Flaxroots Productions - FlaxFlower

A Pleasure to Read

7/2/2026

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.

Review by Harold Bernard

Title: In With Both Feet: A Passport Full of Stories
Author: John Reynolds
Publisher: Starblaze Publications
ISBN: 978-0-473-76635-1
RRP: $39.50
Available: print and eBook – Amazon, & selected retail outlets

Marine crime mystery written with sensitivity

8/1/2026

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.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie

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

Auto-biographical journey of a mountain-climber

19/12/2025

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.

Review by SA Boyce

Title: KIM: A Journey Between Worlds
Author: Kim Rangiaonui Logan
Publisher: Ugly Hill Press
ISBN: 9781067086510
RRP: $55
Available: bookshops

Intriguing murder mystery set at sea

12/12/2025

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.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie

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

Excellent writing in highly engaging stories

3/12/2025

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.

Review by Jane Shearer

Title: Obligate Carnivore and other stories
Author: Stephanie Johnson
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9781991103369
RRP: $35
Available: bookshops

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/

Crime fiction at its best

25/11/2025

Softly Calls the Devil
by Chris Blake

What happens when an old detective, after year of stress and burnout, transfers to the small township of Haast to spend his remaining years in peace and quiet?
He ends up with the murder of his predecessor followed by an unexpected suicide on his doorstep, of course.
His C.I.B. training kicks in as he investigates both incidences and this leads him down the path of historic crimes that include disappearances, gangs and drug running. All of these combine to make this the most gripping crime story, with the added bonus of it being set in parts of the South Island of New Zealand. Areas that are so familiar to many.
I found the short, well written chapters very appealing. They draw you in and hold you causing the reviewer to read well into the night.
Chapter 1 begs the question, what was in the boot of the car that was so horrific it caused the two policemen to have such a severe reaction? Stay with it, the answer will come when you least expect it.
There's also the missing backpacker that is reminiscent of a real New Zealand historic crime. All of the twists and turns throughout the book will hold your attention until you reach the action packed finale.
Softly Calls the Devil is crime fiction at its best. It is a great read and would make a fantastic Christmas present.

Review by Merilyn Mary

Title: Softly Calls the Devil
Author: Chris Blake
Publisher: Echo Publishing
ISBN: 9781786585400
RRP: $36.99
Available: bookshops

Quartet for literary readers

13/11/2025

Angel Train – Four Novellas
by Elizabeth Smither

The novella form, in my opinion, should be selected by authors more often. Longer than a short story, much shorter than the novel, they can pack as much meaning and effect into this reduced form with the advantage of avoiding the padding, tedious detail, and surfeit of characters that detract from many longer works of fiction.
That comment aside, the four stories that make up this 216-page volume are not told simply. It is a quartet for literary readers; each is rich in language, imagery and allusion, with references to literature, art, music, theatre. They reflect the wide reading and knowledge of their author.
Each of the stories – between 43 and 59 pages – could have been lengthened to become novels, but this would have been to their detriment. What is told is enough.
They shift in their settings.
In ‘The Glass-sided Hearse’, an English author and a visiting New Zealand poet combine in a literary tour.
‘The Highwayman’, reveals the lives of the title character as well as three women in Tasmania – a bereaved shop owner, a single woman who nursed her mother to her end, and one who resumes a childhood friendship with the ‘highwayman’ after being seduced into crime by another man. Though I wondered about the timing of Kiwi-produced products instant coffee and hokey pokey ice cream appearing in this location in the period, the characters are well-drawn and believable.
Then in ‘Castle Nevers’ we’re in France, and England again, with twin tales of couples whose marriages are tested by his infidelity, with different outcomes.
In the fourth, ‘Kidnapped’, we come closer to home – to the village of Triple Peaks where the Northern Explorer stops for refreshments at the station café. Three regular visitors to the town find themselves intrigued by an unlikely couple next door.
Together, the stories have common themes of literacy, the reading of classics and poetry, relationships of different kinds, while favouring the lives of women. People portrayed are mainly honest, relying on good values to guide them on their journey through life; and here, I assume, lies the key to the unexplained title of the collection.
The novellas are not light reading, concentration is needed to avoid going back to recheck details. (Are Millie and Minnie the same person?) However, they are admirably crafted and worth any effort made.

