Book Review: Rain Fall, by Ella West

Available in bookshops nationwide.

Sarah also reviewed this on RNZ Nine to Noon 

‘Even if you wear a coat or use an umbrella it doesn’t stop you getting wet. This rain doesn’t just fall. It wraps itself around you, you breathe it in, the whole world becomes water, constant falling water. And we drag it inside with us. Small rivers run off our clothes and our shoes onto the floor as we sit in class…’

By page 20 of this YA novel I was crying with the recognition of the description that author Ella West has written of Westport. I am from Westport, my mum is from Westport, her mum’s mum was from Charleston. The West Coast often arises in New Zealand’s literary narrative as wild and full of wild people. No book that I have read previously has captured my coast. With rain, puddles, and the smell of drying wool – taking your chance and biking to the shops, just to get caught in it again on the way home. With miners, and farmers, railway men and school teachers. With unemployment due to economic depression. With regular people just living their lives in the place they ended up.

‘When it rains, the only difference between the days is the size of the drops and the time it takes for them to fall.’

15-year-old Annie has decided to cycle to her basketball match one day, when she is stopped by a stranger, who tells her to go home and stay inside because they are watching a house nearby. She does, and learns the person they are watching is their neighbour Pete, who – as it turns out – shot up the police station the evening before. The armed offenders’ squad is there from Greymouth, getting some pies and watching the house, when it suddenly explodes, shattering Annie’s window and throwing everybody to the ground.

Annie has a horse, Blue, who she feeds and rides regularly. Because the ground is so boggy, to minimise the mess Blue makes of the paddocks, she takes him to Fairdown Beach for his regular ride. This isn’t the only reason that she goes down there the first time we join her – Pete is missing and she knows that he stayed in their shed overnight after the explosion, so she is tracking him to make sure he is safe away. Pete and she have a history – he saved her once – so she owes him one. On the beach, she meets a boy. They race.

‘If anyone describes galloping to you a the same as flying, don’t let them fool you…For starters you’re connected to this animal that seems like nothing but fluid, moving muscle beneath you…One move from me could send us both crashing down.’

Horse-lovers are going to adore this book. Blue is a former racehorse, and the boy – Jack Robertson – rides Tassie, a barrel-racing horse, smaller and more powerful. It turns out he is the son of the man who is leading the murder investigation – because there has been a murder as well, of a local drug dealer.

The relationship between Annie and Jack is managed well. Annie isn’t a soppy girl – she’s quite pragmatic, figuring they are just having a bit of fun, thinking Jack has another girlfriend who is in the States competing in Rodeo. They aren’t full-on, there isn’t paragraphs dedicated to mooning over his eyes or smile, nor is there any dramatic sexual awakening. The driver of the plot is not only the relationship, but the murder, the outsiders and the small town’s need to protect their own.

Annie knows a bit more about Pete than most, and without realising she was also the only one to see the dead body float down the Orowaiti river. She thought it was a jacket. She and Jack also discover the body when it washes up on Fairdown Beach.

Westport is a small town. Writers who have never lived in one get these towns wrong constantly – Ella has lived there, and it shows. She knows the schools, the layout, the need for the townspeople to protect their own.  She knows locals count. She knows the economic situation of the coast. ‘Brunner, Dobson, Strongman, Pike River – these are the ghosts that walk among us… But not only the dead, the coalmines themselves are now becoming ghosts.’ She has used all of this to build a plot that brings the coast to life.

The final chapters are fast-paced and thrilling. A run into the bush, guns, and desperate men. Will everyone come out alive?

Read this book if you know the Coast, if you want a read you can sink into, with a character who pulls her own weight and loves the place she lives. This is a great read, and while I’m not sure my background hasn’t influenced how much I loved it, I have been reading NZ-based YA critically for more than a decade now, and it certainly stands out. Well done, Ella, for getting it right. And thank you for writing about my town. I’m going to buy several copies of this and send them to my cousins.

Reviewed by Sarah Forster, who is also Editor of The Sapling.

