Books

The 19th of March 2020 will go down in history as one of the most important dates of the early 21st century. Everyone old enough will be able to look back and remember where they were the day New Zealand closed its borders. I certainly do since I ended up celebrating my 44th birthday in Level 4 lockdown.

Politics in a Pandemic goes through what happened in New Zealand with a fine-tooth comb. Not only do we get a rare behind-the-scenes view of why our Prime Minister and other elected officials did what they did, we also get to see their thought processes throughout that period.

I found the writing very well done, mixed with humor and a great deal of insight. What I liked most was the input from the politicians involved and their brute honestly when it came to what they did, why they did it, and any regrets they had along the way. We get to see them not just as politicians but as people who, whether we agree with them or not, honestly did the best they could with the facts they had access to at the time.

Politics is sometimes viewed as a fairly dry subject, and having the politicians chime in and contribute to the book gave it a personal touch, which helped to lighten the tone.

Facts of the matter are written very clearly and I was able to understand everything without any of it going over my head. I know from personal experience that there was a lot of confusion about how it was all going to work, especially in the early days, so this should help answer any lingering questions you might still have. If you know someone who ever had a grumble about the lockdowns, I think you should pick this up to let them see the other side of the coin, as it were. Definitely worth it.

Part fact, part fiction, The Smallest Man by Frances Quinn tells the story of an unusual man and his perspective on the 17th century reign of King Charles I of England. This is not the story of Charles I or the parliamentarians. It is told through the perspective of Nat Davy, who was called the Queen’s dwarf, and was by her side through two decades that were pivotal for the country and changed England forever. Nat starts as a pet to the young Queen but eventually becomes someone she confides in and whose advice she seeks. He is a fictional character inspired by a real person called Jeffrey Hudson.

There is a romantic plot interwoven into The Smallest Man and a strong theme of friendship and loyalty. But at its heart it’s a historic novel. It’s a good read, an easy read, and a feel-good read. It’s not taxing even though it is about a complex and fascinating piece of history. I also liked that it was history told through the eyes of someone who was different, which made me stop and think.

Nat’s story is an interesting one and he’s undoubtedly the character the reader sides with. However, I also enjoyed reading about these moments in history as the Queen, or a close confidant of the Queen, might have experienced them and particularly through the eyes of Queen Henrietta Maria of France, whom we don’t otherwise read very much about.

However, to borrow a football analogy, this did feel like a book of two halves to me. I was fascinated by the first part of the book where Nat works for the Queen and witnesses history unfurling from close quarters to one of the major players. But the latter part of the book, where he leaves the Queen in France and returns to England, wasn’t as compelling or pacey for me. 

This is an excellent debut novel with a good message about being accepted and accepting yourself.

Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces contains myriad interesting facts that explore the intricate nuances of surface science around friction and adhesion and their interactions with the world around us, even on a molecular level. Irish physicist and author Laurie Winkless explores the world of sticky – from Ancient Egypt to the structures on a gecko’s amazing feet – and covers adhesion through surface energy and how some plants are extraordinarily water repellent.

Did you know that oil paint doesn’t dry by losing water, or that Post-it Notes have glue for their glue?

Laurie Winkless takes us on a journey from the Australian Outback and the Resene paint factory in Naenae, through supersonic flight and NASA engineering, to our own households and everyday environment, covering the balance of downforce and friction that helps keep our cars on the road and the (accidentally discovered) Teflon that coats our pots and pans.

While Sticky was interesting, my lack of love for science certainly (and excuse the pun) led to a lack of stickability in reading this book wholeheartedly. I just found it hard to read. So much so, that I roped an unsuspecting household member and lover of science into doing the hard yards with me. This is what he had to say after reading Sticky. “I suspect I was already aware of some of the so-called ‘hard sciences’ written about here. This is possibly why I found the chapter about touch, its features, and how it works so illuminating and full of surprises.”

“If you’ve ever wanted to know how golf balls fly so far, how sharks swim quite so fast, or why superglue was initially considered a nuisance, then this is a book for you.”

He concludes that Sticky is a very rewarding read for the non-scientist in smaller bites, and I tend to agree. Winkless certainly has the expertise and skill to make an otherwise innocuous occurrence entertaining, but it was just not for me.

This collection (if you’ll excuse the pun) relates to author Frances Samuel’s experience as a writer of texts for museum pieces. Perhaps it’s not surprising that an unusual occupation like that should give rise to such smart, witty, nuanced poems.

