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Welcome history of New Zealand comedy

7/9/2019

Funny As. The Story of New Zealand Comedy
by Paul Horan & Philip Matthews

The recent TV series of the same name was a treat – we got to see so many fellow Kiwis who worked to bring local humour into our lives by means of live shows and media. How good it was to see again some classic clips remembered from the days of comedians such as John Clarke, Billy T James, Murray Ball and more.
     Now there’s the book, which is even more welcome because, though we don’t get the clips, it gives a wider coverage of the subject and it’s there to pick up and refer to when we wish.
     The 366 pages contain a wealth of information on those who have entertained us from the start of the 20th century to the present.
     The early decades, covering the 2 World Wars, overwhelmingly favoured male comedy writers, cartoonists and performers. In times of war, perhaps necessarily, male entertainers dressed as women. Following that, female impersonators and institutions such as the university capping show carried on the tradition.
     As welcome as this history is, the woman reader can’t help but wince repeatedly at the reminder of these overwhelmingly male-dominated times. Even after the 1970s when a few women infiltrate the ranks the trend continues and any list is monopolized by men. Women comedians and writers have had a hard job to convince male decision-makers, let alone audiences, that they too can be funny. And it’s surely a fair comment to say that the boys’ comedy club has not been quick to include them.
     It is, then,  good to see that the two male authors of this book have recognized this fact and acknowledged the contributions of some of our female producers of humour – including among others Rosemary McLeod and Diane Wichtel with their satire, Jean Betts and Alison Quigan with their stage plays, and so many wonderful actresses who have made us laugh along with their comedy characters.
     It’s hard to imagine now, but the arrival of television in the early 1960s didn’t prove an immediate source of work for local comedians; from the ‘seventies we were beginning to see home-made programmes, including the first Kiwi sitcom, Buck House. Remember that? Though many of our early shows now appear cringe-inducing, they provided a training ground for local writers and artists and laid the foundation for more to come.
Most of the book's 19 chapters are summaries of periods or specific media, or thematic explanations, and there are copious illustrations. A few chapters, though, are devoted to single performers – Billy T James, John Clarke, The Topp Twins, Flight of the Conchords, The Front Lawn, and Taika Waititi – arguably our most prominent and memorable to date.
Rather than singling out one image for the cover, it’s a wise marketing decision to give the buyer a choice of four different and colourful slipcovers – each of them a great improvement on the inappropriately dull black and white card cover it hides.

Review by J.M.

Title: Funny As. The Story of New Zealand Comedy
Authors: Paul Horan & Philip Matthews
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409005
RRP: $49.99
Available: bookshops

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An intensely personal reveal

3/9/2019

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By the Light of the Moon
by Bernadette Marama Gavin

‘Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.’ Israel Shenker
This quote opens Part One and if any sentence sums up this book, it does. An utterly perfect reveal, lovely imagery, too.
My husband has, tucked away inside him, a yen for buying a yacht and sailing away. He had a colleague whose wife and he did just that, taking two small children on a life-changing odyssey. She was on the verge of leaving him – did she even trust him enough? Even as she told me their story, all I felt was awe that a woman could do this with a man she didn’t know she trusted or loved anymore. It was the making of them.
By the Light of the Moon tells a similar story but this memoir shows there is little in the way of romance in a life at sea. Bernadette’s sometimes harrowing tale reveals this and these parts of the story are gripping. The storms, the hunger, the boredom, the exhaustion of minimal sleep and challenging conditions. The images of broken, cluttered yachts similar to theirs anchored in beautiful bays, their owners just as broken, marriages lost as this kind of life takes its grim toll.
Bernadette’s love story works in reverse of that of the people we knew. She meets Will, they begin as friends, then become lovers and it feels through her eyes as something more. After all, they face huge challenges together, life-and-death struggles alone on a vast sea. Yet, instead of bonding them, they drift apart, Bernadette feeling the gradual separation but refusing to see it for several reasons, the main one being she has fallen even more deeply in love with his yacht Wairua, her womb, her home, her catalyst for excitement and travel. When she and Will finally separate, it’s Wairua she misses more with an almost physical pain.
An intensely personal reveal – one woman’s spiritual journey, the oceans and inhabitants providing metaphors and guidance for Bernadette’s changes and development from child to woman.
An interesting read.

