Book review: One Step Beyond by Malcolm Law

This book is in bookstores now.

One Step Beyond is a great story and an easy read, but watch out as it’s likely to encourage you to go for a run if you take it for holiday reading.

Malcolm Law, self-described average man with average running abilities, sets himself the challenge of running Seven Great Walks in seven days. Most of these runs are 40 – 70km long, so essentially he’s running more than a marathon a day for 7 days.

In part it’s a homage to how he feels at peace when outdoors in the fresh air and away from the office, but Malcolm also still feels the pain of his brother Alan who died of leukaemia when they were children. His inspiration is to run the seven walks in seven days for charity and raise money for a leukaemia related charity.

Friends, family, sponsors and complete strangers gather behind this idea and make it into a force to be reckoned with, garnering support for travel between the tracks, support runners for each leg, video to catch the highlights, and supplying food and accommodation for the 7-in-7 team. This feeling runs throughout the book, and the reader can’t help but feel many a warm fuzzy at the Kiwi way of pitching in behind a good cause.

As a fellow runner, reading this book was a delight with the way Malcolm describes the feeling of running on mountaintops with spectacular views, through luscious New Zealand bush, and the feeling of peace and calm that comes with feeling healthy and fit on the trails. The chapters where Malcolm describes running each of the Great Walks one by one are a pleasure.

One of the great ideas in this book is to set your goals high and you might surprise yourself with what you can achieve. With this in mind, Malcolm sets an initial goal of raising $50,000 for the Leukaemia & Blood Foundation, and ends up raising over $85,000.

Running seven marathons in seven days was also above expectations, he wasn’t sure he could do it – the blisters, the pain, the mental strain… “I had gone beyond what I had thought myself capable of. If I can do what I’ve just done, then anything is possible. Today my horizons are wider and my ambitions grander, all because I dared to go one step beyond what I really thought I could do.”

Reviewed by Amie Lightbourne, Awards Manager for Booksellers NZ and keen runner.

One Step Beyond
by Malcolm Law
Published by Penguin Books
ISBN 9780143568674

Book review: Snow White’s Coffin by Kate Camp

This book is in bookstores now

Snow White’s Coffin is the latest collection from one of New Zealand’s best known poets, Kate Camp. Camp has published four previous collections of poetry, and this latest book was written in Berlin while she held the Creative New Zealand Berlin residency. The book is sectioned into two parts, with a short first section and an extended second section.

The back cover gives no hint of the book’s contents, but a Rilke quote at the beginning suggests the collection deals with themes of inadequacy and uncertainty in the face of love and death. With only that and the title to inform me, I approached the book as though it was a modern retelling of Snow White. As you may have guessed, there are no Disney princesses in this collection, but the book certainly calls to mind the Grimm fairy tale, with axes falling, snow on the ground, poison, death, and avoidance of death.

Camp’s writing style is conversational, while also being lyrical. I’ve always enjoyed the way her poems turn gothic and somewhat mysterious. In many poems I can’t say exactly what’s happening, but I know that I like it; I want to keep reading. While most poems don’t explicitly reference Berlin, they have a certain austere quality that makes me think of Eastern Europe (and made me wonder if the lacking cover design was meant to evoke a  traditional German aesthetic).

Many poems seem to be about the ordinariness of a creative life, from which springs extraordinary ideas. The notes section at the back shows that Camp was influenced by the work of other poets, and also, I think, the experience and idea of translation; both of Camp’s work into German, but also the translation of her life to another culture for a year. Like, as one poem says, “snow in Hawai’i.”

From the first page you can tell you’re in the hands of a skilled poet. There are many wow moments, with poems such as “The loneliest ol’ song in the world,” “There is no easy way,” and “Everybody has to be somewhere.” Camp’s deft imagery provides new ways of looking at the world. For example, from “The sea is dark and we are told it’s deep”:

Inside these caverns dark and bloody only one man goes
with pickaxe and leather kit he tunnels
to produce the loudest man-made sound on the planet.
Earth flies like terrified geese

Or the opening of “Everything is a clock”:

Across the floor she went
it was made up of sawed-up trees
and patterned with the places branches grew.