I smiled with delight at her signature Exhibition, which describes museum objects as “those red herrings of history” and refers to “my employee’s tag a cheap necklace with an outdated cameo”. It took me more than one reading to discover the poem’s meaning – artfully obscured behind a heap of such images – but I’m glad I persevered.

Climate Change posits an unlikely and novel pairing of the ornithological and the mammalian. “You be a bird and I’ll be a buffalo” is the premise, and the poet goes on to suggest why the combination of six legs and four eyes is a useful and workable one. Behind the words sits the concept of cooperation, surely so indispensable for combatting climate change, captured movingly in the last three lines: “Over and again, agreement can only come when the bird in me bleats to the buffalo in you.”

Samuel goes on to capture the world of the supernatural, most effectively with her narrative-style How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts. The writer is good at this job: “Bed sheets with elasticated corners are the best tools for the job”, she advises, and “most ghosts don’t struggle. I think they’re happy to be caught” turns out to be an ironic comment on the nature of marriage.

My favourite poem would have to be Pottery – yes, you read that right – and our writer here uses the likeness of pottery to poetry to comment on the nature of the latter. “Pots are approachable, democratic, familiar to everyone. They don’t require special knowledge to interpret and neither do poems”.

And surely that’s true, or should be, of poetry. Although Samuel’s work is erudite and clever, it isn’t self-indulgently so. She’s down to earth enough to include motherhood and exercise amongst her poetic targets. And, of course, museums.

Picking up directly from the first book One For Sorrow, Two For Joy continues the adventures of the title’s main protagonists, Audrey and Ivy, as they try to solve the mysteries surrounding their school Illumen Hall and the titular Magpie Society. 

This time the actions ramped up to level 10, with the stakes getting higher and much deadlier for everyone involved. In my review for One For Sorrow a couple of years ago, I compared it with Harry Potter; now, it feels as if both Sugg and McCulloch have taken the series and moved it in an entirely new direction. A darker one filled with personalities and locations just as memorable as anything JK Rowling could ever come up with. If this were a movie, I would say that it was a cinematic experience, made with a bigger budget than the first.

The characters are the deepest and most complex I’ve seen. Each one is alive with their own motivations. We see behind-the-scenes glimpses into Ivy and Audrey, who are more developed this time around. By dividing the book into chapters that focus on each girl, we see what makes them tick as people and learn more about their motivations. 

Usually, I take the time to discuss the negatives found in the book, but there isn’t anything for me to complain about here. Everything from the first title has been beefed up and made better, and what didn’t work has been ditched. My only real grumble is that I suspect this might be the last book in the series, and I’ll have to say goodbye to The Magpie Society for good.

Bottom line, if you have read One For Sorrow, then you need to pick this up. To sum it up in just a few words: satisfying, clever, wonderful, fun.

Rebekah Ballagh’s Words of Comfort offers a grounding and simplistic response to grief. Navigating grief, whether it’s sideways, through it, or crawling under it, Words of Comfort offers a sense of stillness through grief’s noise.

Like a journey that has no set place or time, Words of Comfort has no prescriptive actions or ‘must dos’. Instead Ballagh encourages living in a moment, whatever that moment may be, whether it is navigating guilt and anxiety, loss and despair, or trying to tread water in the face of sadness and longing for what once was. The chapters hit you where grief hits you, right in the place where it lives on any given day: the past, the present, or the every day. Ballagh talks about being grounded, being safe, and being okay when nothing feels okay.

Ballagh suggests creating a memory box to remind you of all the moments you’ve shared with someone. She reminds us that in the process of loss we learn we were never promised a perfect life, and that it’s okay to go on living even when you are lost and have lost something or someone.

Words of Comfort is a heartwarming and gentle book that neither preaches about how someone should grieve nor assumes where grief ends or begins. Despite its gentle nature and soft calming illustrations, a small part of me wonders if these messages would seem trite to someone facing overwhelming grief, a grief that untethers you and is palpable in every breath you take. Or would it instead offer small comfort on the days when the mundane act of reading a book has only just become manageable?

I lean towards the latter. If only one quote resonates and makes someone feel a little bit better, for that moment in time, I think it’s a good thing.

“It’s okay to go on living, to have a life that carries on in a future you hadn’t imagined. It’s okay to laugh again. And it’s always okay to cry again,” Ballagh says.

The Fair Botanists by Scottish writer Sara Sheridan has been my surprise read of 2022 so far. It’s charming, beautifully written, and draws the reader in slowly through its rich character development supported by an excellent plot with just the right amount of tension.

