, as the story within deserves reading not only by YA readers, but those who enjoy action and mystery, with a sci-fi twist.
If you’ve ever wished you could fly, then I strongly recommend you read ‘Air Born’.

Review by WJ Scott
Award Winning Children’s Author

Title: Air Born
Author: J L Pawley
Publisher: Steam Press
ISBN: 978 0 9941387 9 8
RRP: $19.99
Available: bookshops

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Curse spans generations & continents

25/11/2017

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Hugo’s Gift
by Suzanne Singleton

Hugo’s Gift opens in Wellington in 1926 with Hugo Kane, an adoring husband, giving his wife, Isabel, a magnificent birthday gift – a brand new Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. In the process of learning to handle the car, Isabel loses control of it and kills an acclaimed Russian pianist who is on tour in New Zealand. The dying pianist’s curse plunges Isabel into a lengthy bout of post-traumatic stress and tragedy strikes the Kanes over and over as the pianist’s curse takes its toll.
     While the Kanes struggle to cope with the aftermath of Isabel’s accident and her psychiatrist battles with her illness, Singleton takes us back in time to the pianist’s childhood in late 19th century Russia in a time of great political and social upheaval. At the same time, we are flashed back to Isabel’s childhood in New Zealand. These switches in scene add depth and texture to a story which could otherwise have been little more than a series of terrible misfortunes befalling three generations of the same family, alternating with tense sessions with the psychiatrist.
     Hugo’s Gift is a series of snapshots of life in New Zealand and Russia from the 1920s through to 1981. We see the growth of the automobile industry, the growing interest in aviation, an outbreak of polio, the medical and social approach to mental illness and the attitudes of the day. We are reminded of expressions, such as ‘lunatic asylum’ and ‘as Catholic as Paddy’s pig’ which have largely gone from today’s vocabulary.
Singleton’s background in psychology provides us with a sensitive and convincing account of the relationship between Isabel and her often bemused psychiatrist. At the same time, Isabel’s sessions with the psychiatrist are skilfully used to shift the story backwards and forwards in time. Similarly, Singleton has used Hugo Kane’s housekeeper’s musings, in diary format, to give us insights into the story from a different point of view. In one of these diary pages, dated two years after the accident, the housekeeper comments that before the accident, Isabel often laughed in a slightly unhinged way…a symptom of her impending lunacy. Food for thought!
     Gradually, as the stories unfold, the ones set in New Zealand and the Russian one are drawn together. I found the last few pages absolute page turners. Having been lulled into accepting never ending gloom as the curse claimed its victims, I was suddenly anxious, with the late introduction of a pivotal character, to discover if another catastrophe was in store or if the curse could be broken.
In spite of the succession of sad events that befall the Kanes, there are some very strong female characters in Hugo’s Gift, women who defy the curse and survive it, providing uplifting moments in sad circumstances.
  Hugo’s Gift is written in an easy-to-read narrative style. However, with mental health and professional ethics critical issues in our modern society, it is inevitable that readers will reflect more deeply on Isabel’s plight and the psychiatrist’s dilemma.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie
Writer, freelance proofreader, copy editor, & translator from Italian to English.
Carolyn kindly offers accommodation at reasonable rates for FlaxFlower writers
in Thames (Waikato) and Ventimiglia Alta (Liguria, Italy). carolynmckenzie@libero.it

Title: Hugo's Gift
Author: Suzanne Singleton
Publisher: Pegasus
ISBN: 978178652517
RRP: UK £8.99; NZ$20 + postage via website
Available: Print book at Waterstones, Barnes&Noble, most online stores, www.cauldronbooks.co.nz

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Pilgrimage for mind and soul

21/11/2017

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Kiwi on the Camino: A Walk that Changed My Life
by Vivianne Flintoff