My favourite poems were those that described how we live within things: beds, buildings, the atmosphere, our own ideas of ourselves; the stories we carry around about ourselves. These poems are aware of the world built by our own human hands, but also by our imaginations. In this sense, the title of the collection actually refers to a 1956 German radiogramme—an old fashioned piece of furniture that combines a radio and record player—that was known as “Snow White’s Coffin.” The radiogramme seems to symbolise how we record our lives, as well as the idea of the past and the future clashing together. For me, this idea of collision is the quiet social commentary at the centre of the collection. Maybe the collection is Camp’s version of a magic mirror?

This is not a book than can be breezed through in an hour. It’s a stunning collection that sustains voice and pressure throughout, which is no small feat. It takes (and deserves) effort and concentration to read, but the beauty of the language and mystery in the poems make it more than worthwhile.

Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

Snow White’s Coffin
by Kate Camp
Victoria University Press, 2013
ISBN 9780864738882

Book review: Magical Margaret Mahy by Betty Gilderdale

This book is in bookstores now

Magical Margaret Mahy by Betty Gilderdale is a little gem of a book. It tells the story of the brilliant woman responsible for the magical and imaginative stories we all know and love. Margaret has always been one of my favourite authors, so I was thrilled when Penguin announced they were publishing a non-fiction book about Margaret that was especially for children.

As all books should (in my opinion), it has a picture of a map at the beginning. It looks like something straight out of Peter Pan or Treasure Island, with curled, worn edges, a compass that points north, exotic birds, mermaids, and a pirate who points his hook at a spot marked X – where a penguin sits atop a treasure chest! It looks terribly exciting and full of adventures waiting to be discovered.

A closer look and the reader realises that the map is in fact New Zealand. The exotic birds are the kiwi and the kea, the smoking volcano is White Island and the spot marked X is Governor’s Bay, where Margaret lived for more than 40 years. Hmmm but why was there a penguin sitting on the treasure chest?

I wasn’t puzzled for long – the first chapter reveals all. Gilderdale tells the tale of a group of children assembled in a school hall, waiting in anticipation for the person whose books they’d been reading all term: “What would she be like, this author who wrote about clowns and pirates, witches and wizards?” You can imagine their delight when out of the car stepped not a woman, but a giant penguin! “‘The problem is,’ [Margaret] said to anyone who might be listening, ‘that penguin flippers were not made for turning pages.’” Gilderdale retells this exciting and unusual school visit marvelously, and the reader gets a real sense of just how imaginative and remarkable Margaret was, and how much schools relished her visits.

In chapters two, three and four Gilderdale writes about Margaret’s journey from imaginative child to famed children’s writer. Margaret was inventing stories and worlds from an incredibly young age. Gilderdale has included the well-known story of little Margaret sitting “beneath the kitchen table listening to the thump-thumping noise of her mother ironing above her” and telling her the story of the Fox and the Little Red Hen.

I really enjoyed the way in which Gilderdale describes events in Margaret’s life in the same fantastical and adventurous style of Margaret’s stories. Even Margaret’s birth is described as an exciting journey by her Grandfather: “I am informed that you happily arrived this afternoon, quite punctually, after a rather long journey … what a lucky girl you are to have landed safely on a new planet.”

Gilderdale cleverly weaves together the connection between stories of Margaret’s life and how these experiences influenced Margaret’s writing. For instance, when Margaret was at school she was invited to a fancy-dress party. Her mother made a deep impression on her by suggesting that instead of a fairy — which surely a lot of other girls would go as — Margaret should go as a witch.

Margaret acted so admirably at the party that “for a long time afterwards she was nicknamed “The Witch”. Gilderdale observes that witches feature prominently in Margaret’s writing, for example The Witch in the Cherry Tree and The Boy with Two Shadows, but “her witches are not really threatening or wicked – the first one likes cakes; the other goes off on holiday”.

