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Entertaining and thought-provoking story

26/1/2023

Nikolai's Quest
by D. Robinson

The subheading of this YA book, a search for answers and belonging, sums up the storyline very well.
Nikolai and Anna are brother and sister in an orphanage in St Petersburg. Or, are they truly orphans? Who is the man they see outside the gates watching them – could he be their father, or is he really dead as they’ve been told? That’s one of the answers they want to know.
Their search for the truth involves a map, secret tunnels and political intrigue. Working around the system, they use methods of information gathering that readers of the target age will identify with. I liked the fact that senior students at the orphanage work with the pair to bring about the conclusion. While all the children hope to find relatives or to be taken into new families, any threat is from outside the walls. Within the institution there is a sense of belonging – a family for children without one.
The novel is realistic, helped by front papers showing a map of the orphanage’s layout and copies of birth certificates for both children.
The New Zealand link to the story is that Nikolai and Anna are to be adopted by a Kiwi couple and brought here to live.
Along with the entertaining and thought-provoking story there’s an opportunity to learn a little about Russian history of the last century.
The cover, book design, and readable writing are all good and suitable for YA readers. A slight disappointment is that, despite a note that the book is written in UK English, US convention is used in the case of honorifics.
Recommended as a very good read for ages 10 to 16, or beyond.

Review by Jacqui Lynne

Title: Nikolai's Quest
Author: D. Robinson
Publisher: Rose & Fern Publishing
ISBN: 9780473633158
RRP: $20
Available: E-Book on Amazon, paperback from bookstores, Amazon and publisher www.roseandfernpublishing.nz

Picture book chuckles

18/1/2023

Who Took the Toilet Paper
by Amy Harrop & Jenny Cooper

Three things little ones like in a picture book –
– a story in verse form
– toilet humour
– great illustrations
This new title from Scholastic has all three.
It’s centred on the Bear family’s privy in the woods. Sorry, ‘privy’ is not a term used in the text. Toilet, dunny, loo, yes.
So, plenty of toilet humour – literal in this case.
Rhymes? Amy Harrop’s verses lay out the dilemma. While Father Bear sits, bum getting numb, the rest of the family, all busy creatures, race around trying to come up with a solution to the mystery, and his problem.
   We heard him growl and grumble,
   “What is this silly caper?
   I’ve been looking everywhere…
   Who took the toilet paper?”
That’s 2 of the 3. So to the illustrations. Jenny Cooper’s imagination excels here, making them a winner with children. The faces of the characters express the various responses beautifully.
The story might not be Dad’s favourite, for good reason, but the rest of the family should chuckle over this one.

Review by Emily R

Title: Who Took the Toilet Paper
Author: Amy Harrop & Jenny Cooper
Publisher: Scholastic
ISBN: 9781775437659
RRP: $21.99
Available: bookshops

Recommended to anyone

11/1/2023

Mountains, Volcanoes, Coasts and Caves: Origins of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Natural Wonders
by Bruce W. Hayward
With aerial photography by Alastair Jamieson and Lloyd Homer

This is a truly wonderful book. A comprehensive journey though Aotearoa New Zealand and the many and varied geological points of interest.
Covering the country from Northland to the Bluff including Stewart and Chatham Islands, the construct is not unlike that of the many illustrated ‘places to vist’ volumes we see. In this one, though, instead of merely showing the beautiful scenery, the author looks underneath to divulge how it has been created. Despite having not had the opportunity to experience previous publications by Bruce Hayward, it is obvious to me from the outset that he possesses a vast scope of expertise in this area.
This approach is assisted ably by the beautiful photography and clear illustrations that accompany each short chapter. The photography, as mentioned in the introductory page, is astounding and it comes as no surprise that both contributors, Alastair Jamieson and Lloyd Homer, are highly respected in their own right.
In addition to being a thoroughly enjoyable read, this book is extremely educational and would be valuable required reading for anyone studying the geology of our unique country. There is also a full glossary of the more scientific language to help the reader gain a full understanding even if fresh to the subject.
From cooled lava flows to glacial moraine, wind and water erosion to plate movement and earthquakes, this volume has it all and my initial response was that a light had been shined on some very familiar sights, completely altering my appreciation of them. It mattered not that I had little or no previous knowledge or interest in any of the above, I found myself engrossed within a few pages.
I would recommend this book to anyone and most especially to anyone who would like to learn more about what has gone and is going on under our feet.

