91 Woodstock Road Less timid each day the squirrel comes to our door for her morning conker. I’ve gathered them from …
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Blog Archives
Leading by the nose, Elizabeth Crayford
Scented
Laurence Fearnley
Penguin, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143773283
If technology and price allowed, Scented would have made a fantastic “scratch and sniff” novel. As it is, the pitfalls of first-person narration make this a challenging read, and I finished the book still not knowing how well the central character knew herself. But I also wasn’t convinced that this was the author’s intention. By the end of the first section, I was pretty sure I was onto it: Fearnley had created a narrator at the high-functioning end of the Asperger’s spectrum. She can hold down a well-paying academic job in a New Zealand university, but her struggles with intimacy and relationships are compensated for by a single and all-consuming passion for perfume.
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Tagged with: Elizabeth Crayford, Issue 128, Penguin, Summer 2019
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Issue 128 | Summer 2019
Words and deeds, Helen Watson White
The Political Years
Marilyn Waring
Bridget Williams Books, $40.00,
ISBN 9781988545936
The cover of Marilyn Waring’s book The Political Years shows a telling photograph of the 1979 National Party caucus in the Beehive: row upon row of suited men, with just one young woman in front.
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Tagged with: Bridget Williams Books, Helen Watson White, Issue 128, Marilyn Waring, Summer 2019
Posted in Autobiography, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in Autobiography, Non-fiction, Review
Absolutely fabulous, Thom Conroy
The Absolute Book
Elizabeth Knox
Victoria University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781776562305
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox is a Ronsardian ode to worldbuilding. Who creates worlds? What connects them? Who controls them? These questions shape the novel’s plot, subject and theme over the 650 pages of Knox’s latest. In a work of this length, the opportunities for spoilers are legion. With that in mind, I’ll need to violate the usual prohibition against them in what follows, although I do pledge not to reveal major surprises from the last 300 pages. This genre-buster tells the story of Taryn Cornick of the Northovers (aka Valravn, Hero of Understanding) and her struggle to overcome demoniac possession and assist a demigod known as Shift (aka Little god of the marshlands, fate foresworn princeling) in recrafting realms of being while struggling to redeem her own imperiled soul.
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Tagged with: Elizabeth Knox, Issue 128, Summer 2019, Thom Conroy, Victoria University Press
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Controversial still, John O’Leary
A Communist In The Family
Elspeth Sandys
Otago University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781988531601
Families are complicated things. Members don’t necessarily agree with one another, or even like one another; relationships can be strained, or snapped, then re-made across the years. This is never truer than when one family member breaks ranks and does something out of the ordinary.
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Tagged with: Elspeth Sandys, Issue 128, John O’Leary, Otago University Press, Summer 2019
Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review
“The frequent flyer friar” John McCrystal
Nailing Down The Saint
Craig Cliff
Penguin Random House, $38.00,
ISBN 9780143773740
Those familiar with Craig Cliff’s work will know that he is fond of a kooky premise – a starting-off point that allows him to tread the blurred line between mundane realism and the surreal. Many of the stories in his debut collection, A Man Melting, caught the eye precisely because of the imaginative, offbeat conceit at their heart; his first novel, The Mannequin Makers, asked us to imagine a man so consumed by professional rivalry that he is prepared to sequester his own children away from the world and raise them for the sole purpose of masquerading as mannequins in a department store window.
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Tagged with: Craig Cliff, Issue 128, John McCrystal, Penguin Random House, Summer 2019
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Opening the fifth dimension, Lydia Wevers
Science Fiction: A Review Of Speculative Fiction: Special Double Issue Featuring Phillip Mann
(Vol 19, Nos 1-2)
Van Ikin (ed)
$AUD30.00
ISSN 03146677
A special double issue of a well-regarded journal, plus full-page authorial cover photo, is a handsome tribute to the work of any writer. Science Fiction has been running since 1977 and has featured the work of many Australian science fiction writers, but never before (as far as I know) a New Zealander. Phillip Mann’s New Zealandness is, however, a frequent topic of discussion.
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Best of all possible worlds? Stephen Levine
Promises Promises: 80 Years Of Wooing New Zealand Voters
Claire Robinson
Massey University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9780995109544
When Jacinda Ardern stated in 2017 that, if elected, Labour would move to “abolish child poverty”, this resonated as an ambitious goal, enlightened, compassionate and long overdue. It is among the many strengths of Claire Robinson’s book that we are able, with perspective (and evidence), to see that the first Labour government had accomplished this task – and more – over 70 years earlier.
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Tagged with: Claire Robinson, Issue 128, Massey University Press, Stephen Levine, Summer 2019
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review