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Don’t we live in America? Rose Lovell-Smith

A Made-Up Place: New Zealand in Young Adult Fiction Anna Jackson, Geoff Miles, Harry Ricketts, Tatjana Schaefer and Kathryn Walls Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780864736970   Chapter four of this collection of essays by five authors is called “Utopia”.

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Posted in Essays, Literature, Non-fiction, Review, Young adults

Doubles and damage, Geoff Miles

The Magician of Hoad Margaret Mahy HarperCollins, $39.99, ISBN 9781869506872 The Magician of Hoad takes Margaret Mahy into new territory – new for her at least. Her earlier YA novels were set in the real world. A highly-coloured version of

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Posted in Children, Fiction, Literature, Young adults

Clear but flat, Geoff Miles

Homer, Odyssey: An Antipodean Translation for the Early Twenty-First Century
Brian Dawkins
Steele Roberts, $60.00,
ISBN 9781927241100

Homer’s Odyssey has been a recurring presence in the literature of our islands, from A R D Fairburn landing Odysseus on the pohutukawa-fringed beaches down to Catherine Mayo’s YA novels about the hero’s boyhood. So “an antipodean translation for the early 21st century” raises intriguing expectations: Homeric epic in the down-to-earth Kiwi vernacular of beach, bach and barbeque? A fusion of ancient Greek and Polynesian motifs, as in Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka, Vana Manasiadis’s Ithaca Island Bay Leaves or the art of Marian Maguire?

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
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