I did feel that parts of chapters five and six let the book down. Chapter five includes a long-winded explanation of how the publishing industry works, including a dry section detailing authors’ struggles with income tax and royalties. Likewise, Chapter six gets bogged down with explanations of how the television industry works and problems it runs into because of budget restrictions. As this is supposed to be a book for children, I’m not sure that these were needed – they’re not very exciting!

However, the book was really enjoyable overall. As well as being a great resource for children who want to know about Margaret’s life, it’s a generally fabulous read. As Gilderdale says in the last chapter of the book, “A ‘good’ children’s book is enjoyable for adults as well – a good book is a good book whatever age it is intended for”.

Reviewed by Stephanie Soper.

Magical Margaret Mahy
by Betty Gilderdale
Published by Penguin Books
ISBN 9780143568810

Book review: Red Rocks by Rachael King

This book is in bookshops now and is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.

It takes quite a lot of trust and faith in your reader to mix a thoroughly ancient legend, in this case about mythical selkies, with a modern of coming of age story. Half of the main characters in this book by Rachael King are in fact seals; seals that, in keeping with Scottish legend, turn into beautiful young women when they cast their skins aside to walk on land. The mythical selkies. The other characters are one half of a modern day separated family trying to get on with life as best they can. It also takes a good storyteller to pull it off.

Surprisingly perhaps, I found myself suspending disbelief; and I became entranced by this book and its characters. And it happened so subtly that I didn’t even notice. The main character Jake is a little lost – his parents are divorced, his mother remarried with a new baby. He visits his father who is living a nomadic writer’s existence on the Wellington coast. But the school holidays are never much fun without friends, so the adventurous Jake takes off to explore the rocks of the Wellington coastline. He makes friends with another equally lonely young girl and an old man and attracts the interest of some local bullies. But it is when he finds an abandoned seal skin which he hauls home that the trouble really begins. The taking of the skin is the key turning point in this book as it unravels the story and importantly prevents its rightful owner from going to back to the sea.

Hindsight is a great thing. And of course, I can tell you now that I knew all along which characters were human and which were seals, but what’s clever is the way this realisation subtly unfolds. There is not a moment of mass revelation, you just suddenly begin to understand who the characters are and how they inter-relate and it feels natural. I guess that’s why it easy to believe in all of the characters in this book; they just work.

Interestingly, I just handed the book to my eleven year old saying it was great and I think you will like it. He read the back (which mentions seal skins but nothing about selkies) and he asked “What’s up with selkies? This is the third book this year that’s had slekies in it.”

Really? I had no idea. Apparently, his teacher has been reading these books to them in class.

“What time period have they been set in?” I asked.
“Ancient of course” was his reply. “And all in Scotland.”
“What about one set in Wellington in modern times. Could that work?”
“Hmm, maybe.”

But there is no maybe about it. This book works and it’s a gripping page-turning tale.

The book should appeal to any reader (young or old) who is able to suspend reality briefly, but after all isn’t that what reading is all about?

Reviewed by Gillian Torckler

Red Rocks
by Rachael King
Published by Random House
ISBN 9781869799144 (paperback)
ISBN 9781869799151 (e-book)

Book review: Glass Wings by Fleur Adcock

This book is in bookshops from today.

I don’t think that Fleur Adcock really needs introduction to most of the poetry reading public. As such I’m going to refrain from telling you much about her. Glass Wings, the most recent in a long line of collections, is a mixed bag for me. I’ll admit that I’m probably not the audience for this work and although in general it seemed a collection of eulogies and wills in poem form there were moments and poems that still grabbed me.

The first section was the one I connected with the least. And this is most likely a failure on my part; other readers may enjoy it more. It is a collection of memories and eulogies. The parts I found most enjoyable were lines with more poetic than prosaic sounds ‘chocolate-box Chiddingstone’ and the more unusual images. Some of the lines about ageing and dying seemed particularly unkind to the subjects.

