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Fun frolic in picture book

29/11/2016

Squeakopotamus
by Dawn McMillan and illustrator Ross Kinnaird

Squeakopotamus is another fun, frolicking picture book from author Dawn McMillan and illustrator Ross Kinnaird – the team that brought us I Need a New Bum! and, with another, Why Do Dogs Sniff Bottoms?
The mischievous mix of mouse and hippopotamus will really appeal to children.
The text is reinforced by bright, playful illustrations with hidden giggles all of their own. They blend beautifully with big, colourful word art, encouraging active reading and participation in the story, and supporting the imaginative tone.
The text has a conversational, enjoyable approach to rhyme and rhythm, making the story jump up from the page right along with Squeakopotamus!
Discover the terrific troubles of having this larger than life pet (from feeding to simply fitting in!) and see how a rainy day can work out well for everybody in the end.
Read it aloud with all the energy, actions and expression that the writing and layout inspire, and this book will be a real hoot (or perhaps a squeak!) for the whole family.

Review by Jenny Palmer

Title: Squeakopotamus
Author: Dawn McMillan
Illustrations: Ross Kinnaird
Publisher: Oratia Books
ISBN: 978-0-947506-11-7
RRP: $19.99
Available: bookshops

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Beautiful publication

25/11/2016

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Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand: The Maori Portraits
Edited by Ngahiraka Mason and Zara Stanhope

What a stunning volume!
For those of us who have grown up aware of the artistic legacy of Gottfried Lindauer, it is a joy to find this appreciation of his life and works presented in such a way.
The large-format (310 x 206 mm), hard covered, 284 page book is a beautiful publication divided into three parts.
Part 1 is made up of 54 pages of a series of essays by experts – Patu Hohepa, Rhana Devenport, Elizabeth Ellis, Ngahiraka Mason, Zara Stanhope, Aleš Filip, Roman Musil, and Leonard Bell. Each contributes their tribute to and discussion of the New Zealand portfolio of this Austrian-born artist. From these, anyone not formerly aware of his work can learn how much we owe to his pictorial record of the people of this country, produced over more than four decades from the 1870s.
Lindauer is of course best known here for his portraits of Maori of the period, and these are what makes up Part 2 of the volume.
Sixty-seven plates are beautifully presented, one portrait per page, with a description (by Ngahiraka Mason, or Nigel Borell) of the subject and some background, on the facing page.
The best-known of these will be immediately recognized by a large proportion of New Zealanders. Some, such as those of Tamati Waka Nene (cover pic), Eruera Maihi Patuone, Wiremu Tamihana, Tawhiao Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero, Rewi Manga Maniapoto, Hamiora Tu, Te Ua Haumene Horopapera Tuwhakararo and more, have been reproduced in many works of history in the years since.
The same is true of the wahine mana and wahine toa included, such as Rangi Topeora, Huria Matenga Ngarongoa, Pare Watene, Pikirakau, Te Paea Hinerangi, and Heeni Hirini whose image the artist repeated over and over.
Without Lindauer’s paintings we would have no likeness of most of his subjects.
A further 8 plates present his scenes of Maori life and customs, which are perhaps even more reproduced and well-known.
Part 3 extends the appreciation of the artist’s works beyond New Zealand, through a series of further essays on his photography and paintings of European subjects, his techniques, and chronology – these contributed by Ute Larsen, Jane Davidson-Ladd, Sarah Hillary, Chanel Clarke, Ngarino Ellis, Kahutoi Te Kanawa, Ngahiraka Mason, and Caroline McBride.
A glossary, notes, select bibliography, acknowledgements, and notes on contributors complete this handsome volume, which is a splendid addition to the library of anyone with any degree of interest in the art or the history of New Zealand.

Review by Paua Blue

Title: Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand: The Maori Portraits
Editors: Ngahiraka Mason, Zara Stanhope
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 856 5
RRP: $75
Available: bookshops

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Honouring the huia

21/11/2016

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12 Huia Birds
by Julian Stokoe
with illustrations by Stacy Eyles

12 Huia Birds tells a sad history of Aotearoa through the dwindling into extinction of our native huia bird.
As their numbers count down, the story is told in lush, colourful illustrations and verse, with sometimes flighty rhythm and rhyme, and lovely, truly emotive imagery.
The mood, tone and light are marvellously captured in the pictures and there are standout descriptions in the text like:
4 huia birds
flee to the misty hills.
Soft flute songs of loss and sadness
warble from their bills.
   The structure of counting down the poor huia page by page, along with the visual and described threats brought by humans, animals and progress, really brings their extinction home and is a good reminder in the world today.
   The accompanying app (free for download on both Apple and Android devices) is a gorgeous addition. It's wonderfully illustrated with lots of interesting huia facts, visuals and sounds and even offers three versions of a memory game.
     This hardback picture book is a special way to encourage New Zealand children to talk about conservation and the stories of our past, and to honour the huia with an uplifting ending to their tragic tale.