Rain Fall
by Ella West
Published by Allen & Unwin Australia
ISBN 9781760296834

The blog to end our 20-day blog tour!

We have just finished a fabulous four-week tour around our authors inspirations, aims and achievements with their Children’s Choice finalist books. Now it is time for you to help your kids to vote their favourite book and author to win: they will be in to win a selection of finalists for themselves and their school if they do! Kids can select a winner in each category; the winning book of each category will win a prize at the Book Awards ceremony on Thursday 13 August. Thank you to all of the other blogs who have hosted these interviews!

During the first week of our tour, we heard from the Young Adult fiction finalists. We heard from Ella West (who, like any good super author, writes under a pseudonym) who dedicated Night Vision to Trish Brooking, because she still takes her out for lunch, after looking after her as Otago Education College Writer in Residence in 2010. We learned that Natalie King has not one but three pseudonyms, and was inspired by a dream of a lake to write the book Awakening, which begins with a mysterious necklace drawn from a lake. While Jill Harris sadly passed away in December, Makaro Press publisher Mary McCallum told us that she published her book The Red Suitcase because the opening chapter inside a Lancaster bomber had her riveted. I Am Rebecca was a return to a character that author Fleur Beale had written about before, in I am not Esther. She told us that the secret to her amazing characters is simply to “walk in the shoes of the character so that what happens to the character informs the story.” Our final YA author was Nelson-based Rachael Craw, who had two interviews in two different places! Spark was also inspired by a dream, which took 5 and a half years to come to fruition: she had to learn to write first! She was inspired by the power of DNA when she met her birth mother.

Week two saw us jump back a few reading years to the Picture Book finalists. Scott Tulloch ran I am Not a Worm past fellow Children’s Choice finalist Juliette MacIver and her kids, and her oldest son Louis suggested what became the final line in the book: “I like butterflies.” Yvonne Morrison, author of Little Red Riding Hood…Not Quite, told us she was about to leave NZ for a new job in Vietnam, living on a jungle island and managing a centre for endangered primates! Donovan Bixley covered two finalist books in one interview, Little Red and Junior Fiction book Dragon Knight: Fire! and he said that working with the same authors again and again means he can just do a messy scribble at the early stage of illustrating, and they will trust him to flesh it out!  Jo van Dam wrote doggy rhymes for her own children when they were young, and this became Doggy Ditties from A to Z. This is illustrated by Myles Lawford, who had to do a lot of research to make sure he illustrated each breed accurately. Peter Millet answered his own question about pets in the army with The Anzac Puppy, illustrated by Trish Bowles, who used to get in trouble at school for drawing: she now gets rewarded for it! Juliette MacIver likes to feature things in her books that children see in their everyday lives – “monkeys, old wooden galleons, pirates, for example, things that children encounter most days on their way to kindy or school.” Marmaduke Duck and the Wide Blue Seas was the third in the series by her and Sarah Davis, who reckons Juliette sometimes writes things in just to annoy her: ”52 marmosets leaped on board”?!? Seriously!!? Do you know how long it takes to draw 52 marmosets? Much longer than it takes to write the words “52 marmosets”, that’s for sure.”

We began the Junior Fiction category with an interview with Kyle Mewburn, author of Dragon Knight: Fire!, the first in a new series for the younger Junior Fiction age-group, and a finalist in both the children’s choice and the judges’ lists. Kyle doesn’t let his ideas float around “in case they escape, or some sneaky author steals one.”  The lead character in 1914 – Riding into War, by Susan Brocker, was inspired by her grandfather, Thomas McGee, who served as a mounted rifleman in WW1. Desna Wallace lived through the Canterbury Quake, and the character of Maddy popped into her head on the way home from work as a school librarian one day. “It was a bit crowded in there, so I sat down and wrote it out,” she said. Stacy Gregg‘s story The Island of Lost Horses began when she fell in love, with a picture of an Abaco Barb horse, the breed featured in this story; which is inspired by real events. Suzanne Main won the Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon award for the manuscript for How I Alienated My Grandma. This came with an offer of publication from Scholastic NZ, which enabled her to keep backing herself and her work to succeed.

