Iona Winter

Beats of the Pa’u by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 152pp, $30; Peninsula by Sharron Came (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 256pp, $30

Maria Samuela, of Cook Islands descent, has an MA from the IIML, and her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. Beats of the Pa’u is her debut collection, told via a community of first and second generation Cook Islands New Zealanders, from the 1950s through to the present day. 

From start to finish, Beats of the Pa’u provides multiple points of view within its stories, often correlating in central themes, such as grief, immigration, and love. The clever use of shifting focus between protagonists also links us to another generation’s experiential history. With apparent ease, these stories straddle worlds of religion, shame, compliance, tradition, and how younger generations often strive to embrace alternate identities. Samuela excels at showing lived experience and, with an intimate knowledge of her culture underpinning each story, she draws us in whilst also evoking compassion and laughter. [Read more…]

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Charlotte Grimshaw

Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand’s best writers, ed. Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2021), 560pp, $40

One day recently, when we were in the middle of a discussion about the current pandemic, perhaps the Delta surge we’d just overcome in Auckland or the projected peak of the Omicron wave, my mother’s expression turned glazed and distant and she began to describe another pandemic in another time: the polio outbreak in her childhood that closed the schools, setting her and her sisters and friends free to roam and run wild for a whole summer. And it was, she said, now she remembered it, an exceptionally long, hot summer like the drought in Auckland in 2020 and 2021, when the parks turned brown, the streams dried up, the skies every day were cloudless blue, and for her, back then, there was nothing to be done but swim and bike for miles and dream your way through another day, a gang of kids liberated from the world of school and clocks and teachers and parents, just for a time. The adults must have been fearful (infantile paralysis, the horrifying threat of the ‘iron lung’: what could be more terrifying for a parent?) but she remembered it as dreamy, idyllic, timeless, mercifully free from the tyranny of phones and computers and Zoom. No Google school, no remote learning; you could read a book under a tree, and other than that, some lessons might arrive in the mail every now and then. [Read more…]