Review by TJ Ramsay

Title: By the Light of the Moon
Author: Bernadette Marama Gavin
Publisher: Chocolate Fish Publishing
ISBN: 978 047345254 4
RRP: $34.99
Available: bookshops

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Artistic work on fine artist

28/8/2019

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Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys
Catherine Hammond & Mary Kisler (eds)

Appropriately for a book on art, this is a beautifully produced volume. Large format, hardback, 288 pages, quality art paper – from beginning to end it is an artistic work celebrating the life of one of our most significant painters.
As the ‘European Journeys’ part of the title says, this tribute work concentrates on the years Frances Hodgkins spent away from this country, but it does give details of her early life so anyone with no previous knowledge of her can learn of her full life.
The 31-year old Frances left New Zealand in 1901, having already established a reputation as an artist here. Apart from visits home, she spent the rest of her life elsewhere supporting herself, often with difficulty, by painting and teaching art.
In her frequent travels between England, France, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands and Spain, and shorter periods in other European spots and Australia, she absorbed and learned different techniques and extended the subjects of her paintings. Places, styles, and the work of other artists were to influence her, resulting in a diverse output.
By her death in England at age 78 her work had been given due recognition in that country particularly, and been shown at an impressive list of galleries. Much as we are proud to claim her, she is more often referred to as a British modernist.
This volume is the work of many experts, all well qualified in the field of fine arts – Catherine Hammond, Sarah Hillary, Alexa Johnston, Mary Kisler, Elena Taylor, Antoni Ribas-Tur, Frances Spalding, Julia Waite. They write of Frances’ life in New Zealand, her early years in Europe, her place within the modern art movement, and of course her works. A list of exhibitions is included, together with text notes, select bibliography and index, so it is a useful reference work for further study.
Most important, the volume contains copious illustrations including portraits and photos of Frances Hodgkins herself, and about 130 of her paintings.
A great resource for artists, art historians, and admirers of her work, and a timely publication, marking 150 years from Frances Hodgkins’ birth, as does an exhibition of her art visiting the four main centres.

Review by Paua Blue

Title: Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys
Editors: Catherine Hammond & Mary Kisler
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408930
RRP: $75
Available: bookshops

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Newer and long-established poets in collection

22/8/2019

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Ngā Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato poetry
Vaughan Rapatahana (editor)

This is, as the editor says, the “first collection of poets from te rohe o Waikato,” people who lived in Waikato for at least a year and who “were still with us” – 39 poets in all. Pauline Canlas Wu’s cover nicely symbolises the contents: there is a lush riverbank and a broad water surface undefined enough to cover a multitude of memories, histories and descriptions but most assuredly The River; in the foreground, a dairy cow, not at all vague, serves as a reality check, lest we forget entirely where we are.
     There are long-established poets and newer ones. Dean Ballinger’s ‘Paterangi Pastoral’ (p9) is written in a nearly Anglo-Saxon style:

After the ditch came the match.
They burnt the bush and the land
burned. Under their feet
the drifts of peat smouldering,
drowned forests coughing up smoke,
choking on kahikatea ghosts,
they wet their handkerchiefs and sowed grass.

     Vincent O’Sullivan’s 1982 ‘Waikato-Taniwha-Rau’ (p66) speaks to our sense of the river:
We have a fiction that we live by: it is the river
that steps down, always down, from the pale lake
to the open jaws of land where the sea receives it.

     There is a variety of poetic styles, including concrete poems by Rapatahana and Terry Moyle. I would count Mohamad Atif Slim’s ‘Frost’ (pp41-2) as another one, the way the words go down the left margin like frost condensed on glass:
a dusting of
glass.

yesterday’s conversation
condensed

on unknown
grass.

bushes of
ruby roses

frozen like
Turkish delight. ...

