Title: The Art of Colonisation: Images of Europe’s Encounters with New Zealand 
Author: Paul Moon
Publisher: Ugly Hill Press
ISBN: 9781738583690
RRP: $55
Available: bookshops
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​In With Both Feet: A Passport Full of Stories
by John Reynolds

In With Both Feet is an autobiography of John Reynolds, telling of several aspects of his life and career. From his school days, where he barely achieved sufficient marks to be accepted into teachers training college, to graduating with a doctorate after a lifetime of learning.
     The book is easy to read, and held my attention very well.
     ​ The first part especially resonated with me, as it is concerned with travel and working in many parts of the world, including Poland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Canada. I did something similar to him, buying an old car in the UK and driving it on the Continent, though my trip was 8 years after his, and did not include any Iron Curtain countries. I too attended a high school where caning was commonplace. 
     He had a talent for playing the piano, which he put to good use playing in pubs in London. He was able to combine his musical talent with film making, teaching and music. 
John returned from Canada with a near new Camaro, which was quite radical for New Zealand in the 1960’s; this car was put to good use as a prop in films.
     This phase of his life was concerned with raising a family and furthering his career in musicals and film making. He achieved significant success with both of these pursuits, making friends with many notable leaders in these fields. The schools he guided through films and music won several national awards.
     He also fulfilled a life-long ambition to obtain a university education, ending with a PhD from the University of Auckland. His thesis was on the work of John O’Shea.
     There are photos placed throughout the book, and these add to the interest of the narrative. 
     The book is well written, and a pleasure to read, I am happy to recommend it to anyone.

​The Boat Shed, 
by Robyn Cotton

If The Boat Shed were an item on the TV news or in a newspaper, it would come with a warning: Some viewers/readers may find this content disturbing.
     And the content of The Boat Shed is disturbing. The story revolves around the importation of children to service an apparently flourishing sex industry in Auckland. When a dead girl is found in a Rangitoto Island boat shed and another is found drowned a short distance away, Detective Frank Smythe of Auckland’s Maritime Police is called in to investigate. The girls’ autopsies reveal prolonged deprivation and sexual abuse. Frank works with Detective Anahera Raupara from the CIB in a bid to identify the girls (aged 10 and 12 and both Nepali) and discover who is responsible for their deaths. 
     The investigation is both land and sea based. There are raids on illegal brothels, an adult nightclub, container ships and shady import companies. As well, Frank Smythe looks into the yachting community that frequents the bays around Rangitoto Island and studies tides and currents to determine how the deaths are connected. Solving this is a huge operation and The Boat Shed shows how, especially where children are involved, a number of investigative units will put their rivalries aside and work as a team to see the perpetrators punished.
     Robyn Cotton’s knowledge of Nepal and the work being done there to save vulnerable children from being trafficked in the sex trade has inspired this book and it has been written with great sensitivity while at the same time the police work moves along at a good pace. Cotton reports that, according to India Today, 50 Nepali women are trafficked every day.
     As a convenient sub-story line, Anahera discovers that her teenage son has been exploring pornography with his school mates, giving Cotton the means to drum home the evils of sexual exploitation.
     ​So yes, The Boat Shed’s theme is disturbing, and all the characters involved in the investigation are justifiably upset and angered by what they discover, and highly motivated to solve the mystery. However, at times I found their indignation and sorrow somewhat laboured and repetitive. Less frequent expressions of grief and disgust would make this a tighter, more compact read.

Title: The Boat Shed
Author: Robyn Cotton
Publisher: Hatherop Books 
ISBN: 978-0-473-74739-8
RRP: $34.95
Available: https://hatheropbooks.wordpress.com
​

Kim - A Journey Between Worlds 
by Kim Rangiaonui Logan

Kim Logan is one of New Zealand’s most experienced mountain climbers, but is not well known outside of the climbing fraternity and in the film industry. The auto-biographical journey he describes is literal – he has climbed some of the highest peaks in the Himalayas as well as in New Zealand – and also highlights how a Maori boy emerges from a European society and education. 
    The product of what used to be called an ‘inter-racial marriage’, he had a difficult childhood, and attended many schools across the North Island, before finding his feet in South Island adventures.
     The book attempts to make an impact partly through its design: the title KIM is in vertical bold, black letters on the front cover, and stands out from a distance. Highlighted text appears in a large font size, which then take up a whole page. These begin with a quote, attributed to Ernest Hemingway, to the effect that the only real sports are those that involve the risk of losing life. This might set the tone, but the design and typography in the body text don’t always help achieve a sense of narrative. Most chapters have text in a completely different typeface which interpose childhood memories into the mountaineering stories. It is obviously a way of breaking up a conventional narrative, but the problem is that there is no continuity in the story, and the book isn’t written in chronological order.
      These problems are clear in the third chapter, ‘A White Nightmare’. This involves a climb up the K2 mountain in 1995, where a New Zealand party led by Peter Hillary meets up with experienced Spanish climbers, and a mixed group then reach the summit. But none of them makes it back to base camp alive, and another Kiwi climber who returns in a blizzard then dies of hypothermia in the night. The book includes photos from this expedition, including a group shot of the New Zealanders, their Nepalese cooks, and the English climber, Alison Hargreaves. But of the climbers in the group photo, seen with their aluminium plates being used as frisbees, only Logan and Hillary lived to tell the tale.
      Logan included an obituary to his friend, Bruce Grant, who he had introduced to climbing. But many other friends are lost in other climbs, with their bodies then left in crevices in the Himalayan mountains, or lost in the Southern Alps. Reading this in the same week as two more climbers die on Mt Cook, it can only been concluded that mountaineering involves going beyond risk-taking, and into tempting fate, relying on luck for survival. This may be a great New Zealand calling, but the author seems to suggest that having an emotionally deprived childhood somehow insulates him from the continual human suffering he is involved in, even when his own siblings have died young overseas.