The Non-fiction category tour began with the double-nominee (in judge’s and children’s choice lists) Māori Art for Kids, written and illustrated by the husband and wife team, Julie Noanoa & Norm Heke. Their aim was “to create something for families to connect with and appreciate Maori art.” Poet Sarah Jane Barnett featured poetry title The Letterbox Cat & other poems by Paula Green and Myles Lawford on her blog The Red Room. Paula says, “When I saw the way the zesty illustrations of Myles Lawford danced on the page, I cried!” Maria Gill followed up her New Zealand Hall of Fame of 2011 with New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame: 25 Kiwi Champions – she says the toughest task was to decide who to leave out. Gorgeous illustration guide book A New Zealand Nature Journal, by Sandra Morris, was featured next on NZ Green Buttons. Sandra’s favourite thing to do when not drawing or managing her illustration agency, is tramping, unsurprisingly!  Philippa Werry was in last year’s awards with her great Anzac Day book, and this year she was a children’s choice finalist for Waitangi Day: The New Zealand Story, featured on Barbara Murison’s blog. Philippa focused this book on the day itself, as opposed to the treaty, and she enjoys doing cryptic crosswords while contemplating writing.

While this tour is ending, we will be carrying on our celebration of the book awards, promoting the judges’ list in the Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in the run-up to the awards announcement at Government House on 13 August 2015. There will be giveaways and reviews, and fun besides, so watch this space!

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For the full links list for the Book Awards, please head here.

Other blogs involved were: NZ Booklovers blog, Booknotes Unbound, Around the Bookshops, Thrifty Gifty, My Best Friends are Books, NZ Green Buttons Blog and The Red Room.

Author Interview: Ella West, author of Night Vision

Ella West has been voted for by hundreds of teenagers all over New Zealand as a finalist in the Children’s Choice Young Adult Fiction category, for her fourth YA fiction book, Night Vision. Night Vision is one of the seven books selected not only by children, but also by judges to be a finalist. This is the first stand-alone book she has published, since completing the Thieves trilogy. According to our reviewer, Angela Oliver, “A quick-paced read, Night Vision is perfect for young teens.”

So how did this idea come to fruition? And how did it get published? Ella has generously answered all of our questions, below:

1. As an author, you must have a lot of ideas floating around. How did you decide to write this book in particular?
Two things made me write this book, no maybe three things. Firstly, I try to go as often as I can to the University of Otago Marama Hall lunchtime concerts on Wednesdays. If you’re in Dunedin I thoroughly recommend them. It’s really cheap and the music is incredible. I know very little about classical music but I just sit there and wow – it’s so great. It was there that I thought of the first line of the book (which is now at the start of chapter two): My name is Viola, not like the flower, the poor cousin of the showy pansy, but like the musical instrument.

Secondly, I was channel surfing one night and came across a short 60 Minutes documentary on Moon Children – kids with XP (Xeroderma Pigmentosum). And it got me thinking. Kids who only go out at night – now, what would they see? On NBC in the States there has just been another documentary on Moon Children but this time it was two hours long. Here’s the link to part of it. My agent in New York told me about it. He said he kept yelling at the TV, “That’s Viola, that’s exactly Viola,” which is kind of cool.

Thirdly, people just don’t get farming. We have sheep and cattle and when I talk to people (non-farmers) they don’t get it. Farmers do everything they can to keep their animals well fed and healthy – a dead or sick animal doesn’t make you any money so it’s really important. I wanted Viola to tell people how it is.

2. Tell us a bit about the journey from manuscript to published work. What was the biggest challenge you faced in publishing this book?
Getting this book published was really difficult, and several times in the two years it took I thought about giving up writing, everything. My last book Real Life came out in 2009 so it was a big gap, a huge gap. My agent kept me going and, after pretty well every New Zealand publisher turning us down, we found Allen & Unwin in Australia. They have been amazing. It is the best home for this book.