     Past and present are happy to mingle in Olivia Macassey’s ‘At Kuaotunu’ (pp37-8), presenting memories of a summer in which you can almost taste the dust:
The migratory teenage boys so wished-for in my youth are the
flocks of native gulls I want to return now, perching on posts
with the same alertness and hunger

and summer people are become silence and wind and tumbling spinifex

running their relentless diagonal.
It is Kuaotunu and it is not.
     And ‘Te Whare o Waikato’, by Mere Taito (p84), is most definitely in the present:
Walk out of the meeting room
to a sheltered landing
in Bullshit Block.
Pass the makeshift container rooms.
Walk into your office.
Blast the volume of
‘this is my whare’
in-between breaths.
The wānanga hears you.

Click Restart.

     Beyond personal memories, the bloody history of the Waikato features in many of the poems. Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, essa may ranapiri and Loren Thomas – as a joint exercise – wrote ‘In the river’ (p88), which begins:
The Rangiriri was built
shallow and thin
to hold rifles and turn around quickly.

We’ve seen the current slow,
heard it quicken,
felt the skin recede from the river breeze
like souls swept through drifting rafts

by the time
they pieced it together they said the fight was over ...
     This poem and a pair of responsive tanka sequences end the volume, the group voices providing an appropriate and fitting conclusion to the book. The tanka sequences – by Celia Hope, AndréSurrridge, Barry Smith, Elaine Riddell, Jenny Fraser, Mac Miller – reference other battles (quoted only in part, p90):
my mother’s poems
about the Waikato slipping
into hidden whirlpools
dragging down its victims
she didn’t know the taniwha ...
Gallipoli
    her father wouldn’t talk
    about the war
  at the dawn ceremony
  she proudly wears his medals.

     It’s an interesting and readable collection. The editor’s notes imply that it is first of several, or is this reading too much into his comments? Given the fuss made over the Whanganui River, it’s amazing that this is the first time the Waikato has had a book of its own.
     And given the value of the individual contributions, it’s astonishing that so little attention was paid to the appearance of the book. It’s all in one type face, of a size appropriate for footnotes, no titles stand out, and it’s often difficult to attribute particular poems to their authors. A table of contents would have helped, but there is none. The type itself is greyed-down; this plus the small size makes the book as a whole unpleasant to read – a collection of this significance needs to look good, not just read well.
     Comparable books from university or trade publishers run to $20-$25; $15 is astonishingly cheap, and unfortunately the anthology looks it. If this is in fact the first book of a series, it’s devoutly to be hoped that a bit of attention go to book layout and design. That way, we would have a book that was a pleasure to look at as well as to read.

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: Ngā Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato poetry
Editor: Vaughan Rapatahana
Publisher: Waikato Press (Mangakino and Morrinsville)
ISBN: 978-0-473-46501-8
RRP: $15
Available: via ngakupuwaikato@gmail.com

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Biography tells two stories

17/8/2019

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Making History
by Jock Phillips

