Book Review: Catching the Wave

Title: Catching the Wave

Author: Emily Selby

Date: 2022

Quote: "[T]hat girl had a strange power bill."

Amelia, the Internet security consultant at the Book by the Sea bookstore, is a real computer geek. She doesn't even recognize how bizarre and rude the phone call with the people yelling about the "strange power bill" is. She investigates, though, and finds herself doing real detective work, tracing the owner of the cryptocurrency "mining" operation and the resulting Bitcoins that are raising the bill. 

This cozy mystery introduces readers to the basics of cryptocurrency. Danger and gross-out levels are low. When not panicked by the inflated bill, even the landlords are reasonably polite. Solving the mystery depends on your ability to apply logic to the information about cryptocurrency Amelia provides to the other characters and you. 

This mini-book is a sort of trailer for a trilogy of detective stories, featuring Amelia, set in New Zealand. 

Book Review: Rangikura

Title: Rangikura

Author: Tayi Tibble

Date: 2021

Publisher: Knopf

ISBN: 978-0-593-53463-2

Quote: "she realised that life / was not going to be fair / but it could be /ferocious."

This is a short book of short essays and free verse about being young and mostly Maori in New Zealand. With lines that are sometimes rude, often funny, and sometimes sad, Tayi Tibble captures moments of growing up in a suburb, being teased and fighting back, loving too much, trying to stay connected to living people and feel connected to her ancestors. 

What some readers will enjoy and others will find unreadable is the way Tibble mixes cyberspeak, Maori, and Black American slang into a whole new form of English. New Zealanders seem to be interested in using Maori words, especially for indigenous food and wildlife, of which several are mentioned in this book. Other readers might actually prefer to read this book online rather than in print.

Tibble is young, and offers no special or new insights, but her word pictures are funny and sad and, yes, ferocious, condemning and celebrating, sweet and sour, and they show a poet's ear. If you finish this book you'll probably want to read the other ones she will undoubtedly write. (This was her second book and by now she's written a third one.)

Book Review: A New Kind of Zeal

Title: A New Kind of Zeal 

Author: Michelle Warren

Date: 2018

Publisher: Michelle Warren / Smashwords

 Quote: "Food to the poor, healing to the sick. It sounds like he'll put us all out of a job!"

Jesus lived among us in one place at one time. When He returns, we are assured, His return will be known around the world.

What if, just as a test of what Christianity has done for the world, another man was allowed to represent Christ, fully, in all particulars? Would we treat that man any better than the ancient world did Jesus?

That's the question this work of fiction raises. Its answer is at least a good story. The best of all stories, retold in modern guise. In Warren's literary vision, the Welfare State reacts to Christ exactly as the Roman Empire did. Only a few of the people who knew Joshua Davidson show a little more enlightenment, because they had some Christian teaching, than the historical persons in the New Testament did. 

In the trilogy that's grown out of this novel (I have the 2018 edition; there was a 2013 edition) Warren shares a prophetic vision for New Zealand, and for anyone else who has eyes to see it. 

It's less poetic, more directly addressed to social issues of our time, than The Singer trilogy, and it's well worth reading even though all Christians will know how the main plot comes out. While the first volume of the trilogy deviates from the Gospel story only in the invention of new characters who hear, and accept or refuse, the message of Joshua Davidson, those characters will shape the following volumes. 

E-Book Review: Sparkles on Water

Title: Sparkles on Water 

Author: Marja Blom

Date: 2015

Publisher: Marja Blom

ISBN: none

Length: 24 pages

Quote: "I grew up in the Netherlands and moved to New Zealand in 1997. In 2007 I set up a blog to show people the beauty of New Zealand. Some fellow bloggers...introduced me to the land of poetry. I discovered it, loved it and learned its language."

Few people dare to publish poems in their second language. It's been done well--some medieval songs in Latin are still loved and sung today--but it's usually done as a learning exercise, and the resulting verses have been published anonymously, or casually tucked into collections written in the author's primary language. (Somewhere on this web site there is a little song parody written in Spanish, yes.) Tolkien's songs in both of the languages he constructed for the Rings books come to mind, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's ventures into indigenous Mexican languages. When whole books of verse by non-native speakers of the language have been published, as was done by Andrei Codrescu in his exuberant youth, they tend to be bought as curiosities; if the actual poems then strike readers as being clever, witty, pretty, innovative, moving (in any way except the poor-pitiful-me-is-a-refugee cliche), or funny (in any way except the foreigner-stumbling-over-language cliche), that's a bonus, a happy accident that readers are eager to rave about. The poems don't rank among the greatest in the language; they're in a special category, but they delight all who discover them.