Review by George Hollinsworth

Title: Mountains, Volcanoes, Coasts and Caves: Origins of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Natural Wonders
Author: Bruce W. Hayward
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409678,
RRP: $69.99
Available: bookshops

Lengthy & detailed memoir

3/1/2023

Every Sign of Life, On family Ground
by Nicholas Lyon Gresson

When does a family history and memoir became a troubling exposé, or even a settling of scores? Nicholas Gresson’s lengthy book on his extended family, and his own journey around the difficult dynamics of his parents’ life, is certainly a troubling one. While the book is centred around his father’s suicide and mother’s character flaws, the aspects of his own history become secondary.
The Gresson family has a long association with the law, and the male side has provided generations of judicial figures. This is certainly worthy of an historical examination, but Nick Gresson doesn’t follow them into the law; even though he seems to have a fascination with aspects of it, it’s as a layman. The first part of the book also discusses other family members, especially a distaff side for which he holds a lot of affection. This is mostly based in the affluent Fendalton area of Christchurch.
Indeed, having some historical knowledge of Canterbury, if not the social dynamics of Christchurch city, makes it easier to follow the early parts of the book. Young Nick’s school days are interesting, as part of the social elite, including at Christ’s College. Then, with his father’s move to Auckland, after becoming a High Court judge, Gresson was able to escape the social conventions of Christchurch education. But he doesn’t head to university to study law, and, after a brief stint at the Fisher & Paykel firm, goes on the O.E. to London. Yet, once again he doesn’t stay on the career path, and in the mid 1960s he becomes a sailor on the other side of the Atlantic, on German registered ships.
The part of the book which follows his shipping days from New York down to various South American ports, and back, is probably the most interesting subject matter in the book. Certainly there are many adventures, and narrow escapes, and there are also numerous sexual liaisons with women in each port. In fact, there is a certain matter-of-factness, or brevity in this description, which may have helped in the rest of the book. But for all his travels in South America, and time spent on Thursday Island, off the Queensland coast, there are still the troubling letters from home.
It is in 1967 that Gresson finally returns home, and to Auckland, where he finds his father worn down by his mother’s invective and carping criticism. On page 450 Gresson refers to his mother’s ‘social character’, which is apparently based on something called the ‘ton principle’. This seems to be a set of attributes borrowed from the English elite, and creates some very judgemental attitudes and pointed criticisms. Maybe this explains part of what living in 1950s Fendalton was like. But other people growing up in Christchurch were also subject to puritanical and judgemental treatment that affected their later lives. The Gresson family life just became toxic, but Nick not only exposes the emotional cruelty of his mother, he goes on to implicate his sister as carrying on the strain.
Nick’s father Terence was the defence lawyer in the infamous Parker-Hulme murder trial in Christchurch. And Nick continues to hold a fascination with such trials, even trying to track down Juliet Hulme, in her new identity, when visiting Scotland on holiday. Perhaps his most interesting intervention was in the Arthur Allan Thomas case, when he helped track down a useful witness, as well as holding up a sign in support of Thomas while walking across the North Island. He claims the interviews that he conducted, and were sent to the Prime Minister, were influential in the royal commission being set up to exonerate Thomas. But it was actually his sister’s husband, a prominent Queens Counsel, who would be more directly involved in the review of the legal case. So the book remains a very lengthy and detailed of someone close to the action, but essentially a prodigal son.

