Books

The Chimes


Posted 1:34pm Sunday 20th March 2016 by Hayleigh Clarkson

I had high hopes for this novel. Anna Smaill’s The Chimes was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015 and the New Zealand media went crazy for it, touting Anna as the next Eleanor Catton. Despite everyone else loving this novel, I found it to be dull and tedious with a shallow Read more...

Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl

Posted 2:41pm Sunday 13th March 2016 by Lucy Hunter

I only wanted one thing on tour: to slam my hand in a door and break my fingers. Then I would go home.” The opening line of Sleater-Kinney guitarist and singer Carrie Brownstein’s autobiography smashes you into the tedium and discomfort involved in touring in a cramped car with a band, Read more...

The Passage

Posted 1:05pm Sunday 6th March 2016 by Anne Oosthuizen

Hunger Games, Maze Runner, The Martian, Interstellar, World War Z. . . Dystopian and post-apocalyptic chronicles are hot! The Passage by Justin Cronin – book one in a trilogy soon to be transported to the big screen to join its blockbuster predecessors – fits right in with the rest. In Read more...

Down the Rabbit Hole

Posted 12:37pm Sunday 28th February 2016 by Hayleigh Clarkson

For those of you like me who spent their teenage years in the early 2000s, you will already be familiar with the pop-culture take over that was Playboy. Ranging from bedspreads, jewellery and temporary tattoos through to the popular hit TV show The Girls Next Door, Playboy took over every teenaged Read more...

Disclaimer

Posted 2:55pm Sunday 4th October 2015 by Bridget Vosburgh

Disclaimer, by Renee Knight, is a thriller. Catherine Ravenscroft, after recently moving house with her husband, Robert, finds a book called The Perfect Stranger among her possessions. She has no recollection of buying the book. While reading it, she realises that the main character is a Read more...

Murder That Wasn’t: The Case of George Gwaze

Posted 1:31pm Sunday 27th September 2015 by Bridget Vosburgh

Unusually for true crime, Goodyear-Smith takes the position that no crime actually happened. Charlene contracted HIV at birth from her mother. Both her birth parents died, and Charlene and her older sister Charmaine were adopted by their mother’s sister Sifso and her husband George. For Read more...

The Mountain Story

Posted 2:00pm Sunday 20th September 2015 by Bridget Vosburgh

Thr Mountain Story, by Lori Lansens, is a survival novel. On his 18th birthday, Wolf Truly takes a tram up the mountain he spent much of his adolescence exploring with his best friend Byrd. A year before, Byrd was in an accident on the mountain that Wolf feels responsible for. This, along with the Read more...

Paying with their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran

Posted 1:55pm Sunday 13th September 2015 by Bridget Vosburgh

Paying with their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, by John M Kinder, takes on the subject of disabilities caused by warfare and the treatment of disabled veterans throughout American history. Kinder begins with the treatment of disabled war veterans and chiefly focuses Read more...

Rich Man Road

Posted 1:55pm Sunday 6th September 2015 by Bridget Vosburgh

Rich Man Road,by Ann Glamuzina, tells the separate stories of two immigrants to New Zealand. One morning the novice nun, Pualele Sina Auva’a, awakes to find that her friend and fellow nun, the elderly Olga Mastrovic, has died in the night. She has left behind a letter to Pualele, confessing Read more...

The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream

Posted 1:31pm Sunday 30th August 2015 by Bridget Vosburgh

The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream is a memoir by Katherine Norbury. After miscarrying a much-desired pregnancy, Norbury distracts herself from her grief with the writing of a man named Neil Gunn. One of Gunn’s novels, The Highland River, tells the story of a young man walking a river to its Read more...