So it went with the online writing groups that discovered Marja Blom and encouraged her to keep writing poems in English and publish this collection of some of her best ones. Blom's English is fluent, sometimes quirky, always readable. Her poems aren't even limited to free verse, which is easy to write in one's native language and translate into whatever other languages one knows. I kept waiting for the "Well that was interesting, I'm sure it sounded better in Dutch" reaction. It didn't happen. Blom writes English as if she's written poems in Dutch, but as if these poems were originally written in English. Some of these poems have traditional English-verse rhythm and rhyme patterns; some have their own patterns of assonance. 

At their best, poems written in someone's second language give native speakers a fresh sense of the possibilities their language offers. Some of Blom's poems have that quality, and may rank among the best poems written in English as a Second Language.

"Some love marigolds

some radiant roses with velvet folds

and then there is weed

It creeps on its knees

swallowing beauty..."

begins a poem celebrating the diversity of wildflowers. 

A poem about springtime begins with the Earth awakening from winter sleep--nothing new there--and then intrigues me with "the sun warps kisses on her cheek." "Warps kisses" is the kind of phrase that has to be mindfully chosen. The intriguing part is the variety of possible meanings: "warps" as an onomatopoeic variant on "plops"? in the sense of "warps as a loom," strings straight threads or lines across the surface? in the sense of "warps as a phonograph record," twists and wrinkles? (Does frost heave, in New Zealand, as it does in North America and Europe?) And what about the echo of "time warps," layers of time that might hypothetically be linked by the resonance created by the sunlight striking the same surface in the same ways, year after year?

What's not to love, for me and probably for some people who read this web site, is Blom's inclination toward a Zen-sanctioned rejection of "mind." We all know the kind of burdensome and distracting thoughts that need to be replaced with the neutral observation of "thinking" in either transcendental or mindful meditation, which seems to be what Zen types' dsparagement of "mind" is meant to mean. At the same time...pooh! Nobody just breathes out little felicities like

"Sunflowers dancing

in harmony together

rocking on a lullaby

waving in windy weather"

A mind was at work there, I quibble...happily. 

I enjoyed this little collection of pretty pictures and poems. You will too. It's currently available as a free download at dutchcorner.blogspot.com, where readers can find some of Blom's new pictures and poems as blog posts.

Book Review: Underrunners

Title: Underrunners

(Why is the picture blurry? Because Amazon is trying to sell new editions with different covers. This is what I physically own. I reserve the right to substitute newer editions if the first edition becomes rare.)

Author: Margaret Mahy

Date: 1992

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-670-84179-X

Length: 169 pages

Quote: “Tris would know Selsey Firebone was with him, moving as silently as only a trained outer-space alien-detecting secret agent can move.”

Eleven-year-old Tris has been making up the story of Selsey Firebone longer than he can remember. Now that his parents are separated, he and his father live near the beach, and he acts out adventures on the way home from school. He’s not told the story to his friends, though, so why does a new acquaintance from the local children’s shelter seem familiar with the story? Tris is about to become just a little bit of a detective and crimefighter, on a very junior level.

Part of the story takes place in the “underrunners,” tunnels of erosion along the coast of New Zealand. It’s possible, though dangerous, to play in these tunnels. Tris has played in them. In this story he’ll be caught up in a real adventure, in the tunnels, with the orphan, and an unpleasant person who really is out to get them...

For his age and size Tris ends up giving a good account of himself, showing both physical and emotional courage. Selsey Firebone turns out to be a real person, and Tris becomes “his” sidekick—although in the reality of the novel Selsey Firebone turns out to be a “her.”

I’m tempted to call this one a coming-of-age story, although Tris is still only eleven at the end. If Tris hasn’t quite become a man, at least he’s made a good study of two role models and learned how a man should or should not react to rejection by the woman he loves.

Shorter and simpler than Mahy’s brilliant Memory or numinous Tricksters, Underrunners might seem juvenile to some of Mahy’s teenaged readers. I’d guess, though, that any older teenagers who are willing to read about an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old won’t be disappointed. Even adults who are in the mood  for a gentle, if not cozy, mystery where no one is actually murdered but the main characters are in some danger, may enjoy Underrunners.

As always when choosing a book to give to a child, know your student. Some eleven-year-olds or even nine-year-olds will be delighted by a Young-Adult-type novel with an eleven-year-old protagonist. Some eleven-year-olds enjoy stories that present people their age mainly as role-models-of-the-future for six-year-old readers, and others will like the teen-level vocabulary, the abstract thought, the dangers, and the insights in this book.

Unfortunately Margaret Mahy no longer has any use for the dollar she'd get if her books were still Fair Trade Books (if she were still alive). Her writing career seems painfully short to U.S. readers because she was quite old when she broke into the U.S. market. Anyway, most of her books can still be purchased from this web site for the usual price of $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment. To set up a special multiple-book package, e-mail salolianigodagewi at the address shown at the very bottom of the screen. To pay by U.S. postal order, send $10 (for this book) or $25 (for four books of this size, shipped together) to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322. To order only this book with the convenience of Paypal, click: