Adventures – Cristina Sanders' blog

Atmosphere – book review

Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Interesting book on the life of an astronaut in training. In 1980, NASA is a male dominated place with the door just beginning to open to the ladies. Sometimes this inclusion feels very modern, with non-gender-specific spewing in zero gravity, sometimes it is fraught with the same old-fashioned misogyny that made the 1980s a confusing time to be a woman. During training, both physical and academic, Joan Goodwin excels. She also fails to fall for the many handsome and smart male astronauts who try to pick her up, and discovers (with surprise, having never thought of this before) that her inclinations lie elsewhere. She falls in love with a fellow astronaut. Vanessa. For reasons that seems unfathomable to us now, this is unacceptable on the programme and wider world and, if discovered, might end her career.

A Marriage at Sea – book review

A marriage at Sea, by Sophie Elmhirst

Maurice and Maralyn Bailey are an odd couple. “Love, when it works, can feel like such a terrifying fluke,” and that is certainly the case in this story. He is eccentric, moody, lacking confidence. Several years older, his life is narrowing and “loneliness had closed around him like a case”. She “coloured in his gaps“. Lucky him. She’s terrific, outgoing, brave and smart. But Maralyn falls in love with Maurice, and it feels true. For some reason, women seem to love an oddball.

They go sailing to get away from the confines of their English life and, in a move that seems inevitable for the pair, sell the bungalow, have a boat built to their specifications and head off into the blue. They’re running away from a difficult England where they feel they don’t fit, and New Zealand is the chosen destination, via a long ocean voyage. They leave in the summer to catch the trade winds across the Atlantic. I was quickly caught up in this story, always a sucker for a tale of life at sea but also I wanted to find out how long it would take for Maralyn to throw Maurice overboard.

The Adversary–book review

The Adversary, by Michael Crummey

I was recommended The Adversary by Phil of Wardini Books who knows what I like and what might challenge me. I’ll tell this one in her words: “It’s miserable. Absolutely. It’s so dark and violent and they all lead such horrible lives and it’s historical and there are old ships and pirates and oooh, I read it and thought of you straight away.” Is this how she sees me? I mean, I love Catherine Robertson, too, and not a shipwreck in sight. But I’ve read and been inspired by many books on Phil’s recommendation, so off I went with The Adversary under my arm. Good God.

1985 – book review

1985, by Dominic Hoey

I guess Dominic Hoey sets his street cred early on in this story by throwing in a couple of ‘cunts’, just in case readers mistake him for an IIML grad. That would be a mistake. You can’t study to write authenticity like this.

Hoey’s previous story, descriptively called Poor People With Money is about youngsters on the edge in Auckland, making bad choices and rocking the consequences on a wild ride to a village so small. It’s on my list of classics of the decade. Can he do it again?

Songbirds of Florence–book review

Songbirds of Florence by Olivia Spooner

Like a very many others, Songbirds of Florence is in my Christmas shopping basket. It’s a gift for a darling Italian friend, who is far too busy this week to read my posts. I think everyone is buying this book (and it was still at number one on 14th December, so they really are) for one simple reason. Because it will make the recipient feel good. Merry Christmas!

James – book review

James, by Percival Everett

Do you think you know the story of Huck Finn? Think again. In this marvelous book by Percival Everett, the adventure is turned on its head and you find yourself reading a totally different story that seems to come tumbling out from between the lines of Twain’s. It’s still an adventure story, in which a boy called Huck and a slave he calls Jim run away by floating down the Mississippi river and get into all sorts of trouble, but this time the point of view belongs to James. The pair become true friends, they look out for each other, care for each other, discuss ideas and try to see the other’s point of view, but the world is different when the one telling the story is a piece of property which needs to be returned to its owner.

The Writing Desk – Book Review

The Writing Desk, by Di Morris

I bought this hardcover book on sight at the launch. I want it on my bookshelves immediately to start showing to people. The book itself feels like a treasure, a brand new presentation of an old world, with heavy shiny paper, crisp print and a sharp layout, illustrating a family story from the 1850s to the current day. There are old photos and copies of telegrams, letters, tickets, and all sorts of ephemera, full-page background designs in a range of heightened sepia and all overlaid with panel-squares of exquisite drawings and minimal text, just enough to tie a story through all the pictures. And what a story.

The Girl From London – book review

The Girl From London, by Olivia Spooner

I started this on a Tuesday night and ended up crying in a café on Thursday morning. I can’t remember when I’ve been so moved by the ending of a story. There is a book within the book. When the former ended a bit too neatly I was a slightly disbelieving, until I realised that actually, well, I’m giving no spoilers, but it’s a war story, after all. I’m not usually known for my tears.

The whole story ties in well with my current interest in stories of those who immigrated to New Zealand down the years, and why they came. Children evacuees from London bombings? I had no idea. Can you imagine sending your children out of a bomb zone, and not to the close countryside, which would be wrenching enough, but through a war-infested sea to an unknown land at the far ends of the earth? And yet people did.

The Grimmelings–book review

The Grimmelings, by Rachel King

Undersong: the sounds of a landscape

Chapters in The Grimmelings begin with a curious word or two, just to set the scene. ‘Undersong‘, one of the words to introduce Chapter Four, describes the background noise we live with, all the time. Can you hear it? I’ve got traffic drone at the moment. I’d rather the undersong of the lake, which I’ll call ‘Flitsplish’, as I have a bit of the Scottish in me. Rachel King’s book itself has an undersong: it’s the rhythm and poetry of the best children’s stories. I was mesmerised from the first line.

The same evening Josh Underhill went missing, the black horse appeared on the hill above the house.

Classic.

English Passengers – book review

English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale

This novel, like most colonial fiction stories told in the last 25 years, looks back at history and describes why the English should feel abhorrence and shame. I found the story interesting – the premise of a group of miss-matched individuals on a voyage to Tasmania and back is a good hook for me – but there was something here I found a bit off, and I’m trying to put my finger on it. I think, to me, it seemed the author, for all he researched events and geography well, was an outsider. He wasn’t wholly present in the period or the location. Perhaps we have woken up since it was published in 2000. I hesitate to use the word ‘flippant’ but it did feel the purpose of the story was to entertain us with the terrible things those crazy colonials did back in the day rather than explore something more nuanced: how these potentially good men could be so blind, perhaps; or what these psychologies meant to the people there, on the ground. The Aboriginal part of the story is told in first person by a boy whose mother is taken, chained and raped by an Englishman and the boy is blond. I’m not sure I trust Kneale’s telling of his voice and culture; I was always aware of the English pen behind the voice as I read, and I cringed, occasionally.

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