MORE GREAT READS FOR MAY, 2017
The Pretty Delicious Café, by Danielle Hawkins
Now. This is a
Kiwi Chick Lit story, so the action takes place in a little Northland town not
so far from the Big Smoke, Auckland – I have to admit that as I got deeper into
the story I spent too much time trying to work out which real town the little
seaside settlement of Ratai is imitating, but concluded finally that it could
be any place north of Orewa.
Lia
(short for Aurelia, named so by her ex-hippy mum) and her best friend Anna run
a very successful café just out of town.
They are mortgaged to the hilt and work like dogs to make money while the
sun shines, for winter is famously a slack time for beach cafes. Anna is planning her wedding (in the slack
time) to Lia’s twin brother Rob, and wedding tension is adding its five cent’s
worth to the usual stress.
Another irritant is Lia’s ex, Isaac, who stoutly refuses
to believe that she has called off their relationship – not once but many
times: he just won’t take ‘no’ for an
answer. What a jerk! Then we have ex-hippy mum, who wears lots of
flowing scarves and draperies, and drinks horrible, unidentifiable juices in an
effort to be physically and spiritually cleansed. She is madly attractive in a middle-aged kind
of way and always addresses Lia and Rob as ‘darling’. Well, of course! Oh, this little story is chock-full of
stereotypes – but it’s FUNNY. Ms Hawkins
is a masterly exponent of the Kiwi sense of humour. Every character, predictable though they may
be, is sharply and wittily observed; our
very ‘kiwiness’ is portrayed affectionately and with a charm that perhaps some
of us can only aspire to, but what fun it is to read about!
OMG – I nearly forgot to mention Lia’s love
interest. What was I thinking?! He is hunky mechanic Jed, a stranger in Ratai
– with a past, naturally. Will Lia and
Jed walk off into the sunset with their buckets and spades? Will Rob and Anna wed in spite of Anna’s
flirtation with an eating disorder? (it’s the stress). Will jerky Isaac get over Lia’s rejection or
will he continue to be a stalker? Will
ex-hippy mum melt into her ex-stepson’s arms?
(Didn’t see THAT one coming, did you!)
This little book is serious fun. FOUR STARS.
Leap
of Faith, by Jenny Pattrick
For
Jock Cameron and his family, it will be a welcome break, a break for him from
working permanently underground, and a change that his wife Sarah hopes will
provide cleaner air for his faltering lungs.
Their grown family of three sons and a daughter welcome the change –
Maggie does housework for a Temperance lady (a job she hates) in Ohakune; the two oldest boys work with their father on
the work gang he oversees, and youngest son Billy is thrilled to find work (at
fourteen) at the Makatote Viaduct, still being constructed across a huge gorge,
and considered by all who work there to be (along with the Raurimu Spiral) one
of the wonders of the age, an edifice as visually beautiful as its use is
practical: a true combination of modern
engineering genius and backbreaking labour.
Everyone, engineers, steel workers and navvies alike, is proud to be
connected to such a masterpiece – including the Denniston Rose herself, now
Rose Scobie, the mother of two small children and married to Brennan who is
thrilled that she would leave the Denniston Plateau and with their family,
follow him as he begins his engineering job at Makatote.
The
scene is beautifully set for other characters to make their unforgettable
presence felt, especially itinerant preacher Gabriel Locke, a silver-tongued
devil who has more aliases than he can con hot dinners, and a fatal charm that
Amelia Grice, Maggie’s employer and doughty warrior against the Demon Drink, is
powerless to resist. Their liaison,
borne from guilt and blackmail, has tragic repercussions for all, including
Maggie’s naïve and gullible brother Billy:
the corruption of his innocence is assured.
As
always, Ms Pattrick draws her readers effortlessly into her lovely stories. (See review below) Her beautiful prose pays fitting homage to
the men and women who laboured so hard and long more than a hundred years ago
to bring New Zealand into the Twentieth Century. Each of Ms. Pattrick’s books
is a reminder that, as a nation we owe these people everything. Our present is enriched immeasurably by their
past. FIVE STARS
Heartland,
by Jenny Pattrick
Donny
Mac is on his way home to Manawa, a tiny village at the foot of Mt. Ruapehu on
the central plateau of the North Island of New Zealand. He has just served a six-month sentence for
grievous bodily harm, charges brought by the overprotective mother of an old
‘schoolmate’, someone who has taunted and bullied him since he was a child –
but Donny Mac doesn’t care now: he has
completed an anger management course; still has his job as a shelf-packer at
Manawa’s New World supermarket, a little
home his late grandfather left him and a place in the local rugby team, who
could be future winners of the regional
championship.
His
life is on an even keel again and he is happy – childishly so, for Donny Mac is
regarded as slow; ‘ a few sandwiches
short of a picnic’ and ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer’, but he dearly
loves Manawa and everyone in it - except
for all the townies, who turn up during the ski season on Ruapehu, having
bought up all the old mill houses for use as their holiday accommodation. No local likes the townies who disrupt their
quiet way of life with speeding SUV’s and raucous parties, but they accept them
as a necessary evil, for Manawa is dying.
The timber mills are closed, there are no jobs and all the young folk
have left to look for work in the big cities, as has happened in countless
other once-thriving communities. At
least the townies spend money when they come to ski on Ruapehu, enabling the
village to stutter along for another year.
Yes,
Donny Mac can’t wait to get home – until he finds that his house has been
appropriated in his absence by Nightshade, the local slut, drunk most of the
time, and hugely pregnant – ‘ and the baby’s yours, you ##@$!!’ Which in all fairness, is drawing a very long
bow: given her non-existent reputation,
the hapless baby could belong to any one of the local youths, but after being
rejected by them all, she has settled on poor slow Donny Mac as a last desperate
resort. She has been abandoned by
everyone. He is her only chance of
support.
And
support her he does, much against the wishes and counselling of his true
friends, people who love him and worry about him and wish that his life could
be better, and that is the crux of this charming story: the fellowship of a tight-knit
community; their heartfelt affection for
each other regardless of blood-ties, and their wildly disparate solutions to
frightening problems.
Jenny Pattrick is a firm
favourite with New Zealand readers. Her
‘Denniston Rose’ trilogy has become a classic of Kiwi popular fiction,
similarly the beautiful ‘Landings’ and while there are a couple of her titles
that I thought weren’t up to her very high standard she has hit her mark once again
with ‘Heartland’. It is a heartwarmer of
a tale in the very best sense of the word, and the only complaint I can make is
that I finished it too quickly – I didn’t want to leave Donny Mac, Vera, Bull
and the Misses Macaneny, finely drawn characters that will stay with the reader
long after the story is finished. FOUR STARS
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