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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Beyond Beauty: Portraits of New Zealand history

December 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Cushla McKinney

No Man’s Land by A.J. Fitzwater (Paper Road Press, 2020), 154 pp, $22; Jerningham by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, 2020), 388 pp, $37

The best historical fiction gives readers a space to explore the origins of issues that continue to affect them. It also presents writers with unique challenges of voice, emotional plausibility, and historical and contemporary validity. Two new novels, No Man’s Land by Vogel Award-winner A.J. Fitzwater and Cristina Sanders’ first adult novel, Jerningham, tackle these challenges in different but equally engaging ways. 

In the early 1940s, when thousands of New Zealand men served in the armed forces overseas, women stepped into traditional male roles in farming, factories and other essential industries. This provides the backdrop for Fitzwater’s exploration of sex, gender and identity in No Man’s Land. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, history

A Little Bridge 

November 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Breton Dukes

The Stories of Eileen Duggan edited by Helen J. O’Neill with an introduction by John Weir (Victoria University Press, 2019), 342pp, $35

 

Let’s start with a shallow dive. Here’s Duggan describing two siblings in ‘The Solvent’:

Both were tireless workers. Those great bones of theirs could bend to burdens that would cow others. And in them was a broody touchiness where others were concerned, combined with a cuttle-fish skin when they hurt others. They never forgot underneath. Their resentments were like eels rising and uncoiling when the waters were stirred again

Eileen Duggan. Irish, Catholic. Born 1894. Raised in Tua Marina, just north of Blenheim. In her time, New Zealand’s most famous poet. ‘The greatest woman poet of this age,’ said the Dublin Review; ‘Exceptional,’ said the New York Times; ‘Doing for us what Katherine Mansfield did for the short story,’ said Railways Magazine. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, social sciences

Feminist Eco-Fiction on the Mothership 

October 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Gina Cole

The Stone Wētā by Octavia Cade (Paper Road Press, 2020), 174pp., $25

The Stone Wētā by Octavia Cade tells the story of ten motivated, determined and brave women scientists, members of a global underground network of ‘operatives’ engaged in a cold war against government deniers of climate change. We follow the women who work in isolation in their various disciplines as the Earth moves towards environmental collapse. The women function as a network of resistance to governments who are suppressing, editing and massaging climate data and pandering to a quest for power and financial profit at the expense of the environment. When I think of what is happening to island nations and the natural environment in the Pacific today, there is a disturbingly familiar ring to this theme of the abuse of knowledge and the environment in exchange for capitalist goals. It is no surprise, then, that preservation is a central theme of the book. The scientists’ collective goal is to preserve climate data in an unadulterated form. It is a future scenario that Cade, a scientist herself, has clearly created from the current mess we’ve got ourselves into on planet Earth. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

Leaping Lightly

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: fiction

Truths and Lies That We Have to Live With 

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: fiction

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