3. How did you tailor this book to the age-group it reaches?
This was difficult, because Viola had to be young enough to be naïve about the danger she brings upon herself, but old enough to be allowed outside at night. She swayed between twelve and sixteen for a while until I finally settled on fourteen. Kids tend to read up to the age of the main character so it’s really for ten to fifteen-year-olds, which is why it’s so short. I like short books – they’re so much easier to write!

4. Who have you dedicated this book to, and why?
Night Vision is dedicated to Trish Brooking who is the person at the University of Otago College of Education who “looks after” the children’s writer in residence. Not only did she make my residency in 2010 (which is when I wrote the book) an amazing experience but she is also a great advocate for children’s writers and for getting kids into reading. And she still takes me out for lunch! In the Italian version of Night Vision – L’Arte Ingannevole del Gufo it’s “Per Trish”!

5. Can you recommend any books for children/young adults who love this book?
Hmmm. How about we do favourite reads of the year so far for me (they’re all YA) – How I live Now by Meg Rosoff (I’m still to watch the movie), Trash by Andy Mulligan which is amazing but the best has got to be We Were Liars by E Lockhart – just incredible. Now why can’t I write such great stories? Sigh.

6. What is your favourite thing to do when you aren’t reading or writing, and why?
What’s keeping me busy at the moment is chasing chickens! We’ve just bought some new hens so we’re getting lots of eggs but they keep getting out into the garden and we don’t know how. They’ve shredded the silver beet (which isn’t so bad because I hate eating silver beet) and have now started going walk-about down the road! So why did the chicken cross the road when it has a perfectly lovely orchard paddock to live in and a cosy chicken house?

Night Vision
by Ella West
Published by Allen & Unwin
ISBN 9781743317662

A Rafflecopter giveaway – click through to enter & be in to win a copy of Night Vision.

This is the second entry in our blog tour for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Our review, posted earlier today, can be found here. The next entry, accompanied by a giveaway, will be at NZ Booklovers for the book Awakening, by Natalie King.

Book Review: Night Vision, by Ella West – plus giveaway

Night Vision, by Ella West is a Young Adult Fiction finalist in both the judge-chosen, and Children’s Choice, sections of the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. We are giving away a copy of this, below the review. 

Viola is not like other teenage girls. For her, sunlight can be deadly. Living on a sheep farm in a remote part of south Canterbury, she leads a nocturnal existence, roaming the pine plantation at night or practicing her viola in the woodshed.

Her life changes when she witnesses a murder and car fire, before subsequently claiming the hidden cash as her own. It isn’t stealing if the money was ill-gotten, is it? As the secrets and lies increase so does the danger, for the murderer wants his money back and after he learns who took it, he will stop at nothing to reclaim it.

A quick-paced read, Night Vision is perfect for young teens. Viola is courageous, if a little bit stubborn and secretive, despitet adversity. Nothing can stop her, whether this is the external threat of the murderer, or the betrayal of her own DNA. Night Vision also offers an insight into a different sort of life: not only that of a teen with a fatal condition, but also of life on a remote sheep station.

Night Vision starts with a crime and builds to a dramatic conclusion. It may not be an adrenaline ride all the way through – some passages are quite slow – but it maintained my interest throughout and was easily devoured in one sitting. It recently won the LIANZA best young adult award, and this, along with its naming as a judge- and children’s-choice finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, guarantees it is worth going along for the ride.

Reviewed by Angela Oliver

Night Vision
by Ella West
Published by Allen & Unwin
ISBN 9781743317662

A Rafflecopter giveaway – click through to enter & be in to win a copy of Night Vision. The competition opens at 3pm.

This is the first in a series of reviews, interviews and giveaways for our Children’s Choice Finalist books. Later today on this blog, you will find a Q & A with Ella West about Night Vision. Tomorrow, you will find Awakening, by Natalie King promoted and given away on the NZ Booklovers’ blog – this link will go live at 7am tomorrow.