Title: KIM: A Journey Between Worlds 
Author: Kim Rangiaonui Logan
Publisher: Ugly Hill Press
ISBN: 9781067086510
RRP: $55
Available: bookshops
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The Jibe, 
by Robyn Cotton

Sailing back to Auckland after a few days on Great Barrier Island, Dean Hampton is lost overboard. His wife, Ella, is the only crew member and her mayday call sets a search in motion. Several days later Dean’s body is found with significant injuries probably caused by a propeller blade and a head injury which ties in with Ella’s account of Dean being hit on the head by the boom as the yacht changed direction. The coroner’s decision that it was an accident is widely accepted, although anyone who knew Dean is surprised that he wasn’t wearing a life jacket. Among the mourners at the loved and respected dentist’s funeral are his sister Amy and Frank Smythe who had sailed with Dean many years ago. Now, as a detective in Auckland’s Maritime Police Unit, Frank also accepts that it was an accident until Amy contacts him to say there are some things which don’t add up. Could it have been murder?
     What follows unwinds as a cunningly constructed plot which seesaws between the certainty that Ella must be innocent to no, she must be guilty, but then how did she do it? I can imagine readers with a sailing background joining Frank in calculating how winds and tides impacted the marine tragedy.
      The story clips along at a good pace and is hard to put down, with any hint of the solution held back until the very last pages. 
      Sailing on the Hauraki Gulf is central to the story but the terminology is so well explained that non-sailors won’t have any trouble understanding what supposedly happened and what really happened. Great Barrier Island, Waiheke, Westhaven Marina and Sea Cleaners all play their part in this mystery along with the police launch Deodar III. The concept of setting a lot of the action in the Gulf rather than onshore is a refreshing novelty.
      The Jibe is a novel about Kiwis doing things that we can all relate to: in spite of not being close to her sister-in-law, Amy puts her all into catering for the visitors who flock to Ella’s place to pay their respects after Dean is killed. Amy is less stoic than Ella – her grief is heightened by her young-onset Parkinson’s disease and the book discreetly informs readers of what living with this illness is like and answers some FAQs about it.
      Given the essentially kiwi nature of this novel, I was at first puzzled by Cotton’s choice of jibe rather than the British English gybe to describe the fatal manoeuvre. There isn’t a lot of US English in the book, so when there is, it grates – turn off the faucet, instead of tap. 
      However, jibe has other meanings besides the sailing one and these sit well with how the plot unfolds. To jibe with means to agree with and as the story moves along, various accounts and theories of what happened to Dean certainly don’t jibe with each other. As well, to make a jibe at means to taunt and there is plenty of that in the lies and the surprising truths that lay a false trail throughout. 
     ​ The Jibe is Cotton’s first book in the crime fiction genre and I’m looking forward to reading more from her.

Title: The Jibe
Author: Robyn Cotton
Publisher: Hatherop Books
ISBN: 978-0-473-70886-3
RRP: $34.95
Available: hatheropbooks.wordpress.com
​

Obligate Carnivore and other stories
by Stephanie Johnson

I won’t forget Obligate Carnivore anytime soon! Stephanie Johnson’s writing is excellent and her stories highly engaging. 
     The headline story, Obligate Carnivore, is about a cat called Gareth Morgan whose teeth are removed to stop him eating wildlife. Gareth falls into a decline so his owner gets him a set of false, human, teeth. This story reflects the tone of the book and is reflected by the cover. Many of the stories are macabre. And the cover is disturbing, striking, or weird, depending on your perspective.
     The other aspect of the book’s cover that is being highlighted in the media is the role of AI in its creation. This has resulted in Obligate Carnivore being declared ineligible for the  Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize of Fiction in the Ockham NZ Book Awards. Use of AI in the creative arts is a highly contentious issue. The decision to exclude books with any AI-generated content was intended to signal the scale of threat of AI to the book industry and the importance of human design in every aspect of books. Will use of AI-enhanced writing tools, such as Grammarly and ProWriting Aid, be next in the firing line?
      The stories cover so many types of people, different ages, sex, backgrounds, values. I’m in awe of Stephanie’s ability to imagine such diversity in a very credible way. She looks into the little things that happen in life which are emblematic, or trigger points for major shifts in perspective.
     ​ Stephanie’s stories are insightful and clever. She makes her points from oblique angles – you don’t see them coming. Stephanie communicates universal narratives while setting her fiction in known places – New Zealand, particularly Auckland, and Sydney. Some themes are recurrent, such as marriage, divorce, and the nature of love, addiction, cats, aging, and environmental threats. 
     ​ Stephanie highlights the peculiarities of humans in a sympathetic and humorous way in a book that is very much worth reading. I look forward to a future short story where Stephanie might take on the boundaries between creativity, AI, and human endeavour and rewrite where they lie. 