If ever there was a person who found himself in the right place at the right time it was J.O.C. (Jock) Phillips. As he states in the introduction, he was privileged by his upbringing, with its richness of culture and emphasis on historical writing; and as part of a cohort of baby boomers who “began to articulate a new cultural nationalism.” He acknowledges his unique opportunity to present history to New Zealanders, just as the internet took off, and through getting the position of chief historian and in other roles.
The book essentially tells two stories, one being about his own family background, and the other being his life as a historian. In many ways the first few chapters, which portray both sides of his family, are the more interesting.
His father, Neville, was from Dannevirke, then went to Canterbury College, and on to Oxford University just before the war. After war service he returned to Christchurch and became a history professor, and later Vice-Chancellor, before succumbing to his Anglophile instincts and returning ‘home’ to England.
The most interesting chapter is entitled ‘My mother and the land’. Jock’s mother Pauline Palmer was from a more affluent background, involving pastoral farming in Hawkes Bay, before taking an MA at Canterbury College. But by delving back into her family history, in Australia and in Canterbury, Jock provides some interesting insights into colonial history and the use of land.
The young John Phillips got the best of education in New Zealand, Christ’s College at the age of 12, and also wonderful holidays on his uncles’ farms in Hawkes Bay. It was this that gave him an appreciation of the land in economic and aesthetic terms. At age 15 Phillips joins his parents in England while his father is on a sabbatical, and gets to attend Dulwich College in London, and a path opens up for him to eventually attend Cambridge University. Instead, he returns to New Zealand, and ventures up to Wellington to begin an undergraduate degree at Victoria. With a scholarship he travels to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, to attend Harvard. There is an interesting account of what a rigorous PhD programme actually entails. Jock also gets to enjoy the popular culture, dips his toes into American politics, and marries Phillida Bunkle. They return to New Zealand to share a History lectureship at Victoria, in 1973. Jock makes progress up the academic ladder but eventually gets frustrated.
At first seconded to the public service, Jock then begins to innovate with a new form of ‘public history’, and an intention to make history accessible to a wider audience. This included commissioning written histories of government departments; being involved in the set-up of Te Papa’s exhibitions; and then creating the on-line encyclopaedic resource Te Ara.
The details of this glorious career reflect a certain form of luck: just when the public service was being restructured or dismantled, Phillips was able to develop roles that defied the trend.
One of the main reasons is his ability to network, and highlights the role of personal contacts. Jock set up the NZ History Research Trust Fund with the help of the minister, Michael Bassett, who was otherwise ideologically opposed to the State. The trust fund started off making modest grants to mostly amateur historians. In recent years, however, the grants have got bigger, but the recipients have often been insiders linked to Phillips, such as older sister Elizabeth. Similarly, the later official histories of government departments were written by non-experts who barely touch the available archive records; and some of the contributors to Te Ara are retired academics who did not research policymaking during their careers. So while the collegial nature of Phillips’ practice is always presented in glowing terms, it is actually a rather small elite based in Wellington.

Review by S A Boyce

Title: Making History
Author: Jock Phillips
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408992
RRP:$45
Available: bookshops

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Engaging story on a difficult topic

12/8/2019

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Meltwater
by Suzanne Ashmore

Just in case readers hesitate to read Meltwater because of the subject matter I want to state right at the start that it is a fantastic read and worth every minute you give it.
Suzanne Ashmore manages the sensitive nature of the novel in a way that keeps readers empathetic without being overwhelmed. She does this by focusing on Elizabeth rather than her abuser and manages readers emotions. She gives enough detailed description to enable us to understand what is happening but leaves us to finish the image she has drawn. This allows readers to breathe and to fill in the gaps with their own narrative.
There is not a word too many so the editing is great and the choice to deliver it as a series of vignettes was perfect.
The prose's lyricism and beauty reinforces the advantage of writing the novel as a series of snatched memories.
Consider this randomly selected example: ‘It was I, Beatrice, who walked away from Elizabeth into the desert that day, disappearing into the steamy throat of the mountain. (95)
There are many more examples.
Beatrice is one of Elizabeth’s thirteen personalities. Each one has a voice which is treated respectfully. Again it is testament to Suzanne Ashmore’s writing skills that she keeps each personality separated. Without making an issue of the event that triggers the formation of a new personality or Elizabeth’s regression into an established one the reader is seamlessly taken into this new person's world. There is never any confusion as to which one is dominant. When dealing with so many entities this is quite an achievement.
With child abuse being so much in the headlines these days this is a timely book. It offers no solutions simply recounts one person’s struggle. I could only admire Suzanne Ashmore’s courage; first in surviving her father’s abuse and then in telling the story as she does, in a matter-of-fact way without any hint of seeking sympathy from the reader. Although it is written as a novel the reader is also aware the story is based on fact.
If I am to be picky the only thing I would comment on is the shift from Elizabeth as primary narrator to Helen, Elizabeth’s therapist. This felt just a bit clumsy and in a way contrived. The change in voice and focus broke the flow and, while interesting, the book's tone moves from a personal story to that of a report of a series of therapy sessions. During that time I lost contact with Elizabeth with whom I was fully invested.
However, that is a small point. What is key is that, as a reader, I continued to follow Elizabeth’s heroic journey from a horrendous world of inner conflict to a place where she, her husband, Ben, and children could live relatively untroubled lives.
The explanation for the title is brilliant. So it is worth reading to the end to find out why this wonderful book is called Meltwater.
Congratulations to Suzanne Ashmore for crafting such an engaging story from a difficult topic and also making it so accessible.