Having lived a fairly hectic life well into her late 50s, Flintoff had become both physically and emotionally jaded. She and her husband, Bruce, decided to take extended leave and travel to Europe to walk the pilgrimage route The Way of Saint James to Compostela: in Spanish this is the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
They chose to begin their 800-kilometre walk in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrenees. From here they crossed the Pyrenees and tramped across northern Spain to Compostela, before continuing for another 100 or so kilometres to the Spanish coast, to Finisterre and Cape Finisterre, where Saint James’s martyred body was brought ashore and then carried to Compostela.
For Flintoff and her husband this was not only to be a quiet, reflective time away from the pressures of jobs and everyday modern city life. It was to be a real spiritual pilgrimage in the sense that they are practicing Christians. However, in writing Kiwi on the Camino: A Walk that Changed My Life, Flintoff has wisely refrained from preaching to her readers. Lastly, and inevitably, it was to be something of a physical challenge and an adventure.
Flintoff has written a thoughtful account of their 47-day walk (and only 5 of these were rest days). With no set date for finishing the walk, Vivianne and Bruce are free to walk at their own pace – and they frequently give thanks for this – so that some days are a leisurely 6-8-10 kilometres while other days they manage 25-30, even 33 kilometres. Although presented in a day-by-day diary-like style, Kiwi on the Camino is far from tedious as each day is different: the weather ranges from snow storms to warm and sunny; the terrain from pretty challenging to easy walking.
Flintoff did not intend to write a guidebook as such, but she has included interesting snippets of history and descriptions of the villages along the Way. She delights in the vegetation as spring unfolds and varying architectural styles. There are moments of fun and laughter and more sobering times too, such as when one of their new-found friends has to comfort a German pilgrim who has been called a Nazi by a Dutch pilgrim. The German woman is so upset that she abandons her pilgrimage.
Pilgrims stay in hostels that are set aside specifically for them, most of which Flintoff found to be are warm, clean, comfortable and inviting – I found myself wanting to do at least part of the walk, in order to immerse myself in the villages and enjoy the convivial atmosphere in the hostels, sharing the day’s walking experiences with fellow pilgrims. This time with other pilgrims was a highlight of the Way for Vivianne and Bruce and Flintoff involves her readers in the fun times they shared as well as the sad moments when a pilgrim has to give up the walk because of ill health or fatigue. At one point, Flintoff fears that she may have to give up her pilgrimage but readers will find themselves willing her on. In these ways, Kiwi on the Camino: A Walk that Changed My Life is in fact a guide book for the mind of a modern pilgrim or long-distance walker.
Both she and Bruce are seasoned trampers with experience in New Zealand and in the Himalayas. Even so, they experience sprains, blisters and falls and fellow trampers will understand their discomfort and frustration. Kiwi on the Camino is written in an uncomplicated, easy to read style that will appeal to would-be pilgrims and armchair travellers alike.
There are as many reasons for doing a pilgrimage as there are people doing it. The Flintoffs’ motivation being spiritual is highlighted by the fact that although they are on the road for practically 7 weeks and need to keep their rucksacks as light as possible, they have none-the-less each carried a stone from home to add to the pile at the base of a cross that they pass shortly before reaching Santiago de Compostela.
Kiwi on the Camino is complete with comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of French, Maori and Spanish terms. A couple of times when walking far from a village Flintoff wishes she had a ‘pee wee’. My search of Feminine Urinary Devices (FUDs) has only turned up a ‘She-wee’ and no stockists. Perhaps the author can enlighten us as to where they are sold.

Title: Kiwi on the Camino: A Walk that Changed My Life
Author: Vivianne Flintoff
Publisher: Balboa Press
RRP: $30
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8252-6
Available as softcover from a few independent booksellers – Hamilton & Coromandel; Christian booksellers throughout New Zealand; author via http://www.vivianneflintoffbooks.com/; Online retailers - Balboa, Amazon, Book Depository, Fishpond, Barnes & Noble
ISBN 978-1-5043-8254-0 (hardback) – Online as above
ISBN 978-1-5043-8253-3 (E-book) – Online as above

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Compelling read

14/11/2017

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A Distant Belonging
by Tony Chapelle

This fascinating book recounts the lives of a family who emigrated to New Zealand from an estate in Wales. One branch of the family goes to Taranaki, and the other to Fiji.
The story is a sequel to two other books of Chapelle’s, Merely a Girl, and The Youngest Son, but this one is complete in itself and is a compelling read.
The New Zealand part of the story is told through the eyes of Jamie Ashcott, great grandson of the first settlers in Taranaki, and begins immediately after the Second World War.
His mother is greatly affected by the death of her eldest son, Haddon an RAF pilot killed in the war. She gives Jamie a diary, written by her grandmother, Adelaide Gilbard who settled in Taranaki in the 1860s. This diary gives an account of Taranaki during the Land Wars, and Adelaide’s shame and disgust at the treatment of Maori at Parihaka. She has a close friend, a Maori woman known as Hannah, and the two of them start a group of women dedicated to the uniting of the Maori and European peoples. Their vision is not of sameness, but of a society based on mutual respect and tolerance. She despairs as the pressure of European society causes a loss of vitality and spirit amongst the Maori.
     Jamie finishes school and goes to university in Wellington, where he comes in contact with a part Fijian young woman, Tela Gilbard, a scholarship winner from Fiji. She is a very attractive and intelligent woman, who has her own story of childhood and maturity at boarding school in New Zealand. She has some opposition because of her mixed-race parentage, but still retains her confidence and a strong self-belief.
     The rest of the book is concerned with the coming of age of these two children of the Pacific, and the discovery that they can both trace their distant origins back to the same estate in Wales.
I enjoyed the book greatly, and in particular I could identify easily with the 1950s New Zealand of my childhood, and feel that the path to maturity of the two Pacific children, parallels the maturity of New Zealand as a nation, and its struggle towards a multi-cultural society.
     I have no hesitation in recommending this book to others, and I would like to read the other two books in the series.

Review by Harold Bernard

Editor’s note: For reviews of Merely a Girl, and The Youngest Son see FlaxFlower archives for 29 Feb. 2016 and 11 October 2016

Title: A Distant Belonging
Author: Tony Chapelle
Publisher: Rangitawa Publishing 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9941490-3-9
RRP: $35
Available: Print only, from Bruce McKenzie Booksellers and other selected bookshops, and through Amazon, Fishpond, Wheelers, and from the publisher.

