Tag Archives: fiction

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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Life after Life cover imageLife After Life by Kate Atkinson, Random House NZ, RRP $36.99, ISBN 9780385618687, Available now.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

11 February 1910, a baby girl is born dead with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, the doctor stuck in snow.

11 February 1910, a baby girl is born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, the doctor has made it through the snow to ensure she breaths her first. And so we meet Ursula (“little bear”), whose life after life we will follow. Ursula is a soul afloat in life, beholden to the dangers of one small choice, one small change that can spell her end. She is born dead, she drowns, she falls out a window, she gets influenza – there are a myriad ways to die but each time she does it’s 11 February 1910 again and it’s snowing.

Oh, how I loved this book! At first thought the premise didn’t seem like one I would enjoy but Kate Atkinson handles it so incredibly deftly that I found myself completely drawn in to Ursula’s lives, shocked each time she died, waiting to see how she would get through the next life, the choice she would make that would see her navigate the danger.

Atkinson is also a master of characters, hers are so beautifully drawn. She makes sure her characters are human, likeable, dislikeable and capable of so many emotions.

“To war? You are going to war?” she had shouted at him when he enlisted and it struck her that she had never shouted at him before. Perhaps she should have.

If there was to be a war, Hugh explained to her, he didn’t want to look back and know that he had missed it, that others had stepped forward for their country’s honour and he had not. “It may be the only adventure I ever have,” he said.

“Adventure?” she echoed in disbelief. “What about your children, what about your wife?”

“But it’s for you that I am doing this,” he said, looking exquisitely pained, a misunderstood Theseus. Sylvie disliked him intensely in that moment.

There’s also a generous amount of humour throughout Life After Life. Ursula struggles through the Influenza epidemic following WW1, dying several times before she finally finds a way to avoid contagion, and it becomes almost slapstick.

Darkness, and so on.

Then Atkinson hits you between the eyes with a moment so touching, so human you just thinking about weeping.

“We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.”

“And if we are killed?”

“Then others must remember us.”

Such a tour de force.

My Book Watch for the NZ Herald on Sunday, 21 October 2012

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Naked Truth coverNaked Truth: Lifting the lid on the New Zealand sex industry

By Rachel Francis (Penguin, $35)

An engaging and eye-opening social history of the New Zealand sex and adult entertainment industry, this is a fascinating read that tells the stories of several figures from the industry, from Flora MacKenzie of Famous Flora’s to Steve Crowe of Boobs on Bikes furores. Rachel Francis writes with an insider’s view, treating her subjects with honesty and admiration, letting them tell their own stories.

Greyhound

By Sid Marsh (Wooden Shed, $39.99)

As a reader I can tell when an author has gone above and beyond the call of duty for researching their books, and Greyhound is one of those. A compelling, strange war novel, written in thick Kiwi slang and focusing on a Kiwi tanker crew at the end of WWII, it is a difficult but ultimately rewarding read, filled with period detail of New Zealand and Italy.

Alex

By Tessa Duder (Whitcoulls, $19.99)

A fantastic new edition of one of New Zealand’s most beloved young adult books, Alex is still a great read after 25 years. It focuses on a wonderfully Kiwi heroine, Alex, who is trying to balance teenage life and love with trying to qualify for the swimming events at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games. I loved reading Alex again, almost as much as I loved reading it in 1989! A piece of New Zealand literary history.

Catching Fish coverCatching Fish

My Dad’s a Dragon Catcher

By Tanya Batt (Clean Slate Press, $19.99)

Educational publishers Clean Slate Press have launched a new imprint with new titles, including these two fantastic picture books from Tanya Batt. Catching Fish (illustrated by Natalia Vasquez) is a great read-aloud romp with beautiful collage-like illustrations, while My Dad’s a Dragon Catcher is full of colourful cartoonish illustrations and has the cutest heart-warming story. Perfect bed time story books.

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Reprinted courtesy of the NZ Herald on Sunday.

Book Review: Two Little Boys by Duncan Sarkies

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Two Little Boys cover imageTwo Little Boys by Duncan Sarkies, Penguin, ISBN9780143567882 , RRP$30, Available now.

Two Little Boys… an apt name really because, seriously this story really only works if you imagine that the two protaganists are 9-year-old boys stuck in the bodies of 30-year-old (ish) men. And even then I’m thinking I’m being too harsh on 9-year-old boys. Maybe 13-year-old boys.

