Breton Dukes

Aspiring by Damian Wilkins (Massey University Press, 2020), 200 pp., $22

During the winter school holidays I was with my infant son at the main playground in Alexandra. Fresh snow made a duvet on the Hawkduns as trucks, Wanaka and Queenstown bound, rolled by. Teens scrimmaged under the pines. One boy—short pastel shorts, a T-shirt, a tea-cosy-type woollen hat—broke to leap onto a picnic table.

‘Hey kids,’ he shouted, aiming his face at the playground, ‘we’re leaving!’

People looked, but nobody moved except a teenage girl who got up behind him and snatched his hat. He laughed like the Count on Sesame Street and jumped off. Who was he? Was he leading some sort of holiday programme? Wasn’t he freezing? [Read more…]

Cushla McKinney

Necessary Secrets by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2019), 298 pp., $37.99

As much as we might like to believe that our relationships are built on truth, in reality life abounds with secrets: those we tell others and those we tell ourselves; those we forget and those we choose not to know. Secrets can bind people in trust or complicity or be used as a weapon or a shield. But whether necessary or contingent, we all have knowledge we must hide for the sake of others and ourselves. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than within families, where the random assortment of genetics means that we may have more in common with our friends than our relations, and the conflicts and allegiances across and between generations are amplified by competition for limited material or emotional resources.  [Read more…]

Helen Watson White

Moonlight Sonata by Eileen Merriman (Black Swan/Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2019) 283 pp., $38

The strength of Moonlight Sonata is that its fictional world seems ‘utterly real’, to use the words of Paula Green reviewing Pieces of You, Merriman’s debut novel, just a few years ago. This is the award-winning writer’s first adult novel, after successful young-adult stories Pieces of You, Catch Me When You Fall and Invisibly Breathing. Her fourth book in three years, Moonlight Sonata was also the second novel she published in a single year, 2019. [Read more…]

Emma Gattey

The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde (Victoria University Press, 2020), 624 pp., $35

Beyond the daunting double whammy of The Reed Warbler’s intricate introductory family tree and the opening words of the blurb (‘Pregnant after rape …’), Ian Wedde breathes life into seven generations, their complex inter-relationships, and individual lives, observations and desires. Early on he gives a sympathetic nod to readers after slinging a welter of names our way following a family reunion, acknowledging the vertigo induced by complex, tangled family histories. Beth, the ‘girl-swot’ family historian, isn’t sick from her cousin Frank’s driving through the Kaitīeke Valley, but ‘rather felt a bit sick from the winding around of names’. Yet even with a complex opening, from this point onward there is no more motion sickness. The Reed Warbler is a finely crafted triptych of a novel: three parts composed of interwoven stitches in time. [Read more…]