On 26 March 2018 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing Brave by Rose McGowan. You can listen here.
Category: Books
Review: Casting Off by Elspeth Sandys
This review was first published in Landfall Review Online on 1 March 2018.
Elspeth Sandys has had many names. Born Frances Hilton James in 1948, she became Elspeth Sandilands Somerville on the occasion of her adoption into the prominent Dunedin Somerville clan at the age of nine months. The circumstances of her birth and adoption, and their impact on her childhood, were the subject of the first volume of her memoir, What Lies Beneath, published in 2014.
The second volume, Casting Off, starts with another name change. With her first marriage in late 1960, Elspeth inexplicably took on not only her husband’s surname, but a new first name as well – Susan. ‘Till recently,’ she writes, ‘I believed this new Christian name was given to me by my young sisters-in-law, Elspeth being too much of a mouthful, but they have assured me they had nothing to do with it. So the question of who bestowed the name on me, and why, remains unanswered. As does the question of why I agreed to it …’
Fixin’ to Write: An experiment in “found” writing
In July 2017 my writing group started a collective blog on the creative process called Fixin’ to Write. Each week one of us posts about our experiences of finding creativity in everyday life. Here’s my fourth post for the blog, an experiment in “found writing” inspired by Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum. It was first published on 22 February 2018.
Due to a recent tweak in my insomniac four-year-old’s bedtime routine, I now spend hours each night sitting outside her room waiting for her to fall asleep while answering the questions that run through her head while she winds down: “Mum, what’s a fawn?” “How do you spell poison?”
It’s painful, but at least it affords me some reading time, and as a consequence I’m churning through the books at the moment. One of the latest is The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey.
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Review: This I Would Kill For by Anne Buist
On 19 February 2018 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing This I Would Kill For by Anne Buist, the third in her ‘Natalie King, Forensic Psychiatrist’ series. You can listen here.
Review: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
On 31 October 2017 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing the first volume of Philip Pullman’s new trilogy following up the His Dark Materials series, La Belle Sauvage. You can listen here.
Review: Tess by Kirsten McDougall
This review was first published on The Spinoff on 7 September 2017.
There’s something about the Wairarapa. Big skies. Beautiful old villas. Close-knit communities, with a pointy edge of small town meanness. There’s also something about the dying days of 1999, that strange, tense moment before we ticked over into the 21st century, when just for a moment it felt like the world might end.
Perfect time and place to set a gothic novel. So we’re on a country road just outside of Masterton, in the rain, a few weeks before the end of 1999 when Wellington writer Kirsten McDougall opens Tess, her second book. Tess is 19, on the run from something, living out of a pack, not eating much and about to fall drastically ill. Lewis Rose, the local dentist, picks her up and gives her a ride into town, where she gets hassled by some errant youths on the street. Lewis intervenes and takes her home to one of those beautiful villas under the big sky. Beautiful, yes, but dusty and disheveled and the garden has run wild. There’s something not right about the garage.
Fixin’ to Write: A writer’s work is never done
In July 2017 my writing group started a collective blog on the creative process called Fixin’ to Write. Each week one of us posts about our experiences of finding creativity in everyday life. Here’s my first post for the blog, about the experience of actually finishing a book, and what happens next. It was first published on 24 August 2017.
My first book came out two months ago.
I’d always imagined I would write a book one day, but in that way you do when you’re not actually writing. As long as I wasn’t trying, I could cling to the fantasy that at some unspecified future date, when the stars and planets aligned, I would sit down and bust out the Great New Zealand Novel.
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Review: The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes
On 18 August 2017 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing The Book of Emma Reyes, a memoir in correspondence by Colombian painter Emma Reyes, translated by Daniel Alarcon. You can listen here.
Review: The Suicide Club by Sarah Quigley
This review first appeared on The Spinoff on 11 July 2017.
Last week’s “Break the Silence” series by Olivia Carville in the New Zealand Herald was intended to start a national conversation about youth suicide. Are we not already having that conversation? From my own high school days, some 20 years ago, I remember much handwringing and hyper-vigilance about peers who were at risk of self-harm; we all talked about it then. These days we have 13 Reasons Why, (everyone’s talking about that) and news media are slowly but surely breaking down the legal wall that prevents them reporting in detail about suicide. Yet suicide is still, according to the blurb on the back of Sarah Quigley’s new novel, the “last taboo”, and in The Suicide Club she is the latest to enter the conversation.
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Review: The Haunting by Margaret Mahy
On 10 July 2017 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing the reissue of Margaret Mahy’s classic supernatural children’s novel The Haunting. You can listen here.
