Thursday, 27 August 2020

The Nature Activity Book: 99 Ideas for Activities in the Natural World of Aotearoa New Zealand

 The Nature Activity Book: 99 Ideas for Activities in the

Natural World of Aotearoa New Zealand (2020)

Rachel Haydon, ill. Pippa Keel

Te Papa Press, 175 pages, paperback, NZ$35

 

Over the last decade Te Papa Press.  has produced a number of brilliant books, for both young people and former young people. I would pint out the collection, Maui’s Taonga Tales and Simon Pollard’s Genius of Bugs and Why is that Lake so Blue? One of the best was The Art Activity Book and now we have its companion volume The Nature Activity Book.    

 It is one of those marvellous Science activity books which invites you to observe and think, to be curious about the things around you. Aimed roughly at the 9 to 13 group, it offers a variety of approaches to learning about the natural world, and whole range of doors for curiosity to open. In the Sensing Nature section, for example, the reader is asked to nominate ten things you can see, six things you can touch, two things you can smell, four things you can hear and one thing you can taste.

There are loads of activities, all of them designed to reinforce some aspect of our understanding of the world: birds to be fed, insects to be identified, forces to be measured, cloud types to be identified, wind direction to be measured, compost to be made, bug hotels to be built and habitats to be created. Readers will find themselves writing, dancing, reflecting and learning te reo terms for everything from cloud shapes to the phases of the moon. Pippa Keel’s pictures and Kate Barraclough’s design make this a comfortable book to handle and write in.

For the young scientist and natural philosopher in all of us.

 

Trevor Agnew

27 Aug 2020

Tuesday, 25 August 2020

Space Maps: Your Tour of the Universe

 Space Maps: Your Tour of the Universe (2020) 

Lara Albanese

Ill. Tomasso Vidus Rosen

Oratia, Auckland NZ

Hardback, 96 pages, NZ$40

ISBN 978 0 947506 68 1

 Oratia Books of Auckland is making a brave venture by publishing Space Maps: Your Tour of the

Universe. It is a large format book that lays out the entire universe for young readers. Originally published in Italian, it is now coming out in English and plucky Oratia are responsible for supplying this portion of the universe. They deserve good sales because the book is a pleasure to read.  

 Guided by a three-eyed alien, two young children are taken on a tour of our solar system, with all its planets and moons, as well as the galaxies surrounding it. Then they see what is known about deep space and the technology which allows us to glimpse it. The result is a mind-broadening series of revelations.

The author, Lara Albanese, has a flair for memorable phrases. Thus Venus is the ‘dazzling planet’ named after the Roman goddess of beauty.  Saturn is the Lord of the Rings and Uranus is the Sideways Planet. Asteroids are ‘an army of small stones’.

 Of course, observers on Earth have all interpreted the heavens in terms of their own culture, so several pages are devoted to the various ways we have mapped the stars, including the Greek, Chinese and African viewpoints.  Thus the Pleiades appear on the European star map but they also turn up as the daughters of the sky god on the African map, which shows the star stories of the San people.

 [The only slip in this book is that the love story of Princess Orihime and the shepherd Hikoboshi on page 13 is Japanese not Chinese.]

Space Maps uses a magnificent series of double page spreads to introduce such concepts as gravity, spiral galaxies, black holes, gas giants, ice giants, pulsars and colliding galaxies. The artist, Tomasso Vidus Rosen, has matched his striking illustrations and diagrams perfectly with the text. Fact boxes abound. The result is to make a mass of information clear and intelligible. This particularly applies to the section ‘What is Beyond our Solar System?’ where we share the insights modern technology has given us into deep space.

 The aim is always to make things clear to a bright young reader. An ingenious example is Vidus Rosen’s use of a polar bear and a penguin to differentiate Earth’s north and south poles.

 Space Maps is a richly enjoyable book, with a good glossary and index. It will inspire a future generation of astronomers and, with luck, a future generation of astronauts. After all, the name for the planet Pluto was suggested by an 11-year old girl, Venetia Burney. How she would have enjoyed this book.