Whilst I don’t think that poets and writers have an obligation to be kind these images reflected common – and to my mind – uninteresting societal attitudes that pity the fat and infirm. At one point a woman’s growing fatness is described as ‘abducting’ her. And in another poem a 94 year old in ill health prompts the narrator to suggest that in their shoes they would rather be dead. The author at one point admits, I think, what are my reasons for being unable to connect with many of these poems:

‘They would certainly fly more gracefully
than my stumbling private-public poem
(you know how tricky such commissions are — ‘

These poems seem self conscious in their construction and in some places a little forced. Intimacy is explained through anecdotes where the reader doesn’t always have the understanding to get the jokes and connections. Often they feel like letters rather than poems, direct addresses that feel like the reader is eavesdropping or somehow interrupting.

The next section is a series of ancestor poems where wills and inheritance are the central themes. These poems were generally more interesting to me with lots of excellent familial detail going back hundreds of years. The final poem in this section, ‘Intestate’, references the whole collection and I think is one of the finer poems there both for its voice, its abstraction and its clarity.

The third section is brief and returns to the elegiac theme. This section deals with the author’s marriage to Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and the children they had together. Although brief this section is the one I enjoyed the most. The eulogy here is more successful, perhaps because it retains a feeling of intimacy that doesn’t have to be over-explained. The rest of the poems contain wonderful detail of another time. They include some lovely witty lines such as ‘Who says you can’t be ‘slightly pregnant’?’ at the end of ‘Port Charles’ and in ‘The Professor of Music’ a guest jokes that the couple may ‘be getting above ourselves?’ after the purchase of a fridge. The last two poems in this section return to the slightly more awkward territory trodden in the first section.

The final section, the only one really addressing the title of the collection, contains an excellent poem about a dung beetle. There are other successful jokes and good moments here. However, when the author writes about her ‘not-to-be-written memoirs’ I was a little surprised. Many of these poems are memoir. In fact the whole book could be memoir in poem form. I wondered what prompted that line and attitude.

If you’ve read and liked Fleur Adcock before I’m absolutely sure that you’ll find something to like, if not love, here. Even more curmudgeonly readers such as myself will probably find something worth dipping into. Adcock is after all an accomplished poet with a long history of awards and accolades.

Reviewed by Emma Barnes

Glass Wings
by Fleur Adcock
Published by Victoria University Press
ISBN 9780864738875

Book review: The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo by F. G. Haghenbeck

This book is in bookstores now.

Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) has a devoted following and in recent years I’ve read a number of novels based on her life – The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo: A Novel by Mexican writer F. G. Haghenbeck is by far the most enjoyable.

The problem with dead people is that if you’re telling their story there’s not a lot of new material to work with so it can get a bit same-same. For example, while I quite enjoyed The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver I found the plot followed a little too faithfully to the movie Frida for my liking so there was nothing new.

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths is billed as a poetic re-imagining of the life of Frida Kahlo and is certainly lyrical and passionate but left me wanting something with a bit more substance and a bit less reliance on shock value.

Image via Pinterest

In all honesty I was swayed to buy this new re-imagining of Frida Kahlo’s life by the cover, which was designed by Lisa Congdon, a great illustrator and a recent discovery. (She blogged about the book cover).

Haghenbeck tells a compelling, lively and interesting version of Frida Kahlo’s life that picks up familiar occasions and characters but does it in a way that feels fresh and new. There is ground covered here that readers will also find in The Lacuna and A Love Letter from a Stray Moon but it’s ground that’s covered in greater detail, or with more believability than the other two ‘Frida books.’

The genesis of the story – and it’s a great and immediate hook – is the idea that a notebook of Frida’s recipes for Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations, which was about to exhibited, has disappeared. The book expresses her passion for Día de Muertos and includes recipes and the stories associated with them – these recipes are included at the end of each chapter of the novel in a way some will find reminiscent of another Mexican-authored book, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.

