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Kapiti College

19,194 pages read and 2,980 team points

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NicE

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(1,055 pages read)

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    Highly original and chilling. A powerful imaginary of animal voices in concert with dystopian human ones. Amazing that the author wrote this book not long before Covid-19. It's left me with a lot to think about.

  • The Alchemist

    By Paulo Coelho
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    I first read this uber-popular book in the 90s and would have given it 5-stars back then - when I was a world-travelling, 'universal truth'-seeking twenty-something (the memories!). It was so interesting to reread 'The Alchemist' thirty years later. Plot-wise, I found it hurried and cliche; style-wise, a heavily telling-over-showing New Age preach.

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  • The Good Days

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  • Kōhine

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    5 stars

    This is an impressively taut, affecting debut. I didn't enjoy the second person narrative point of view in the first story and almost gave up on the book because of it - it felt more discombobulating than inviting me in as an imagined protagonist. But I'm so glad I persisted. The contrasts and intersections between Māori and Japanese cultures, both customary and contemporary, is fertile for storytelling and the author (tangata whenua in Aotearoa NZ) draws on her own lifechanging experiences as a gaijin, worker and mother in Tokyo. I found myself believing in the character motivations, their relationships and connections to land, and got swept into and along the spaces between the lines where deep grief lives. The way Lenihan expresses fathoms without drowning us is admirable. And when I went back to read the first story, I could appreciate that the narrative perspective was not an ambitious or experimental strategy - it was appropriately unsettling for what happens at the end. I am looking forward to whatever Colleen Maria Lenihan creates next.

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