The book is set in summer 1822 when all of Edinburgh is excited about King George IV’s impending visit. Elsewhere though, our characters are more fascinated by the growth of an exotic Agave Americana plant in the Botanic Gardens, which only flowers every 30 years. The plant brings together newly widowed Elizabeth and entrepreneurial Belle, as well as a cast of characters who grow on the reader as the plant grows. The female characters are by far the strongest and most captivating. But there’s a sprinkling of likeable male characters too, including William McNab, the hard-working head gardener at the Botanic Gardens who has some secrets of his own and is wrestling with his conscience.

The flowering of the plant brings tension to the plot as many characters have an interest in it and the promise and possibilities its seeds could bring. Elizabeth finds a sense of purpose through her botanical illustrations and wants to contribute by capturing the plant when it flowers, while courtesan Belle is exploring a new niche in the creation of a perfume that she hopes will make her fortune and provide her with a more secure future.

This is a historical novel and its descriptions of Georgian Edinburgh bring the setting to life. Gardeners will enjoy reading about the exotic plants and the history of the gardens. At the heart of the book though is female friendship and two women striving to find their place and their independence in a man’s world.

I loved this book from the first few chapters and couldn’t put it down. I know you’ll love it too as you follow the ups and downs of Belle and Elizabeth’s unlikely friendship.

Poignant, fun, and touching, Mary’s Boys, Jean-Jacques, and other stories is a collection of short stories from one of New Zealand’s most accomplished authors and poets, Sir Vincent O’Sullivan.

From an elderly grandmother dredging up her old memories to a man from the past purchasing the unthinkable, each story evoked a different emotion and kept me hooked and engaged until I reached the last page.

I loved them all and found myself reading and re-reading some of the stories simply because they were that good. But for me the real meat, the pièce de resistance of the book was Mary’s Boys, Jean-Jacques. An unofficial sequel of sorts based on Mary Shelley’s
1818 novel Frankenstein, which picks up some time where the original story left off with the titular creature floating away, his fate left uncertain.

As a rule of thumb, I have always believed that classic literature should never be touched, but O’Sullivan treats Frankenstein’s monster with the respect and dignity it deserves. I especially enjoyed the little Aotearoa-esque twist that I think many readers will appreciate.

While each story is unique they all share a few similarities. The character development is top-notch. They aren’t just a bunch of words on a page but instead well-defined people that I related to and even liked. One standout is of course the marvellous job O’Sullivan’s done at recreating Mary Shelley’s creation. Its description genuinely terrified me. Likewise, I loved the worlds of each story, and almost imagined myself being in them alongside the characters.

My one complaint is that I wanted more. Seven stories just weren’t enough, and by the end of the book, I was hungry for more. It’s a minor complaint though, and I’m sure everyone who picks this up will thoroughly enjoy it. 

O’Sullivan has done admirably, and I think Mary Shelley would be proud of the care that he has taken with her work if she were alive today.

exile on tombleson road is the perfect pocket-sized book and unconventional compilation of poetry.

For want of a better word, there’s something ‘cool’ about it. It’s rugged and folksy and the images by Riley Claxton are old-school yet fitting.

It’s a nod to the Rolling Stone’s Exile on Main St., and in a similar vein to an album has track listings and two sides.

It’s a winning collaboration between Claxton’s images taken around author Brian Potiki’s house and surroundings in Lake Rotoehu with some of his bohemian poetry. Potiki seems to have captured the ultimate leanings of a Kiwi life with the images speaking of a musician’s backdrop.

Having worked for someone where pedantry over capital letter use reigned supreme, I couldn’t help but give a small smile at the almost entire lack of them in Potiki’s words in favour of lowercase letters. This only added to the charm and I found myself enjoying the irregular nature of the poems; what they looked like and how they read. Claxton’s images emphasised the eclectic nature of the bite-sized book.

I read exile on tombleson road quickly. In a pleasant interlude in a small moment in time, I found myself enjoying Potiki’s reflections of exactly that: snippets of time. The cover didn’t quite sell me but in between the pages were poems like octopus arms. See a short snippet bellow.

“one arm the jazz-pop

crowd called swing,

another arm called

rock and roll...”

exile on tombleson road is like a favourite notebook where environment meets words, meets music, meets life.