Review by S A Boyce

Title: Every Sign of Life, On Family Ground
Author: Nicholas Lyon Gresson
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9780995143777
RRP: $69.99
Available: bookshops

Author’s best novel yet

20/12/2022

A Virtuous Lie
by Christina O'Reilly

From the back blurb –
Hidden in the dense bush of the Manawatu, a tiny skeleton lies overgrown with weeds. DSS Archie Baldrick and DC Ben Travers discover that the victim is a young child who went missing from a rural skate park twenty years earlier. Who could possibly have abducted Lukas Branson and kept him hidden for over two years?
This is the third of the DSS Archie Baldrick and DC Ben Travers books – Into the Void, Retribution and now A Virtuous Lie. I happily took the task of reviewing this for Flaxflower, knowing how much I’d enjoyed O’Reilly’s first two books. This is her best yet. A fully rounded detective fiction with great characters throughout, believable plotlines and great development of Baldrick and Travers.
A Virtuous Lie is a less linear storyline than Retribution and is all the better for it. Interweaving histories and personalities with a great twist – in fact more than one great twist. Also a step up from Retribution, are the personal story lines of both detectives. Nicely complex and well written lives interwoven within the overarching framework of their intense careers. The complications of their personal lives give added drama to the whole book while offering Baldrick and Travers greater depth for personal development.
As with the first two books in this series, O’Reilly is a dab hand with dialogue and she brings the scenes alive with great visual clarity. I read the wind as a metaphor and almost a character in itself, sweeping through the town and people, clearing heads and providing relief and clarity, or blowing chilly and cold, adding to shivery moments.
It’s difficult to review the storyline without spoilers so I avoid going into details about the plot. Rest assured it takes personal histories and reviews them in the context of this terrible discovery as new connections are made, past mistakes highlighted with a sincere understanding of how people react, how people are betrayed, how lives are rewritten and not always for the best. Also, O’Reilly continues to trust the reader to remember evidence and never does us the disservice of rehashing unless it sits well within the day-to-day policing process and she never lets it become boring or repetitive.
Thanks, Christina. Thanks again. I’ll await your fourth with great interest.

Review by TJ Ramsay

Title: A Virtuous Lie
Author: Christina O'Reilly
Publisher: Christina O'Reilly
ISBN: 978 0 473 64439 0
RRP: $25
Available: Wheelers Books www.wheelers.co.nz
OR by emailing the author: ckwordsmith@gmail.com

Novel has strong characters

14/12/2022

Life and Death in Birkenhead
by K.M Tarrant

Within the small suburb of Birkenhead lives a monster, one the local residents entrust with their recently departed loved ones. He has been inflicting his atrocities unnoticed. But what happens when he turns his attention to the living?
This is a debut novel by Tarrant about a New Zealand serial killer and it’s a good one. Her characters are strong, her plot line well defined.
Detective Tipene Patrick deserves another case to solve. I found him sympathetic, intelligent and down-to-earth. Tarrant’s people live believable lives and have sincere back stories which nicely explain why people end up on dangerous paths. There is plenty of hopelessness and sadness yet, through it, her people are trying their best, coping how they may. For me, Jazz came across as the most layered character, good side/bad side in a constant moving flux which made him easily the most interesting character.
Tarrant is writing about work she knows and she is able to make the practical work of the back-stage of a funeral home interesting, actually without bogging the reader down in unnecessary details. Always nice to go, ‘I didn’t know that. Cool.’
The plot is linear. Nothing to discover. There are no surprises for the reader. The bad guy is named from the start and we are just following along his gruesome path until he gets his comeuppance.
Gerald had no lights and shades. Being bad to the bone from the get-go leaves no room for slow revealing or shocks. I found Maisie’s life-path such a huge fore-shadowing and knew from that moment how things would pan out. If I would have preferred more challenge in the story and the read, that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I did and read it in one sitting.
Tarrant has a nice, believable touch with dialogue and it all flowed smoothly and easily. I did have a question – I wondered why the repetition on page 100? The same information is repeated later on and I could see the point to that but not at page 100.
Life and Death in Birkenhead is a debut novel Tarrant should be proud of. I hope to read more from her in the future.
Thank you for the opportunity to review this enjoyable book.

