Tag: Book Awards

There are rivers in the sky–book review

There are rivers in the sky, by Elif Shafak

I bought this book because of the insanely pretty cover (the silver drops are embossed) and for the fact that there is a woman called Zaleekah in it. My sailboat is called Zuleika, a name from the same root. I thought I could find a bit more about the name, it’s not common. And yes, I did. I also learned heaps about the ancient city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and lots about the world’s earliest poem, Gilgamesh, which was carved into stone tablets. The ruse for this story is that water falls from the sky and is recycled over and over again. We meet the first raindrop when it falls on a Mesopotamian king and it resurfaces again for our three storytellers: a slum boy in Victorian London; a Yazidi girl who travels to war torn Iraq in 2014 and a miserable woman in 2018 London who is ungrateful to her rich relatives. I don’t know why these three narrators. The drop of water seems a tenuous selection process.

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Ripiro Beach–book review

Ripiro Beach, by Caroline Barron

There is so much to enjoy in this book. I felt immediately I was in good hands, with a writer who had the confidence to take her time describing scenes to bring me into her space and letting me settle into the surroundings before moving on to the action. We could be in a park by an Auckland motorway, in a nightclub, or at Ripiro beach, and each scene is painted with a keen sense of observational detail. Here’s a paragraph that really is worth reading twice, just for the pleasure of the writing:

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Pet – book review

Pet, by Catherine Chidgey

Very creepy, very noir, if domestic New Zealand, circa 1970, can be called noir. The story certainly starts off sweetly enough. Our girl, Justine, is in class, trying to please the new teacher, Mrs Price. Everyone is. Mrs Price is young, new in town, and glamourous. Hot, she’d be called today. She also has a tragic past: a husband and daughter, dead in a car crash. Justine watches as she selects her pets and desperately wants to be the one asked to stay behind to wipe the board, or empty the bins, but these jobs go to the popular kids. Justine, and best friend Amy, are not part of the cool crowd. They go home to each other’s houses, rate the prettiest girls in the class in order: Melissa first, others depending on haircuts and body parts, and then they select each other as fourth. Pretty enough, but not up there. They are kind to each other. They talk about boys, and buying a first bra. There’s nothing creepy here, yet. Just a whiff of foreboding. Chidgey is a clever writer. It’s all good until it isn’t.

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