LATER NOTE
       Since this review was published, The New Zealand Book Awards Trust has announced that two books previously disallowed because their covers were originated using AI, in contravention of the awards’ entry criteria, can be considered by the judges of the fiction category of the 2026 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
    This ruling applies to the above book, Obligate Carnivore, and Angel Train by Elizabeth Smither – see the review 13 November, below.
    For further details, see 
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/05/ai-cover-ban-overturned-for-book-awards/

Title: Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly
Author: Craig Robertson
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409838
RRP: $59.99
Available: bookshops
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Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa 
Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill, Robert Sullivan (eds)
 
I found this a stimulating read, a read that I recommmed dipping into, sampling a variegated potpourri of pieces, of poets per se. Rather than attempting to view through from go to whoa, eh. More of which later.
      Who are the ten ‘new’ poets selected here? Sam Duckor-Jones, Tayi Tibble, Claudia Jardine, essa may ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes, Chris Tse, Oscar Upperton, Joanna Cho, Ruby Solly, Nafanua Purcell Kersel. The editors make it quite clear early on that this is a somewhat arbitrary selection of contemporary Aotearoa poetic talent, ‘Other poets...could as easily have been selected’ page 8).   They further note that, ‘The ten we have chosen began publishing their work relatively recently and have done so to significant acclaim’ (pp. 8-9), although I could quibble and state that Chris Tse is hardly a ‘new poet’, given that the editors do rationalise his selection in their He Kupu Whakataki/Intoduction.
      For each of the ten an essay extolling and – to various degrees of intensive critical analysis – exemplifying via extracts, has been prepared by a further ten aficionado critics, primarily academics based in two of this country’s universities. Indeed, paralleling the critics’ employment locale, the vast majority of the poets’ collections have been published by either Te Herenga Waka University Press or Auckland University Press.
      More, each poet themselves has penned – at different lengths – a sort of vision encapsulating their own motivation, and each of these is mounted in a much larger font after a selection of their poetry, and just prior to the critical scrutiny. All the poets except Tayi Tibble that is. Just like the examinatory essays, these poets’ statements of intent vary in size and style. I really like essa may ranapiri’s sparse and sincere spiel – ‘All my words are just some more bullshit to deny the colonial destruction of our culture’ (page 90). Others meander somewhat.
      The critical exegeses also vary in tone. Several are intense, intensive line by line x-rays of a poet’s – sometimes sole - collection and may well require more than one reading of a passage as to understand exactly a classical reference that has been employed, and why. Others are less scholarly and fully adhere to what Robert Sullivan so clearly states is the overriding purpose of this significant collection, namely, ‘The intention of this book is to draw literary and scholarly attention to new and young writers’ (page 60). Sullivan does exactly that in his own personalised approach to the toikupu of Tibble, whereby he draws in his own life as impacted by the poet, ‘reading poetry personally runs the risk of subsuming a more interesting text to the mundacity of one’s own expetriences’ (page 64). A couple of other critiques do likewise, such as Robin Peter’s nuanced appraisal of Ruby Solly.
       What we have then, as noted above, is a somewhat variegated array of poets and their voices, and commentators and their critiques. A bit of a lucky dip. All good, though, because a reader will freshly discover a poet they know little about, or a review that makes them want to read a poet much more, such as David Eggleton’s illuminating essay about the powerful poetry of Nafanua Purcell Kersel. An essay which, by the way, references the recent collection of contemporary Pasifika poetry titled Katūīvei published by Massey University Press, but which is  not mentioned earlier by the editors on page 14 where they adumbrate several ‘recent fine anthologies that have gathered diverse communities, diverse voices’.
      Penultimately also, I want to praise the two chapters which precede the individual poet perambulations, namely on Potlucks and Poetry: the New Generation of Aotearoa Poets by Amy Maguerite, which is a cogent exposition of recent journals, and the excellent viscerally viewable Visual Poetry: Between Feeling and Form by Tru Paraha. Well-done, I say.
      This then is a gallant gallimaufry worth sampling. For the editors are honest in their statement, ‘This is not a map of poetry in Aotearoa now, nor an encyclopedia or any other sort of exhaustive coverage. This is one account, and there will be dropped stitches we have missed along the way’ (page 14). Fair enough, given that the exponential explosions of small poetry presses have not been referenced much throughout. Te Whāriki, aka the entire carpet mesh of contemporary New Zealand kaitito, would have to be at least the double the size, and it is to everyones’ credit that this anthology is at the very least, an invigorating skinny-dip.
      Which is where I began.

Title: Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa 
Editors: Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill, Robert Sullivan
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711314
RRP: $39.99
Available: bookshops
​