Tag: Community

This is a familiar genre, a story of a bunch of plucky underdogs against big money developers. It reminds me very much of Patricia Grace’s lovely Potiki, of which I wrote: “This is a simple story of good verses evil, weak versus strong, country v commerce, tangata whenua v greedy imperialists… the imbalance of power … lives threatened by the Dollarman who will bulldoze away their traditional lifestyle and smother their ancestral lands with rather obvious bad things.” Jenny Pattrick’s Sea Change is a similar story set a few miles around the coast in a Paekākāriki-ish village, and a few decades later. There are two main changes. The first is that Grace’s Māori community is replaced by a collection of unrelated randoms: retirees, hippies, dysfunctional families, escapists, hermits. This could be a cliché of small town residents, but those of us who have lived up the coast know the truth behind these depictions. They grow into a sort of ‘found family’ with their power not in their iwi identity but in the coming together of a mixed community. The second difference is the tidal wave.

Continue reading “Sea Change – book review”