Materials from Oceania
It’s New Zealand, 1914, and the biggest war has just broken out in Europe. William eagerly enlists for the army but his younger brother, Edmund, is a conscientious objector and refuses to fight. While William trains to be a soldier, Edmund is arrested. Both brothers will end up on the bloody battlefields of France, but their journeys there are very different. And what they experience at the front line will challenge the beliefs that led them there.
This picture book is about cousins’ holidays in a rural Maori community having adventures and fun together – playing in the bush, riding horses, fishing, eeling and swimming at the beach. During the holiday, a death leads to a rahui being placed on the beach. After a year, the rahui is lifted, and they return to the beach full of life and with their cousin in their hearts. The feeling of the book is joyous and wistful, and the illustrations richly evoke the atmosphere of the setting and people.
Featured in Volume VI, Issue 2 of WOW Review.
When sixteen-year-old Canny of the Pacific island, Southland, sets out on a trip with her stepbrother and his girlfriend, she finds herself drawn into enchanting Zarene Valley where the mysterious but dark seventeen-year-old Ghislain helps her to figure out her origins.
“What do you want from me?” he asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More. Abandoned by her mother on Jellicoe Road when she was eleven, Taylor Markham, now seventeen, is finally being confronted with her past. But as the reluctant leader of her boarding school dorm, there isn’t a lot of time for introspection. And while Hannah, the closest adult Taylor has to family, has disappeared, Jonah Griggs is back in town, moody stares and all. In this absorbing story by Melina Marchetta, nothing is as it seems and every clue leads to more questions as Taylor tries to work out the connection between her mother dumping her, Hannah finding her then and her sudden departure now, a mysterious stranger who once whispered something in her ear, a boy in her dreams, five kids who lived on Jellicoe Road eighteen years ago, and the maddening and magnetic Jonah Griggs, who knows her better than she thinks he does. If Taylor can put together the pieces of her past, she might just be able to change her future.
As Freddie’s seeds grow in the Australian bush, so does his friendship with a secretive pen pal.
This treehouse has thirteen stories, a bowling alley, a see-through swimming pool, a secret underground laboratory, and a marshmallow machine that follows you around and automatically shoots marshmallows into your mouth whenever you are hungry.
To rescue her homeland from tyranny, Neryn must seek out the powerful Guardians to complete her training as a Caller.
The notes of an old music box connects two girls from very different worlds–Clara, who struggles to survive poverty and violence in a troubled city, and Claire, whose ordinary life is beset by grief–in a place where neither can be sure what is real.
The Girl in the Moon Circle, like the cover drawing, shows Samoan life through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl called Samoana. Samoana is perceptive, not much escapes her analysis. She tells us about school, church, friends, family violence, having refrigerators and television for the first time, Chunky cat food, a Made-in-Taiwan, Jesus, pay day, cricket, crushes on boys, incest, legends and many other things. Her observations offer a compelling look at Samoan society.
AboriginaL stories of the dreamtime.