Review by T.J. Ramsay

Title: Life and Death in Birkenhead
Author: K. M. Tarrant
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473634629
RRP: $35
Available: bookshops

Rich reading in novel

7/12/2022

A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura
by Jessica Howland Kany

Had I known then about the hunt for buried treasure that has occupied the locals for decades, I may have extended my short visit to Rakiura to try my luck. Darn it!
Maudie would have expressed that much more graphically.
Maudie? Really? She can’t be a Kiwi, because no one here has been called that in the past century. No, she’s from a very different island – straight from Manhattan to Stewart Island. What sort of translocation is that! The Author knows, because she has done it too.
It’s post 9/11 and post Christchurch. Maudie is scarred, literally, and minus a couple of toes. The handicap motivates rather than hinders her determination to run, run, run.
The two locations aren’t the only ones. At times the narration shifts, in time and place, to Monte Casino, Italy 1943-44, with brief visits to Paris.
The story is revealed not in chapters, but in parts divided into sections with subheadings. The majority of the text, narrated by Maudie, is in 1st person present tense, through which she reveals her backstory gradually, also uncovering those of others close to her.
There is more than one mystery to be resolved. One is 75 years old and the locals have long since given up on figuring it out. Maudie arrives pushing a running pram, and carrying her own secrets. The interaction of the two leads to yet another situation that rocks the close island community.
The quirky nature of the narration allows so much information to be inserted into the 400+ pages – details of southern geography with its flora and fauna and cartographic snafus, comments on language differences between USA and NZ, appreciation of poetry in what seems unlikely places, flashes of wartime Italy, and much more. Together it makes for richer reading than most novels. Different fonts mark separate sections, and a graphic of a fishing buoy recurs, inscribed with short phrases – make of them what you will.
Usually, I try to avoid novels of such length, often finding them unnecessarily padded. Not so with A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura, despite the inclusion of the extra information that is always in line with Maudie's character. The richness of the content, the great stable of characters which includes a kākā (“He’s a wild bird with a cat door and a food bowl?”), and of course the hope of finding buried treasure, made reading this one entertaining and a pleasure all the way.
It makes me think I’ll stay longer on Rakiura-Stewart Island next visit.

Review by Bronwyn Elsmore

Title: A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura
Author: Jessica Howland Kany
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9780995143852
RRP: $37.99
Available: bookshops

Message in picture book

29/11/2022

Hare & Kunekune’s Moonlight Mission
by Laura Shallcrass (text and illustrations)

Another title in what is becoming a series about a hare and a pig – unlikely friends in real life, but acceptable in picture books.
As is usual in the genre, there’s a single, somewhat slim storyline – food is disappearing. Peaches and karaka berries from the trees, strawberries, and more. Where is it going?
The pair see themselves of defenders of the food – ironic when you consider it, so perhaps the motivation’s more selfish.
It is Ruru – as always it’s the owl who embodies wisdom – who helps them come to a broader view.

Review by Emily R

Title: Hare & Kunekune’s Moonlight Mission
Author: Laura Shallcrass
Publisher: Beatnik
ISBN: 9781991165718
RRP: $30
Available: bookshops

