Octavia Cade

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, 2019), 666pp., $35

Fantasy comes with expectation. It’s a genre of escapism, often involving a very literal escape from one world and into another. Escape, however, is rarely so linear, and there is an expectation that the problems of one world manifest themselves in new ways in another. What it means to be left behind, what it means to compromise yourself, what it means to lose faith and then find it again … these are questions of isolation, of consequence, and of the transformation of self that goes with the movement between worlds.  [Read more…]

Rushi Vyas

Where We Land by Tim Jones (The Cuba Press, Novella Series; originally published as Landfall by Paper Road Press, 2015), 75pp., $22; The Everrumble by Michelle Elvy (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019), 107pp., $18; Soul Etchings by Sandra Arnold (Retreat West Books, 2019), 174pp., $19.99

A new arrival to Aotearoa from America after my partner landed a job at the University of Otago, I attended my first New Zealand poetry reading at the Dog With Two Tails in Dunedin this August. The night served as my introduction to the Kiwi literary scene. Brian Turner was the featured poet and I still remember one of his poems vividly. ‘New Zealander: A definition’ reads ‘Born here, buggered it up’. My first thought when hearing that poem was how I could replace ‘New Zealander’ with ‘American’ and the poem would still resonate. I wondered how many people around the globe could replace ‘New Zealander’ with their country’s moniker for citizens. When reading the three fiction-esque books in this review, I saw them as loose responses to Turner’s poem. While they each take a different approach in form and worldview, they share a concern with how we can respond now that we’ve ‘buggered up’ the world.  [Read more…]

Hannah Mettner

Attraction by Ruby Porter (Text Publishing, 2019), 288 pp., $37

When I saw Ruby Porter’s debut novel Attraction on the ‘recommended reads’ shelf at Unity, and browsed the blurb on the back, it appealed immediately. The idea of a plot based around three women who may be friends, lovers, or a bit of both, and are trying to figure that out, has the potential for the kind of sticky emotional writing that I’m always seeking out. But set and setting are everything; when I finally got around to the reading the book, the protests over the stolen land at Ihumātao had become a national news item, I’d flown home to Gisborne to say goodbye to my dying uncle, Jacinda had announced that New Zealand history would be taught in all New Zealand schools, and I was deep into a year-long te reo course. [Read more…]

Penelope Todd

The Boyfriend by Laura Southgate (Victoria University Press, 2019), 273 pp., $30

When I started uni, one early friendship group included a girl who, in memory, was a kind of Marilyn Monroe. Blonded, made-up, grown-up and, although new to the city, already in a relationship with an urbane and much older married man. In fact, we could never really be friends with her because the world into which she’d fallen was not even adjacent to our own naïve and wide-eyed take on Year One. It was another galaxy. [Read more…]

Paula Green

Loving Sylvie by Elizabeth Smither (Allen & Unwin, 2019), 328 pp., AU$32.99

‘She loved what others didn’t. Things aslant and odd, glimpsed from the corner of her eye.’ – Isobel in Loving Sylvie

Elizabeth Smither has published eighteen poetry collections, five novels and five short story collections along with memoirs and journals. In 2004 she received an honorary Doctorate in Literature from the University of Auckland, and in 2008 was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievements in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Night Horse, won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her poems deliver an appealing mix of thought, feeling, economy and detail. I have found her fiction equally captivating: imbued with insight, layers, stillness and, conversely, intense movement. [Read more…]