I Laugh Me Broken is an exploration of choice versus genetic destiny. Ginny is a young author living in New Zealand. When she is contacted by relatives from her mother’s side of the family whom she has never met, she is given the unexpected news of a genetic condition, for which she has a 50 percent chance of carrying the gene. Huntington’s Disease. Left motherless from a young age, Ginny finally has a glimpse of why her mother chose to end her own life rather than wait for the symptoms of such a condition to show themselves.

With calm and natural prose, author Bridget van der Zijpp explores, through Ginny’s sudden flight from everything familiar to her, the inner turmoil of decision when faced with knowledge of your own demise. Ginny could take the test to determine whether she carries the offending gene, but then what? What does one do with that knowledge? Appropriately contextualised in the setting of Berlin’s rich history, van der Zijpp discusses the past fate of those once deemed to be “useless eaters”; how their freedoms and ultimately their lives were taken from them. Ginny feels the hopelessness of a potentially inescapable fate, as Huntington’s has no cure, and the success of treatment is varied.

Ginny carries this heavy uncertainty silently inside her, avoiding sharing her news with anyone, even her fiancé Jay. The poignant question posed is if perhaps it is kinder not to burden him with the knowledge of what the future may hold. “If I told him, I wouldn’t be able to escape his concerned gaze. Did I really want to do this to him?... To be trapped in the sticky mud of his watchfulness... To turn love into solicitude?... I believed I was really thinking about self-sacrifice. Wasn’t the most noble act, the greater love, not to tell him, not to force his obligation?”

I Laugh Me Broken is, ultimately, a story of vulnerability, of love in the face of uncertainty.

An epic novel perfect for your isolation blues, The Secrets of Sainte Madeleine will have you yearning for a time when France was just a plane flight away. But if you can’t travel physically you may as well travel to a different world through a book, and there’s no better book in which to lose yourself than The Secrets of Sainte Madeleine.

Spanning five decades from the early 20s through WWII and up to the 70s, The Secrets of Sainte Madeleine follows the trials and tribulations, the celebrations and the tragedies, the lives and the memories of the Salignac family. Owners of beautiful château Sainte Madeleine, the family have been wine growers of Burgundy and members of the French aristocracy for centuries, but nothing has prepared the Salignacs for the years that will come to pass. Their connection to the chateâu will be tested through the turbulence of both the world around them and of life itself.

Though each of the three children born to Louis and Therese Salignac have very different temperaments and lives, each one develops an essential bond to their home at Sainte Madeleine. Elise longs to inherit the chateâu and vineyard but loses herself in societal expectations; Alexandre, frustrated with his father’s difficult temperament, escapes to Napa to start his own vineyard; Didier, always sensitive, must find his own way to reconcile the love and pain caused by Sainte Madeleine. Meanwhile distant cousin Laurent Senard must find a way through war and politics back to Elise and Sainte Madeleine.

In this sweeping historical romance, Tilly Bagshawe crafts a world of perfectly balanced escapism and historical reality. Though she confronts serious topics of war, sexism, classism, racism, and generational strife, she also weaves in romance and beauty. Just as in life the bad moments always have their counterpart; each low will also have its highs and vice versa. The Secrets of Sainte Madeleine is a dream, a saga, an escape, and everything in between.

Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming is not so much a look at the American Dream as it is an autopsy of it and the toll it can take on those chasing it.

The story focuses on Olga Acevedo and her brother Prieto, two siblings trying to navigate modern-day corporate America while finding their place in it. Years earlier, they were abandoned by their mother, Blanca, who ran off to become a revolutionary and save the world. Now she’s back, and her arrival shakes up what some might consider the siblings’ perfect lives.

I found the characters fascinating; they’re just wonderful to be around. Each one is so alive, and I was surprised by the depth of humanity that they all have. They have their triumphs and failures, and like all people, they make mistakes. This made them more relatable, and it was not long before I saw them as real human beings rather than characters on a page. 

I loved them all, but my favourite has to be Blanca. While she does not appear until much later on, she looms omnipresent over her children throughout the book. She is cold, cruel, and calculating to onlookers, but I loved her ambition and her tenacity to succeed whatever the cost (including being there for her kids). The prose is likewise a joy to read, and when I was finished I found myself wanting more, surely a great sign.

While it is true that nothing is perfect, I honestly could not find a single thing to critique about Olga Dies Dreaming. I suspect that many people will agree with me and love this book.

Put this on your list of must-haves. Gonzalez weaves a compelling story about the dangers of chasing that seemingly golden ideal: the American Dream. It is an exciting and thrilling read that I just could not put down. After this, Xochitl Gonzalez is an author I will be looking out for in the future.