Author’s experience makes believable novel

14/11/2022

The Road to Madhapur
by David Whittet

This is not like other books in which medical doctors tell stories of their life in practice. This is a novel, written by a doctor, which does include stories based on true happenings in surgeries, but it is broader in scope. Much broader.
Geographically, certainly. It begins in New Zealand where the central character, Theo Malone, is a medical student in Dunedin, and where he is told he will never make a GP. There’s a stint in Uganda where he goes with excellent intentions and is tested severely. Back to New Zealand, to rural India, to Auckland and Bay of Islands.
The geographical locations are also diverse culturally. Every step of his way is fraught with difficulties, it seems each success is paired with a failure.
Inevitably, given the very diverse locations, there’s a theme of faith. An Australian missionary family suffers for their stand in India, leaving one of the younger members, Elisha, with resentment –
“You told me God was going to open new doors for me in India. Well all He’s done is slam them in my face.”
The way is never easy, but some common ground is found with the ministrations of a Hindu guru and eventually the same person learns to accept
“A church or a temple. Heaven or Nirvana. We’re all aiming for the same place. We’ve just got a different way of getting there. It’s the same God.”
In addition to cultural tensions overseas, the doctor’s journey is also roughened and tested by political and social issues both there and in New Zealand, inter-personal relationships, grief, and a less-than-smooth romance.
Though the point of view is mainly that of Theo Malone, it does shift in parts so we also get to know the thoughts of the other central character, Elisha.
How much of the Author’s own experience is reflected and retold in Dr Theo Malone’s story is explained in a few pages at the end. The basis of fact, together with the informed fiction, results in a believable work.
The 436 page volume itself is nicely designed with a very attractive cover

Review by Norma D Plum

Title: The Road to Madhapur
Author: David Whittet
Publisher: Copypress
ISBN: 9781991167422
RRP: $35
Available: bookshops

Exquisitely careful choice of words

7/11/2022

My American Chair
by Elizabeth Smither

She is a serene and hugely well-informed tour guide, Elizabeth Smither, as she takes us through her latest poetry collection. Poems lead from one into the other, and they present their levels of meaning to us as though this were the easiest trick in the world. (It isn’t.)
  All day in the hotel room
in a red chair by the picture window
I am looking at cranes.

On the fourth floor I am level
with the new fourth floor they are building.  (‘Cranes’, p5)
The title opens for us a possibility of talking Japanese art, as do the first three lines, but in the second stanza, we have no choice but to focus on a modern, industrial city. The first poems in the collection all use this conceit: but cardinals are not balloting below the chimney smoke, the cigarette dog doesn’t smoke, the fire brigade doesn’t haul baggage.
In ‘Blossoms’ (p 35) we are told:
This year they come in billboards, not in trees,
flat, eye-catching squares, thick
as embossed paper, creamy and deckled
a blossom advertisement along an avenue.
And the ‘Port Hills, Canterbury’ (p 40), are
Not ‘magnificent’, far more slippery
as they tread with giant steps through gorse
or peer over a road they’ve made perilous ...
Nice trick, if you can do it, and Smither certainly does.
Part II of the book reads more like narrative, reminiscences, from one person’s unique and focussed memory. ‘The man in the hammock’ (p 47) starts with
  My neighbour has strung a hammock
between the posts of her veranda
and in it, near midnight, a head arises.
But rather than open out into scary possibilities, pulling up other than the one action, the poem goes on with a simple description of the moonlight, the garden scene and matter-of-factly ends “Sleep well foreheads, man and moon.”
It’s very impressive, watching a poem focus on the here and now, resisting the (perfectly legitimate) invitation to wallow in metaphor. This, taken along with the exquisitely careful choice of words, gives us the smooth pleasure of the poem as part of a “how could it be otherwise?” experience.
The last poem in the collection is ‘A wild book’ (p 87). It illustrates how Smither is both sticking to the focus while moving images from level to level, like some sort of verbal puppet show. The first stanza:
  After a day of dreadful disorder
  you offered me a bed and a meal
  and afterward an art book.
But then it ends:
  Before I reached the end – slices of life cut through
  by each now knife-edged page – a calm
  (it might have been the page of The Scream)

  dissolved the bed and the chicken, your fine
  conversation which calmed everything, and the book
  on my lap was reverently shut again

  while outside, when darkness fell and stars
  like the numbered pages came to glow
  the peace of a wild book descends.
Lovely craft, lovely book.

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: My American Chair
Author: Elizabeth Smither
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 960 9
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops

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