Click image for source

The story features all the Frida highlights – her tumultuous relationship with Diego Rivera, the development of her artistic vision, her complex personality, her lust for life and her existential feminism. Her early family life, her affairs with icons like Trotsky and O’Keeffe, her time in USA and life at her Mexican home La Casa Azul are all covered here – but in a context that gives Frida a true personality; in The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo she is more than just an angry woman or a painter strapped to a bed.

I read The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo on the train to and from work. Even if you know nothing about Frida Kahlo this is an interesting and enjoyable novel full of the heat and passion of life, love and food in Mexico. It is easy to get into and compelling enough that you can regularly return to it and quickly and easily pick up the story again.

Read this book if you love Frida Kahlo or just need a bit of daily inspiration. In fact, I also created a Pinterest board inspired by The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo.

Reviewed by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

P.S. Of all the Frida Kahlo books my favourite is definitely The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (ISBN 9780810959545), which is the reproduction of Frida Kahlo’s diary. It’s well worth looking out if you’re keen to hear from the woman herself.

The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo: A Novel
F. G. Haghenbeck
Published by Atria Books
ISBN 9781451632835

Book review: Paris by Edward Rutherfurd

This book is in bookstores now.

My advance review copy of Paris weighs over 900 grams and is over 670 pages long. I didn’t keep count of the number of characters the book follows, but the number was high – and with about 800 years of Parisian and wider French events to cover, it’s understandable.

Paris tells the story of the city through the lives of four families who bump against each other and occasionally intertwine over many centuries. Significant events and periods in Parisian history – from multiple religious expulsions to The Terror, the reign of the Sun King to occupation in World War II – are interpreted by the actions and reactions of members of the families, all from different social strata, but all determined to survive.

I will admit to struggling to get into Paris – but once I got the hang of the plot skipping backwards and forwards between families and time periods, and realised that there was a central plot arc that everything was feeding into, I found it hard to put the book down, and the housework and garden were neglected as I chose to keep reading to get to the story’s conclusion.

The bulk of the novel deals with a set of characters living between the 1870s and the end of World War II, and the stories that fall outside this period are a seasoning that add richness and dimension to the story. Rutherfurd cleverly weaves his narrative so that you don’t always realise the significance of a scene, or even a whole chapter, until later in the story; I found myself having small “a-ha!” moments when I’d realise that something I’d read dozens (if not hundreds) of pages earlier was a clue to the current storyline.

A strength of Rutherfurd’s style is that he doesn’t assume the reader has prior knowledge of French history or language, of Parisian geography. The story is clearly very well researched, and events are explained without feeling like you’re sitting in a school room, and not needing to stop and check what a French phrase meant was great. Being an advance proof, my copy did not contain the family tree or maps of Paris that are in the final published book and will greatly add to the richness of the reader experience. Without these, the travelling backward and forward in time, the historically correct repetition of ancestral first names, and my ignorance of the layout of Paris, made some parts of the story feel a little muddy. I understood the action, but couldn’t always see things clearly.

Characters in Paris, as in the real world, sit on the spectrum from thoroughly unlikeable to delightful, with steel worker Thomas Gascon being a favourite of mine. I was really interested in some of the minor players who weren’t from the main four families, particularly some members of the Renard/Fox and Jacob families, and would like to have read more about them. It felt like the Gascon family got less attention than the other three families, and I would have like to follow their story more. The death of a strong female character near the end of the book was not commented on by the other characters, which felt odd and jarred a bit, especially in the circumstances; it felt like a loose end that had been dropped. Over everything hung the spectre of a rigid class system, blindly accepted by some characters, and fought against by others.

When I started Paris I wasn’t sure that I’d be writing a genuinely positive review; now I’m looking forward to rereading it, with family tree and maps close to hand.

For an interesting review with the author about this book, I recommend this interview on Radio NZ National (the audio file will download when you click the link).

