Gail Pittaway
Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent (Aporo Press, 2025), 263pp, $35
Hoods Landing was shortlisted for the Ockham Book Awards in 2026. Although a first novel, it is not Laura Vincent’s first publication, being preceded by a cookbook, Hungry and Frozen, in 2013. Hungry and Frozen is also the title of her blog, which is mostly about food. Vincent has written about food and other preoccupations since 2007. Her craft as a writer is undeniable, equally in the cookbook, in her gorgeously opinionated and random online writing, and in this novel. The discipline and devotion involved in maintaining a food blog in which every recipe and photograph tells a story, not to mention the delight and whimsy of her storytelling, are continued in the novel. Let me state here something I’ve often remarked: Susan Boyle developed her craft as a singer by singing every week and more in her church choir, for years, and went on to win the coveted Britain’s Got Talent prize in 2009 with her solo rendition of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. Naturally, initial talent and skill need to be present, and Vincent’s published poetry is another indication of her accomplished versatility as a writer. I hope Vincent isn’t offended by the Susan Boyle analogy. Regular writing and practice surely develop voice and confidence, and after all, hers is a novel full of family jokes and traditions, of singsongs and storytelling, and celebrations of the commonplace, given a unique glow.
Laura Vincent cites Nigella Lawson as an inspiration in her food writing, and the influence is evident in the way that, like Lawson’s, her recipes unfold and are narrated anecdotally, rather than through an emphasis on scientifically measured cooking times and ingredients. Hoods Landing, too, evolves organically, incorporating bits and pieces of tangential stories and flashbacks, quotations from poetry and songs, tarot readings, popular musicals, theology, photographs and the ephemera of family life. Beyond the personalities and perspectives that bubble to the surface in an unpredictable manner, Vincent also creates the village of Hoods Landing impressively and convincingly in the mind’s eye. Located near a west coast beach, just south of Auckland, this settlement was once much larger, but time and economics have depleted the main street of all but a few hairdressers, several takeaways and corner dairies, a couple of sandwich bars and liquor stores. Busiest of all is the Mainly Two-Dollar Store, although the two drinking establishments also do better business than the shops. At one end of the town is the beach where ‘the Seussical tufts of sand tussock’ edge the west coast tide, ‘chomping at the fudgy sand’, and westerly winds have ‘browbeaten’ the macrocarpa trees.
The novel centres upon a family called the Gordons, several of whom, it turns out, are gay. Rita, still called ‘Baby’ at 50, has come back to the family home in Hoods Landing, ostensibly for her mother Bufty’s 83rd birthday. But Rita also needs to announce to her mother, grandmother and sisters, their partners and offspring, that she has ovarian cancer. In the beginning and ultimate chapters, ‘Rita counted the dead. Traced their names inside her head.’ The dead are the women of the district, whose deaths are given quirky obituaries based on the interactions the Gordon girls and family had with them—in short chapters that interrupt the simple plot of several homecomings and celebrations in the family. There’s Mrs Pauline Barley, a veteran of committees and district functions for whom nothing ever went wrong, until she found a lump in a breast and died when her sons were still at primary school. Or Erana Milner, whose breast cancer grew undetected and ignored by the doctor, but not by her, as she frequently asked for a scan.
Surely the sentence announcing the death of Mrs Rhonda Taft should be memorialised as a quotation for the book council, along with Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s ‘The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut’:
Mrs Rhonda Taft was briskly urinating in the shower on the night before her thirty-fifth anniversary as school secretary, when she died five different ways.
The short encomium identifies the potential causes of death: a drop in blood pressure from a sudden change in water temperature; a fall and a head wound; the accidental slicing of a razor for shaving the legs across the femoral artery during that fall; an involuntary imbibement of toxic hair products as she lay in the water—any or all of which could have ‘done her in’. But at the autopsy her body was also found to be ‘riddled with bone cancer’.
These forays into small-town death-notice gossip are mere distractions from the real business of the novel, which is, after all, the gathering of the family and the interactions between the generations, with their quirks and fondnesses, tales and secrets. It’s near to Christmas, when the whole family promises to be together. It’s also a time when love and death come foremost, to remember the past and those who have passed away.
Bufty, the mother of the Gordon women, is not the only matriarch. Her mother-in-law, Irene, has eschewed a surname and many other conventions. A centenarian, a seer and a tarot card reader of a deck that she made herself, she has earned this mononymous status in the family and wider community. Irene is also naturally intuitive, summoning Rita to tea to ask her how long she has had cancer, before Rita announces it to her siblings. Her son Wally married Bufty when they were teenagers, but died young—his being the only male death notice in the book. One of the beautiful mysteries of this novel is tracing the story of how Bufty slipped from being Wally’s wife to coming out with her oldest friend Avery—a female minister of religion, as well as gay—shockingly soon after his death.