Review by Suraya Dewing

Title: Meltwater
Author: Suzanne Ashmore
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473472313
RRP:$30.00
Available: bookshops

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Perceptive analyses of mid-sixties life

6/8/2019

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Dubrovnik, My Love
by Suzanne Brooks-Pinčević

This work of semi-biography offers a contrast, throughout, between dark and light. That is, the life experiences of some residents of a Europe only recently riven by the calamity of World War Two and condemned to live with the dark forces unleashed by it, and the light represented by their concepts of life in ‘the West’. As the central character, Gašpar, comes to realise, life is seldom painted in such shades of black and white but is much more often composed of shades of grey that vary in intensity.
       At the beginning, however, his life is shaped by the constraints imposed by the political system under which he lives, the form of communism imposed by Tito’s Yugoslavia. As is the case in any authoritarian system, the glittering prizes are very much the preserve of the system’s friends and acolytes and, as a Croat, Gašpar is on the outer in a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. This impacts on his life in ways that include education, employment, and future prospects so that he is driven to escape the tyranny that shapes his life, succeeding only by the skin of his teeth on his third attempt, an attempt that would have brought a death sentence following failure.
       He relocates to Australia, and the book from then onwards outlines his adaptations to new circumstances and accommodations as he settles into a long-desired life ‘in the West’. It is here that he encounters the first shade of grey, however, as is made plain in his reaction to the migrant camp at Bonegilla: a raw and empty land of red dirt, few trees other than eucalyptus and so far inland that the sea might as well not exist. While things do improve as he moves to more salubrious accommodation and into paid employment, less obvious constraints begin to affect him. These include the attitude of Australians to ‘Dagos’ and ‘reffos’ and the presence, even within a land so far away from the source, of Yugoslav counter-intelligence, the ‘Udba’.
       However insidiously, his very being as a Croat also becomes a constraint; it shapes his reactions to his long-cherished aspiration of ‘life in the West’ and is disguised, one suspects, as the book’s mention of the recurring ‘restlessness’ that drives him to change jobs and locations within Australia so frequently. This continues even after his move to New Zealand, a landscape that answers at least some of his yearning for the familiar geographies of his upbringing, and – ever so gradually – events in his homeland begin to consume him. This is evident both in his relationship with the ‘Yugoslav’ community in Auckland and in the wholesale adoption of his viewpoints by Suzette, who becomes Gašpar’s wife and who is, herself, a recent immigrant to New Zealand.
       It needs to be said at this point that, despite a heavy and obvious biographical slant, this book is written as a novel and so its content ought not to be challenged on historical grounds such as the conflicting claims made for the motivations of the Ustaše in its ongoing battles with the largely artificial construct known as “Yugoslavia”.
       ‘Dubrovnik, My Love’ contains some extremely perceptive analyses of mid-sixties life in both Australia and New Zealand, as those fortunate enough to have lived through those times and experiences as immigrants will doubtless attest. Both societies were raw, unsophisticated and constrained by geographical position in what was virtually a pre-television age, so that levels of sophistication familiar to Europeans in food, drink, dress and social intercourse was definitely not familiar to the indigenous despite the numbers of returned servicemen who had seen some of each.
       Paradoxically, both nations subscribed to the sanctity of individual rights and the inviolate nature of freedom of expression; yet both societies enforced a conformity of behaviour, ideals, and dress that was no less intense for being informal and ‘understood’ rather than nailed to anyone’s wall.
       Technically, the book has some egregious flaws that derive from indifferent proof-editing and/or spelling, and the first of these concerns the use throughout of “immigrate” where correct usage calls for “emigrate”. There are anachronisms, most notably the phrases “totally out of our comfort zone” and “a large learning curve” which belong to 2019 rather than 1965, as does the grab-bag word “awesome”. Finally, it was rather odd of Suzette to explain to a recent arrival in New Zealand what ‘manuka’ is without doing the same for ‘bach’; the more so as Kiwis themselves call a seaside cabin different things according to which island they live in . . .