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New collection for new Poet Laureate

10/11/2017

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Tightrope
By Selina Tusitala Marsh

This book’s publication coincided with the author’s appointment as New Zealand Poet Laureate. The variety and breadth of the poems illustrate the skills behind both the collection and the appointment.
Marsh’s poetry styles include free verse illustrating Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between New York’s Twin Towers:
   if rain is
there or
not there
a cloudburst
would wash
away his life   (‘Le Coup’, p 26)

and a take-off of e e cummings:
  bloodgirl lived in a sleepy how town
  (with up all few bird words down)
  bloodgirl scrubbed her skin with their bones
  carbon, dirt, diamond, stone   (‘Gafatele’, p 28)
‘Eviction Notice 113’ leaves the printed page almost entirely out of the poetry story, relying on rapid sounds alone:
  a body a part her body’s become a body apart her body’s become a body a
part party party party party party party party party t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t (p 63)
Twenty pages of blackout poetry serve as a gloss to Albert Wendt’s novel Pouliuli. These poems, like the novel, address that blackness that invades the human spirit according to its own schedule. It’s not an existential nothingness – rather, dark to the nth degree, a miltonic too-much-ness rather than nothingness. Blackout poetry – sometimes called redacted poetry – involves blacking out a page of text, leaving only a few scattered words to serve as a new poem. Such poems are often unsuccessful because they don’t properly address the underlying text and seem irrelevant to it. Marsh’s poems, however, appear on pages of Wendt’s novel – an ingenious and successful way of using blackness to illustrate blackness.
     Many of the poems address other people: ‘Essential Oils for the Dying’ is a lament for Teresia Teaiwa, to whom the book is dedicated. Other poems centre on the author’s attendance at 2016’s Commonwealth Observance Day – gone to London to visit the Queen, where in an auxiliary poem ‘Pussy Cat’ shows off:
  My moana blue Mena
  My Plantation House shawl
  My paua orb
  My Niu Ziland drawl
  my siva Samoa hands
  My Blood red lips
  My Va philosophising   (p 41)
So where is the tightrope taking us? It takes us over the Abyss, from Uncle Siva’s squabbling dogs to the formality of Westminster Abbey to a windswept Hawaiʻian outcrop – not so much step by cautious step like Petit but with the speed of imagination and the balance of consideration.
   It’s a wide-ranging collection – interesting for both the varied styles and the varied scenery. Some of the poems make me wonder, why write them down at all? Paper is too thick, too durable for some ways of talking. But should we worry about where we will end up? Probably not. As the last blackout poem (p 99) puts it:
  never
wound a
new
bird

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: Tightrope
Author: Selina Tusitala Marsh
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408725
RRP: $27.99
Available: bookshops

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Comprehensively researched, enjoyable work

6/11/2017

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Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand
by Chris Brickell

‘History teaches us that young people pull out and re-stitch the threads of the past.’
So writes Chris Brickell nearing the conclusion of his book, Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand.
     The Author takes us on a chronological journey through aspects of teenage years from the 1860s to recent times. Following the introduction, the book has five chapters the first of which deals with early immigrants and their interaction with Maori as ships brought new migrants into New Zealand ports, the boys often becoming itinerant and girls dependent on domestic service.
Chapter two describes the growth of industry and establishment of small cities. After that, follows the consolidation of youth culture and the differences between town and country dwellers.
The fourth chapter introduces American influence on New Zealand youngsters following the Great Depression and the Second World War as young folk were more able to avoid adult surveillance. Chapter five brings a view of the dynamism of the 1950s and 1960s as teenagers endured a new level of scrutiny by media. Some reference is made to homosexuality, and its consequences for young folk, at intervals throughout the book.
With the help of many diaries and photographs there emerges a description of youth employment from the days of domestic service to World War II, after which few teenagers wanted to work as domestic servants. War had increased girls’ and boys’ independence, helped along by improved mobility facilitated by railways and trams, not to mention motor bikes. The ebb and flow of Maori/Pakeha relationships is discussed.
Having lived through some of the period it was pleasurable to be reminded of past cultural happenings, whereas certain other aspects of the time must have flown beneath my radar and reading about them now has been enlightening. Students of this subject would find it interesting and informative while other readers could gain an insight into this facet of our history.
     The book is an historical account up to and only touching on evolving present day culture, making few predictions about future developments and the positive and negative impacts of future technology and drug culture.
     Included in the volume is a list of abbreviations used, 18 pages of notes, a list of illustration credits, a bibliography and an index. The book is a beautiful production and its binding and cover make it a pleasure to handle.
     I find this to be a magnificent portrayal of the rise of New Zealand youth culture. The author is to be congratulated on a comprehensively researched, and enjoyable, work.

Review by Irene Thomas

Title: Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand
Author: Chris Brickell
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408688
RRP: $49.99
Available: bookshops

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Different viewpoints add insight

Curse spans generations & continents

Pilgrimage for mind and soul

Compelling read

New collection for new Poet Laureate

Comprehensively researched, enjoyable work

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