There’s a fine account of a meeting between Irene, Avery and Bufty, not long after the couple move in together, as Irene is more offended that Bufty has taken up with a minister than with another woman: ‘A minister … the only one you can trust is the bishop on the chessboard. And I’ve got my eye on him, too.’ Avery argues that they both, Irene in her ‘God-sneering’ paganism and Avery in her faith, deal in the interpretation of symbols and their application to everyday life.
When Clara, Bufty’s mother, abandoned the family, father (Jock Williams) and daughter agreed to generate the story that she had died, when in fact she was living in Wellington with Aubwyn, her first love. The carrier of the Māori bloodline (affiliation unidentified), through Whetū, her mother, Clara confesses that her father—like Jock, the man she married—left gambling debts and bankrupted the family. After Jock Williams dies, the homeless Bufty is invited by Bill, Avery’s father, to live in the Manrose household. Meanwhile, Avery Manrose is attending Saint Swithin’s Theological College, having been mistakenly accepted by the principal (who is the Very Reverend Avery Moss) due to her androgynous nomenclature. All of these events are pieced together from the pot-boiling and bubbling of incident in a non-chronological manner.
Each member of the family has a story and a legend to live up to or refute. There is a family tree in the book’s front section, helpful though not necessary when each character’s voice is so distinctive. However, it is useful to be reminded of the levels of generations and who sits within each household.
Rita had been living in Italy with Sidha for decades but comes back, sad and alone, to share her news with the family. She spends her days lying about, reading Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, until her consultation with Irene gives her more energy to participate in family affairs. Marlon is straight and married to Glen, a plumber, while their daughters Mahalia and Diania identify as twins (and queer), though born a year apart. Ben, their son, has followed his father’s hobby to become a skilled knitter who appears in his handiwork rather than in conversation. The self-styled twins have taken over one of the few successful businesses in the town, a pub which they name, through the selection of a card from Irene’s tarot pack, The Chariot.
Judy has divorced three husbands, two called Peter, but all remain on good terms and are invited to any family gathering, especially if they manage the barbecue. Her daughter Sissy complicates all food arrangements with her veganism, though the family is coming around to adapting to this preference, even considering a vegan Christmas dinner, though they would not be able to go without butter. Jayne, the mother of fatherless Stevie—a civil servant who has had postings in the UK—is a singer whose gentle guitar playing often changes moods and soothes tensions as they hum and sing some of the old numbers together, described as ‘songs with an easy muscle memory’, such as ‘Down by the Riverside’ … ‘The Carnival Is Over’ and ‘Hine E Hine’.
As with the story of Avery’s mistaken acceptance into theological college, playing with names and naming is a continuous thread running through the novel. Apart from the cavalcade of cancer victims—Margery Dick, Lorainne Hooker, Sue Dijkstra, Darelle Hoare, Tarns Fuffer—there’s the fact that each one of Bufty’s dogs is always named Roger, after the puppy that Avery sent her when her husband Wally died. Other pets are named after film stars—from Marlene Dietrich, deceased, to Jimmy Stewart, extant.
There’s also a delight in the deft use of a comically pompous phrase, such as in one of the novel’s flashback time slips, when ‘The Principal knew he was losing his prepollancy’ over a parent–teacher meeting with Bufty’s father. Baffled at the use of such terms as ‘contumacy’ and ‘turpitude’, Jock Williams assures the principal that Bufty will soon be leaving school to work in a factory. ‘Couldn’t make hide nor hair of what he was going on about … so said you’ll be well shot of the place.’
Over the gatherings to celebrate Bufty’s birthday, a discussion arises about whether the love of baking and sharing food in the family, and the insistence on feeding visitors, is manaakitanga or simple country courtesy. ‘It’s manaakitanga,’ Irene asserts, stamping her walking stick. Of course it is both, all delivered with so much aroha that any reader is made to feel most welcome in encountering this exuberant narrative.
GAIL PITTAWAY is a writer and lecturer, now part-time, at Wintec in Hamilton. She has published both creative work and academic papers, and has edited an anthology of writing on gardens and a book of academic essays, Minding the Gap, for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, among other works. She is a regular book reviewer for Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme and a drama critic for the Theatreview website.
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