Reviewed by Rachel Moore

Paris
by Edward Rutherfurd
Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
ISBN 9781444736809

Book review: Ghosts of Parihaka by David Hair

This book is in bookshops now.

In Ghosts of Parihaka, the fifth and penultimate book in the acclaimed Aotearoa series, David Hair again delivers his clever and thought-provoking blend of contemporary and historical New Zealand, coupled with mythology and magic.

The protagonist, teenage adept Matiu Douglas, is now well-trained in the in magical arts and well on his way to becoming a fully-fledged tohunga ruanuku (“good wizard”) He flits with ease, although no little physical exertion, between our world and the parallel world of Aotearoa, where historical figures and the ordinary dead co-exist with mythological and magical creatures.

Matiu’s friend Riki, on a school trip to present-day Parihaka, is tricked by a beautiful woman into passing through to Aotearoa’s Parihaka, where he gets caught up in the famous passive resistance protest he has been studying, and ends up on a slave ship headed by tohunga makutu (“evil wizard”) and historical character John Bryce. Matiu, alerted to Riki’s disappearance, heads to Aotearoa to rescue his friend, accompanied by his posse of now-familiar characters (including Damien, who died in Book four, Justice and Utu, but now resides in Aotearoa).

Matiu is also accompanied by newer friend and blossoming love interest Everelda, a seer who in Book 4 discovered she was actually the natural daughter of two of Matiu’s greatest enemies in Aotearoa. Their fledgling relationship is severely complicated by the fact that Matiu has been chosen by Aroha, the incarnation of Hine-ahu-one (the first woman), as her future mate. As Aroha is also the incarnation of Hine-te-po, the Goddess of Death, Matiu and Evie’s relationship proves too dangerous to continue.

Ghosts of Parihaka had some fantastic moments and gave some interesting insights into the devastating events that took place at Parihaka in the 1880s. The main problem with the book was that it was clearly a ‘middle book’, which does not stand well on its own and sets up a lot of events which it then leaves hanging, to resolve in the final book. There was a large section in the middle in which it felt like very little of importance happened other than a lot of travelling. Things just keep getting worse for Matiu, and the final showdown with John Bryce ends up feeling somewhat anti-climactic. The book did its job, however, as I am now waiting very impatiently to read the final installment.

The Aotearoa series has the same sort of young adult/adult crossover appeal as John Marsden’s Tomorrow series, and although the subject matter is very different, is likely to appeal to a similar audience. Mild violence and romantic themes mean the books are probably more suited to teens and mature pre-teens than a younger audience, and I would also strongly recommend them to adults with an interest in New Zealand’s history and in Māori mythology.

Reviewed by Renée Boyer-Willisson

Ghosts of Parihaka
by David Hair
Published by HarperCollins
ISBN 9781869509323

Book review: A Winters Day in 1939 by Melinda Szymanik

This book is in bookstores now

It’s always interesting when you read a book about a well-known event and an entirely different perspective is presented that makes you pause and think. As the cover of this book suggests, it is set in World War II and the narrator is Adam, a 12 year-old Polish boy whose family are uprooted and relocated to various labour camps in Russia.

Reminiscent of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the main character, an adventurous boy named Adam, has no idea what is actually happening to him; the political background remains unspoken. Of course, as readers in 2012 we know the unspeakable terrors of World War II are not far away.

I really like the authentic voice that this character has – he is undeniably his age, and he never quite comes to grip with why the events that unfold in this book (and his life) actually happen. It’s easy to believe in this young character, who is in fact the author’s father.

Melinda Szymanik has skilfully managed to recreate her father’s young persona and avoids any temptation to preach, inform, or explain this war. Adam never becomes bitter and jaded, he still notices the small wonders of life and is resolute in his will to survive.

The book opens with the family’s idyllic life on a farm awarded to Adam’s father for military service. They are hard working, and enjoy a comfortable and fruitful, if not wealthy, life. But the new authorities have decided the farm should be re-gifted to another man and rather suddenly, the family are ousted from their farm and find themselves heading to places unknown. Their imposed long train journey starts in a cattle wagon and finishes in what appears to be a concentration camp albeit without the gas chambers. Disease, death and hunger accompany this family through their enforced journeys through a vast area we would know as Russia and Persia.