This new edition is a tie in for the film so I’m not going to waste too many words doing a plot recap. Nige kills a backpacker. Nige freaks out and goes to his ex-friend Deano for help. Deano turns out to be creepily, stupidly and implausibly mental. And also insanely jealous of Nige’s new friend, Gav. Hi-jinks and further criminal activities ensue.

The difficulty with black humour is it only works if the humour is really, really funny. Otherwise you’ve just got black chuckles, and they don’t work at all. Two Little Boys has this vein of really creepy “repressed homosexuality” combined with the aforementioned not-really-that-funny mentalness¹ that just makes it more unpleasant than anything else. Neither Nige or Deano are at all likeable characters and while Gav brings some much needed normal intelligence to the party, it’s all too little.

Women characters? Nah.

The Catlins deserves a better class of fiction, surely. Great cover image though!

¹And seriously, I’m not referring to mental illness here. This is a whole ‘nother kind of fictional mentalness that bears no resemblance to reality.

Book Review: Greyhound by Sid Marsh

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Greyhound cover imageGreyhound by Sid Marsh, Wooden Shed, ISBN9780473200008, RRP$39.99, Available now.

I have to admit, this novel was a strange beast for me to review. As unsure as I was when I first saw it, I’m even more unsure now I’ve actually read it.

Imagine a war yarn written in authentic war-time Kiwi slang, detail heaped upon detail, with shades of both Catch-22 and All Quiet on the Western Front and a sense for the reader of a Pynchonesque “What the hell is going on”… yeah, you can see why I’m unsure.

Greyhound follows a Kiwi tanker crew (Dad, Mutha, Digs, Smiler and Reay, I think ), as the Allies make their way slowly but surely up the Italian front, ending in Trieste where they become mired in post-war politics, dealing with Jugoslav communists.

Along the way we read of their trials with the officers (or orifices, as they’re referred to..), their lives pre-war and their potential lives post-war. And did I mention the authentic Kiwi slang? It’s so thick I’ve may have got the plot ENTIRELY wrong.

This is definitely one of the novels to which you just have to apply the term “tour de force” but it won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s not easy to read, care of the language, however if you persevere it takes on a hum and a pace all its own, and becomes almost lyrical. In this way it reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon – written in an exacting and often confounding 18th century english manner – after a while it all starts to make a sort of sense. Or at least you think it is, so you go along with it.

“DAD, DAD. He just called you a hostile monopolist pig,” translated Reay. “Something about how the National Liberation Movement grinds slowly, but it grinds to dust. Can’t figure that one out, he’s lost me. Hang on, there’s more. Something about your mum being the whore of a Chetnik – and I don’t know if I’ve got this entirely right – your cattle being dwarf Herefords, scrawny as, crammed agin gate… awaiting feed-out of hay… while his Black Buggers are out there foraging for themselves and putting on poundage… on a farm, somewhere near the Bulgarian border. There may well be a few macrocarpa trees in the package too. Definitely shoddy fences and lots of Taranaki gates, mate.”

The coaster paused before adding, “DAD, HE JUST INSULTED YOU, TO YOUR FACE.”

There’s plenty of tank action, more than the odd grotesque war-is-hell moment and it has that a genuine depressingly joyous tone (yes, I said that right), much like the old soldier who tells you all about that time he got stuck in a foxhole surrounded by Germans, as if he was having the time of his life. He probably was. No one said that it was the BEST time of his life. There’s also plenty of black humour and a very observant eye, particularly in the poetic descriptions of New Zealand and Italian countryside.

All the way back to Tauranga – recalling how her tongue had probed his mouth – he noticed for the first time ever the surrealistic shapes and colours of Life: the browns of dairy streams; different shades of green of the various weeds dotting the paddocks, the spindly pines and macrocarpas in lieu of majestic grey kauri trunks; vivid reds of fly-strike amid the wool; the bony black and white hides of cows cooking in the sun.

I got lost around about 2/3rds in but the final quarter picked me up again and held me until the end. So, in my fine tradition of drawing a line in the sand, this is either a new NZ classic literary tour-de-force, or I’ve totally overblown it. Read it for yourself, and decide.