Review by Jenny Palmer

Title: 12 Huia Birds
Author: Julian Stokoe
Illustrator: Stacy Eyles
Publisher: Oratia Books
ISBN: 978-0-947506-12-4
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops

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Ethical issues in alien murder mystery

15/11/2016

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The Forbidden Gene
Book 2 in the Ryxin Trilogy
by Genesis Cotterell

The Forbidden Gene opens with a crime scene that is both normal and futuristic. Normal in that the victim is a woman: she has been stabbed and her estranged husband is the prime suspect. But futuristic because, before they even enter the house the police have flashed their I-Finder at the house and know instantly who the occupants are. Once inside, they scan a microchip in the victim’s neck and immediately learn everything about her. And so we are drawn into the dangerous world of a half-blood Ryxin-human woman whose microchip describes her security status as ‘high risk’.
Private investigator Curtis McCoy is engaged by the victim’s son to prove his father’s innocence. As McCoy, himself a half-blood, moves into the case with his half-blood trainee-assistant Janux Lennan, it becomes evident that although the victim’s husband certainly had motive – rage at her having left him – it is highly probable that there is something much more sinister behind the death.
For the benefit of readers who haven’t already met Curtis and Janux in Murder on Muritai, Book 1 of the Ryxin Trilogy, Cotterell recaps the perils of life on the otherwise idyllic island. The descendants of the original Ryxin settlers who came to Earth from their own endangered planet in 1905 should all be at least half-bloods or neutral by now. However, a group of rebels have refused to mate with Humans and these people are intent on building up sufficient numbers of pure-blooded Ryxins so that they can gain supremacy over the Humans. At the same time the rebels have realised that some Ryxin women have inherited a gene which gives them special powers: these women must be eliminated.
In Murder on Muritai, Curtis was newly qualified as an investigator, and still feeling his way to a certain extent. In The Forbidden Gene he is much more focussed. Furthermore, when his mind wanders onto another case that he’s interested in, Janux is there to keep him on track and more or less sober. Cotterell has therefore ramped up the pace in this second book, largely thanks to Janux’s role as Curtis’s dedicated assistant.
At the same time, as this is a slightly bizarre murder mystery in that the victim is part alien, Cotterell has entwined it with some disturbing issues which would once have seemed pure sci-fi but are now closer to reality: ethnic cleansing, selective breeding programmes, gene manipulation, microchip surveillance. Then there is the question of what we Humans have lost by becoming ever more urban and sophisticated: telepathic communication and levitation are just two of the powers that Ryxins have retained and which give them an edge over Humans.
The Forbidden Gene cruises along at the murder mystery level, but I found it really niggling away at my subconscious on a deeper, ethical level. As an ‘alien’ – a New Zealander living in Italy: a non-European – I have had my fingerprints registered by the police for the last 20 years, as a prerequisite of living legally in Europe. Ten years from now when I’ll have to update my status, I’m wondering if it will be via microchip rather than fingerprints. With this in mind, and knowing how many of Cotterell’s readers will abhor the idea of even carrying an identity card, I feel Cotterell has dealt very aptly once again with some of our world’s troubling ethical dilemmas.
The Forbidden Gene ends with Curtis still fretting over another case that involves him personally: solving it will see his already complicated relationship with Janux stretched to the limits, and I look forward to seeing how Cotterell with deal with this in Book 3.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie
Writer, freelance proofreader, copy editor, and translator from Italian to English.
Carolyn kindly offers accommodation at reasonable ratesfor FlaxFlower writers
in Thames (Waikato) and Ventimiglia Alta (Liguria, Italy ). [email protected]

ED NOTE: Murder on Muritai, Book 1 in the Ryxin Trilogy, was reviewed on this page on 13 July this year. Access the review via Archives July 2016 on right sidebar.

Title: The Forbidden Gene
Author: Genesis Cotterell
Publisher: P M Hayes (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 978-047-336-7862
ASIN: B01KH1WXY2
Available: Amazon Kindle as an e-book

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Complex issues of an ancestor river

8/11/2016

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Tupuna Awa: People and Politics of the Waikato River
by Marama Muru-Lanning

The title, Tupuna Awa, is key to the content of this book. To the people who identify closely with it, the Waikato river is not Te Awa Tupuna, merely their ancestral river, but Tupuna Awa – a tribal ancestor, their River Ancestor.
The author, Dr Marama Muru-Lanning, an anthropologist with both personal and academic expertise in the subject, is ideally suited to produce this learned and readable account of competing discourses to do with this important waterway.
It is a book that deserves to be read widely, for its explanations of attitudes, political stances and positions regarding complex issues that that have involved the river in recent times, including a history of claims and outcomes.
     On the latter, there is detailed description of key events – such as the dynamics of the public signing ceremony of the 2008 Deed of Settlement in Relation to the Waikato River, and the later pan-tribal water hui at Turangawaewae.
     Readers less interested in the specifics of legislation regarding recent schemes to do with te awa, and wanting elaboration on feelings involved, will gain from content that deals with the different cultural/ethical aspects of Dr Muru-Lanning’s research. This includes the reconciling of the spiritual and academic approaches. As such, it could be a useful preparatory text for anyone engaged in formal or more casual study of landscape, history and politics.
For general readers, probably the majority of New Zealanders, chapters 3 and 4 particularly provide background information about key issues at the basis of discussions – most importantly, tribal identity as opposed to the politics of commercial interests. “Mapping River Culture” gives a summary of the river from geographical, tribal, spiritual, historical, political, mythological, and commercial viewpoints.
     In “Different Understandings of ‘Owning’ the Waikato River’, there is explanation of Maori viewpoints and English-based law.
Maps, diagrams, and sixteen pages of coloured photos support the text.
     Overall, this is a book that meets several needs. It is an academic study that is fully supported by detail provided in appendices, glossary, extensive scholarly references, and index. At the same time it is accessible to a broader readership of those who wish to gain more understanding of ongoing debate about New Zealand’s longest river.

Review by Paua Blue

Title: Tupuna Awa: People and Politics of the Waikato River
Author: Marama Muru-Lanning
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869408503
RRP: $49.99
Available: bookshops

Comments

Fun frolic in picture book

Beautiful publication

Honouring the huia

Ethical issues in alien murder mystery

Complex issues of an ancestor river

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