Tag: Found family

Vianne – book review

Vianne, by Joanne Harris

Nice bit of fanciful storytelling, bit too ‘woo woo’ for me, but hey, it’s coming up to Christmas and this will be a really good present for one of your friends. I asked my local bookseller for a recommendation for something easy and fun, but not rubbish. Not every book needs to be a lit masterpiece but every book must be well written for its audience and have a point, must delight in some way. Vianne, prequel to the splendid Chocolat, is full of entertaining and wistful romps around Marseilles, which was enough to keep me happily engaged. Read it in the hammock if your Christmas is southern hemisphere, or curled up by the fire through the dark afternoons up north.

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Sea Change – book review

Sea Change, by Jenny Pattrick

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.

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