 ”Excuse me, but am I missing something here?” came in Reay. “I mean what the heck do these flippin’ squareheads think they are up to? Jerry top brass has formally surrendered, so what’s the deal?”

“Issues, mate, issues,” said Digs authoritatively.

Book Review: Jade’s Summer of Horses by Amy Brown

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Jade's Summer of HorsesJade’s Summer of Horses by Amy Brown, Harper Collins,  RRP $19.99, ISBN 9781869509224, Available now.

The pony books I read as an impressionable youth starred rich girls in a parallel universe of jodhpurs and gymkhanas. Jade’s Summer of Horses is still a fantasy, but a much more relatable one. (The exception to the problem of unrelatable pony stories is The Pony Problem, a classic I must have read ten times.)

Both the setting of Jade’s Summer of Horses – small-town New Zealand – and the characters – Jade’s single-parent dad, a very prickly aunt, and a pretty-much homeless neighbour – are different to what I remember in horse books. The plot’s a little different too: Jade has to sell her lovely old horse, Pip. Luckily, she finds the perfect buyer in her friend’s very prickly aunt, who happens to own a riding school, and would love to have Jade and her friend stay for a Summer of Horses. Jade makes friends with the aunt, the horses, and the next door neighbour who lives in a shipping crate and brings about the book’s – spoiler – happy ending.

There’s an awful lot about horses in this book. Jade goes riding around the paddock, in the sea, along the beach, and in the forest. It sounds rather exhausting, but she seems to enjoy it, as presumably, does our young reader. There’s instructions in the back of the book on How to Mount and Hold the Reins, which rather suggests that the audience isn’t the type of child who takes riding lessons, but the type of child who would very much like to.

It’s easy to dismiss horse books as nonsense written for girls, but Jade’s Summer of Horses takes care to introduce a variety of characters, in between loving descriptions of horse riding. Brown doesn’t speak down to the reader: there are lovely long words scattered about, and the more interesting characters are described perfectly matter-of-factly.

I especially enjoyed the loving descriptions of the food. In true Famous Five fashion, the characters eat regularly, and with great gusto. There’s pipis, fish pie, pancakes, toasted marshmellows, and “steaming hot, aromatic bread, on which the butter melted deliciously.” It’s great that the book is set locally – it’s always nice to see the place we live reflected, and especially as the beach is far more accessible than Platform 9 and 3/4s.

The only thing better than a good horse book is a series of good horse books. This is the 4th book in the Pony Tales series, all of which star Jade.

All in all, Jade’s Summer of Horses is a very solid pony book. Highly recommended for the pony-crazed young reader in your life.

Book Watch 12 August 2012

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The NZ Book

By Jess Lunnon, Sandi MacKechnie, Michael Fitzsimons and Nigel Beckford (FitzBeck, $40)

It’s a New Zealand themed Book Watch this week, starting with this quirky and gorgeous illustrated stroll around our country and culture. It’s the book Kiwis deserve – beautiful and “mildly entertaining” (as the publishers put it). Don’t let them fool you; The NZ Book is a fact-filled fun romp across the country, from town slogans (“You matter in Matamata”) to culture to sports to history. A book to buy all your overseas friends and, more importantly, yourself.

 

The New Zealand Woman: 80 Glorious Years of Fashion, Food and Friendship From the Pages of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly

By Bee Dawson (Whitcoulls, $24.99)

The New Zealand Women’s Weekly is a venerable 80 years old. First published in 1932, the New Zealand Women’s Weekly is a Kiwi-institution and The New Zealand Woman is the commemoration it deserves. Combining fantastic illustrations from the pages of NZWW with excerpts from issues past and gentle commentary, The New Zealand Woman is a well-produced and fun journey through some NZ social history. It’s also interesting to note the change in focus of the NZWW from the domestic to the celebrity sphere.

 

Mansfield with Monsters

By Katherine Mansfield with Debbie and Matt Cowens (Steam Press, $25, ebook $10)

Last but most definitely not least in this trio of outstanding New Zealand books, Mansfield with Monsters may owe a debt to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but it proves our writers and publishers hold their own when it comes to messing around with the classics. To put it simply, Mansfield with Monsters is quite brilliant. Funny, dark and seamless – Mansfield’s moody characters only seem enhanced by a bit of blood and gore. Steam Press is really the best new NZ publisher at the moment and I can’t wait to see what’s coming out next.