Review by MJ Burr

Title: Dubrovnik My Love
Author: Suzanne Brooks-Pinčević
Publisher: Leon Publications
ISBN: 9780473466565
RRP: $34.99
Available: bookshops

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Crime thriller well-paced and enjoyable

1/8/2019

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One Single Thing
by Tina Clough

This crime thriller is a sequel to the same author’s book ‘The Chinese Proverb’ reviewed in May 2017 by Flaxflower.
Much of the continuing story of Hunter and Dao involves characters and events from that earlier novel and that poses problems for readers unfamiliar with it; most notably the names and influence on the story of characters and villains of the earlier work; viz Mint, John, the Boss and Bram/Bramville. A further example is that the surname of the leading character, Hunter, doesn’t appear in the first 65 pages, while Dao’s surname never does, and such omissions are irritating for a reader wishing to settle into a multi-branched and well-layered plotline.
The plot revolves around the disappearance of a successful photo-journalist from her Auckland home following her return from a fact-finding assignment involving honour killings in Pakistan. The supposition that the long arm of the Pakistani Establishment has reached out in retribution is cleverly masked when the journalist survives a terrorist attack on her way home through the active intervention of one of the terrorists. At which point New Zealand intelligence services become interested in why and wherefore, and she is placed under surveillance as possibly having terrorist links.
This doesn’t prevent her disappearance in circumstances that suggest a swift and spur-of-the-moment abduction which quickly comes to involve Hunter Grant and Dao, herself a survivor of a previous and long-lived abduction. Complicating things and drawing the odd red herring across them is the re-emergence of some of Dao’s demons from her own past and, while this muddies the waters surrounding the journalist’s abduction in providing another, if tenuous, opportunity for villainy to emerge, the journalist’s disappearance has its roots in something much simpler than either historical villainy, terrorists or Pakistani displeasure.
One Single Thing is notable for being a genuine attempt to drop a crime thriller into a New Zealand setting, and Clough is to be commended for that in full measure for it is a well-paced and enjoyable tale that moves purposefully along, even if the formality of Clough’s writing style occasionally appears at odds with the casual nature of the New Zealand vernacular.
Its central characters are a mixed bag: Noah the brother, painted as impossibly neurotic but consumed by an anxiety perfectly understandable in the circumstances; Branson, the stereotypical rumpled and creased cop whose first name we never discover; Robinson, the ‘white knight’ and the key to the whole mystery; Dao and Hunter, self-assured and almost always omniscient enough to stay ahead of the game and the other players. By comparison, Charlie, Kristen, Tyler, Matt, Willow and even the villainous John and Will receive modest brushstrokes and might have been enhanced.
There are proofreading inconsistencies: ‘kilometers’, ‘sidewalk’, ‘emmigrate’ and ‘tempter’ for ‘temper’ are a few noticeable enough to raise eyebrows but do not detract from the story.
One suspects that we will see more of Hunter Grant and Dao, and that is to be welcomed if sufficient detail is provided for readers who drop into their saga cold.

Review by MJ Burr

Title: One Single Thing
Author: Tina Clough
Publisher: Lightpool Publishing
ISBN: 9780473469139
RRP: $34.99
Available: bookshops

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A lovely fun book

27/7/2019

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There’s a Hedgehog in My Pants
by Amy Harrop & Ross Kinnaird

An engrossing title, that’s for sure, but what a draw card!
A story about a hedgehog in a little boy’s pants is certain to rock the socks off many other little boys.
It’s certainly a novel plot, and a catchy title for this picture book.
The focus is initially on the hedgehog dilemma; but where did it come from? There’s no way the boy can sit on a sofa or a chair, no way, it would appear, to dislodge this animal. The boy tries to dance it out, to shake it out and even to tempt it out with some yummy food dangling from a stick, but no... The hedgehog seems quite content to stay put where it is warm and comfortable.
However, the boy works through the problem, solving the unwelcome guest in his pants problem and the story ends with a win/win kindness.
It’s a lovely fun book.
Right from the first line, the key words are in bold type. This is a great way to help the reader emphasise that specific word and for the child listener to recognise it and join in.
The artwork is fun and robust, and even without the narrative the story flows along without a hitch.
It is suitable for both boys and girls.