Weeks, months and years pass. The end, when it comes, is thrust upon Adam’s family as suddenly as that first train trip was thrust upon them. This plight of displaced persons during World War II makes a sobering read, but this is a tale of survival and although Adam’s family is changed beyond recognition through their experience, there is a happily ever after.

Reviewed by Gillian Torckler

A Winters Day in 1939
By Melinda Szymanik
Published by Scholastic
ISBN 9781775430308

Rachael King has a secret and she’s ready to confess…

I have a confession to make. I took another person’s words and I put them into my book without attribution. So far nobody has called me out on it, not even my editor, who is renowned for having an eagle eye in such matters.

These are the words that I paraphrased: I baited my line, watched it sink, and waited with exquisite anticipation for the pecking of mullet, the sucking of trevally, or – best of all – the sudden pull of kahawai or kingfish.

Ring a bell? These words sit above Wellington harbour, as part of the Wellington Writer’s Walk, and they were written by my father, the late Michael King.

Let me explain myself.

There’s a picture of me, aged about seven I guess, proudly holding up two (admittedly rather small) kahawai by the gills, with a big snaggle-toothed grin on my face, while my brother serenely gazes at the camera with a rope swing between his legs, about to leap off into the abyss. I look at that photo now, with our home-knitted jerseys and flared jeans, and think that it sums up a pretty idyllic New Zealand 1970s childhood experience: bare feet in winter; haphazard haircutting practices; homemade, death-defying swings on macrocarpa trees; and nature, lots of nature.

The photo was taken at Paremata, near Welington, where Dad lived for a time in a two-bedroom rented cottage, with a steep track down to the beach. Jonathan and I slept in bunk beds in the bedroom; Dad slept in a double bed in the living room, and used the other bedroom to write in. It was while living there that my dad taught me how to row a boat, and to fish. He taught me not to reel my line in every time I got a bite, but to wait patiently until the fish was truly hooked, when the rod would dance in my hand. He taught me how to identify varieties of fish. The silver ones were yellow-eyed mullet. If they had yellow spots they were kahawai; but not too many spots or they were spotties, which also had jagged dorsal fins and were inedible. We threw those ones back. If the fish had ridges along the tail so its cross-section was diamond-shaped: trevally.

When it came time to write my first children’s book, how could I not suffuse it with all of those experiences? They were so much a part of my growing up that I couldn’t write what I knew without involving the sea.

And so Jake in Red Rocks goes and stays with his writer father by the sea and his father takes him out fishing. And as I wrote that scene I wanted to put a part of my father in it, and so I took his words, and I gave them to Jake:

“His hands were cold as they gripped the rod, but he felt such exquisite anticipation, it didn’t matter. What would find his bait? Would he feel the sudden pull of kahawai? Or the pecking of a mullet?”

I put them in there not because I couldn’t think of my own words to use, but because my dad isn’t around to read my book and this is how I made up for that fact. It was my little secret; my homage to the man who had given me the experiences I was now giving to my characters. And happily, as his literary executor, I was able to give myself permission to use those words.

There’s another picture of me. I’m sitting next to Dad’s quote on the Wellington Writer’s Walk, not long after it was installed. It’s late 2006 and I’ve got my first baby son in a sling and I’m smiling at my aunt Gerri, Dad’s sister, who is taking the picture. Soon after this picture was taken, I walked that baby around the South Coast of Wellington, and an idea came to me about a boy finding a sealskin in a cave, taking it home, and hiding it under his bed. I like to think that in this photo, that story is a twinkle in my eye, and that the quote is already working its way in there.

By Rachael King, author of Red Rocks.

Red Rocks is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.

Red Rocks
by Rachael King
Published by Random House
ISBN 9781869799144