Review by Bronwyn Elsmore

Title: Angel Train
Author: Elizabeth Smither
Publisher: Quentin Wilson
ISBN: 9781991103383
RRP: $37.50
Available: bookshops

Biography of idiosyncratic musician

23/10/2025

Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly
by Craig Robertson

If ever one could judge the content of the book by its cover it would have to be this biography of Chris Knox. First there is the photograph of the subject, involving one of Knox’s most impish and silly grins. Then there is the title, with “Not Given Lightly” being his most well-known song, devoted to the mother of his children. The inside of the cover has Knox’s cartoon depiction of life up to the age of 47: in this he draws a highlight in a box for each year of his life, but most seem to involve females.
So if Knox portrays himself as a musician and artist who does not take himself too seriously, do we get a book that should be taken seriously? It certainly is a comprehensive catalogue of all of Chris Knox’s artistic endeavours and pop cultural criticism. From the early 1980s to his catastrophic stroke in 2009, Knox cultivated an iconic status in local popular culture.
  Craig Robertson is an enthusiast for the Flying Nun label, and has diligently examined all of his subject’s prodigious recordings, it might even be an oeuvre. Robertson could have been more analytical, if not critical, but doesn’t really want to detract from the creativity. So what we get is an aesthetic package of Knox’s life and times.
  Robertson’s main interest is obviously the music, especially with Knox being a key player in the Dunedin sound, and a major figure in the Flying Nun Records story. Knox is indeed a Southern man, having grown up in Invercargill, and gravitating to the cold Dunedin student flats that spawned the ‘indie rock’ that became iconic. Knox was a punk with attitude in The Enemy; an effective songwriter and frontman for Toy Love; and the mainstay of the duo Tall Dwarfs with long-time collaborator Alec Bathgate. But this is not the same as being a professional musician. Robertson quotes Simon Morris, then working for Radio With Pictures, saying in 1982 that the Dunedin music was “badly played through horrible equipment.” It was, of course, seen as ‘underground’, and was not intended to be fully professional, but just being “interesting and alive” doesn’t make it artistically successful.
  Knox had always seen his “shambling amateurism” as a virtue, in contrast to slick professionalism, but he still had to make a living. And his timing was good, as he came back from Sydney in 1980 to settle in Auckland. Although he was working for Flying Nun Records, he also had to find other gigs to get by, especially after his two children came along. Luckily, his pop cultural cachet and connections meant that he was able to get regular music reviews in mainstream publications, like The Listener, after being anointed by Gordon Campbell as the rock music columnist, and then the author of the “Rant” column. He also published regular cartoons in the New Zealand Herald, and for music publications like Rip It Up. Robertson adds Knox’s contributions to other, short-lived, music and cultural magazines, and later appearances on some forgettable TV art magazine-type programmes.
  So Knox has been given many opportunities in local media outlets, in the era when music and pop culture activities were significant. His dogged enthusiasm and iconoclastic status also received some recognition from international musicians, as highlighted in the photograph of a grinning Knox in between Deborah Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie fame. But his combative personality, and what Robertson calls his “bullet-proof ego”, also included irascible and sometimes harsh criticism of his peers, and personal insensitivity to friends. But all was forgiven in the end, and Knox continues to create art, including the cartoon depicting the experience of his stroke, as idiosyncratic as ever.

Review by S A Boyce

Title: Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly
Author: Craig Robertson
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409838
RRP: $59.99
Available: bookshops

10 poets produce stimulating read

15/10/2025

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.

Review by Vaughan Rapatahana
(Te Ātiawa)

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

Fantasy tale for junior readers

6/10/2025

Zephyr Follows the Stars
by Linley Edmeades

Witches (good), wizards (bad), abducted women held captive in a castle – the storyline is heavy though this fantasy tale for junior readers is told simply.
Ten year old Zephyr, her father and uncle, with help from the witches, hitch the horse to the wagon and set out on a quest to find and recover her mother and other women taken by force by the Wind Wizards.
Throughout their journey they must repel attacks by giant sea hawks, wind storms of glass sand (both agents of the wizards), then navigate further hazards such as cave, volcano and more which impede their progress. But there’s positive magic also to help the trio, in the form of crystal talismans, a dog, plant, and magic key provided by the witches.
Despite the fact that the women, when rescued, appear to be relatively unharmed and the only reference to any reason given is that they had to cook for the wizards, the subject of women’s abduction is a very disturbing one, particularly in a book for junior readers.
This book of 115 pages is very nicely presented. It is marked as Book One so there are apparently more to come in a series.

Review by Jacqui Lynne

Title: Zephyr Follows the Stars
Author: Linley Edmeades
Publisher: YourBooks
ISBN: 9781067017705
RRP: $18.00
Available: bookshops