Review by Susan Tarr

Title: There's a Hedgehog in My Pants
Author: Amy Harrop & Ross Kinnaird
Publisher: Scholastic
ISBN: 9781775435655
RRP: $18.99
Available: bookshop

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Novel merits close attention

22/7/2019

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Melt
by Jeff Murray

This is a novel that works well at different levels and one that merits close attention, particularly as it has as its core theme the greatest current threat to humanity’s survival.
At one level it is a simple but harrowing tale, set in the near future, of a young Pacific Island woman whose homeland is being overcome by rising sea levels. She has been charged with advocating for her people, twenty thousand of them, in dealings with the New Zealand government over negotiations for resettlement here.
Her story unfolds in a wider world beset by troubles caused by climate change. A hundred million refugees from its effects are desperately seeking a place to re-settle. Three major northern hemisphere powers – The United States, China and India – are manoeuvring for advantage in Antarctica, where the ice is gradually retreating and old agreements restricting the exploitation of resources are being abandoned.
These great powers are all looking to establish close and dominant relationships with southern hemisphere countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and South Africa, so that they can establish large-scale bases in readiness for exploiting the great southern continent as the thaw makes it increasingly habitable and its resources more readily exploitable. Meanwhile, most of Europe is turning inwards, Russia is concentrating on establishing its dominance in the Arctic regions, and the United Kingdom has aligned itself with India.
Against this background the author gives us a kaleidoscope of motives operating amongst the various interests involved. There is greed and envy, fanaticism and arrogance, and an occasional glimpse of altruism. There is also subterfuge, and there are friendships that might not be friendships at all. Yet these features are related in a way that is not in the least hysterical. Indeed, it all seems almost mundanely inevitable, as so much that is described is little more than a continuation of what we see happening today.
The big issues emerge out of the narrative; out of the journeys of the young woman protagonist as she meets with New Zealand politicians, sails with eco-activists as they attempt to disrupt Japanese whaling ships, and finally travels to Antarctica to see for herself what is happening there and to discover whether it is perhaps here that her people can find a new home for themselves. The biggest issue of all is the conflict between the necessity for whole-hearted co-operation if humanity is to have a future at all, and geo-political rivalries, competing systems, and selfish ambitions.
The Antarctic itself can be seen as an emerging new world in the broadest sense – a last chance for humanity to redeem itself and establish a society that respects all of its kind and all its fellow earth dwellers and the earth itself. Indeed, there is much in this novel that can be interpreted as being allegorical.
Yet no definitive solutions to the problems raised are offered. In this sense, the novel is not polemical. In essence, it is a tragedy concerning a young woman doing what she can or feels she must do to allow her threatened people a future; a tragedy acted out against forces, both natural and human, that are far beyond her power to control.
This is an important book and one that provokes thought and a sense of urgency. The world it depicts could well be just around the corner. It is an intensely disturbing novel that even raises doubts as to whether or not humankind are worth saving at all; but it is also an engrossing read.

Review by Tony Chapelle

Title: Melt
Author: Jeff Murray
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473470531
RRP: $35.00
Available: print:www.jeffmurraybooks.com; http://www.unitybooksonline.co.nz/nz-fiction/nz-fiction/Melt
ebook:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07S46BW9W

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Welcome history of New Zealand comedy

An intensely personal reveal

Artistic work on fine artist

Newer and long-established poets in collection

Biography tells two stories

Engaging story on a difficult topic

Perceptive analyses of mid-sixties life

Crime thriller well-paced and enjoyable

A lovely fun book

Novel merits close attention

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