 Trevor Agnew

26 Aug 2020


Tuesday, 18 August 2020

The Inkberg Enigma Jonathan King

 The Inkberg Enigma (2020)

Jonathan King

Gecko Press

125 pages, paperback, NZ$30

ISBN 978 1 776572 66 3

 

A. INTRODUCTION: Have you seen this trailer? It’s the best possible introduction to an exciting New Zealand graphic novel. (Our generation called them comics and we weren’t encouraged to read them. Of course our generation didn’t have communication screens in each house, that could link you to trailers like this. But we did have books. And comics.)

https://youtu.be/f5Vd-oVv4TQ

 

B. BRIEF REVIEW: Whew! Now that you’ve seen the trailer, you have to read The Inkberg Enigma. The Covid-19 pandemic delayed the publication of The Inkberg Enigma but it’s available at last. Buy it or borrow it from a Library, but do read it. It’s great.

 

LONGER REVIEW:

This review first appeared on The Source website:

The Inkberg Enigma is a comic book which gives young readers a gripping introduction to the genre of the graphic novel, with a story told in a vivid mix of words and pictures, each supporting the other.

The lively proactive main character is Artemisia, who prefers to be called Zia. (Since Queen Artemisia was a triumphant war-leader and naval commander, this is a marvellously appropriate name.)  Zia is the adventurous character in this story, and she has a hard job persuading Miro the book-worm to leave his collection of dubiously-acquired classics.

This is how you have adventures. You find cool things and you do them,’ Zia protests, ‘You don’t just read books about them.’

Miro would rather lie on the sofa and read books. In fact Miro’s enthusiasm for books is a key factor in the story, and a wide range of books and authors are name-tapped. For example, it is significant that copies of both Comet in Moominland and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea play a role in this story. Both of these books feature alarming tentacled creatures and the cover of The Inkberg Enigma shows several tantalising glimpses of tentacles.  

The story develops with the pace of a good movie, reminding us that Jonathan King is also a successful film-maker. In the port of Aurora, the mysteriously successful fishing industry has a sinister secret, and Zia dragoons Miro into helping her investigate.  They soon find Mr Hunter, the mayor of Aurora, and others connected with the fishery, applying pressure.  Undeterred, they enter the fish processing works that evening  - in a creepy noir sequence - and witness a disturbing ceremony where pages of a book are sacrificed.

Gaining information from the Aurora Museum and Miro’s favourite bookshop, Zia and Miro realise that the mystery is connected to William Danforth who led a 1930s Antarctic expedition before founding the fishery that made Aurora wealthy. One dramatic picture shows his statue (decorated with tentacles).

What follows is an unexpected and exciting adventure. The quest culminates in a marvellously imaginative (and delightfully booky) concluding sequence including a full-page librarians’ nightmare of collapsing shelves and cascading books. There’s also a witty twist at the very conclusion of the story.

 

The dialogue is quick, clever and often amusing. When Zia rescues Miro from bullies, she recognises him from their primary school days.

I saved you from getting beaten up then too, didn’t I?’

‘I think you were the one beating me up, actually,’ says Miro.

 

Jonathan King’s handsome colour illustrations (which were drawn by hand in Clip Studio on an iPad Pro) contain a nice combination of the familiar and the eerie. The colours are carefully chosen, flat and muted, while, in a clever touch, the historical flash-back scenes (of the 1930s Antarctic expedition’s disturbing discoveries) are drawn in black-and-white.

 

The harbour map on the endpapers has the same mix of the familiar and the strange as the rest of the book, although those who know Te Whakaraupo (in Canterbury) and The Camp (in Otago) will find familiar echoes.

Jonathan King gives subtle nods to his artistic influences throughout The Inkberg Enigma. For example, he has used the names of some artists he admires in the map. At one point Miro unwittingly sells Salvador Dali’s diving helmet to an antique dealer, who already has Citizen Kane’s sledge, Rosebud, hanging in his shop. Miro even eats his toast off one of Alan Garner’s Owl Service plates. The Miros of this world will enjoy these little gems.

The Inkberg Enigma is a great New Zealand comic, able to bridge the generations and bring reading enjoyment to young and old alike.

 

- Trevor Agnew

25 May 2020

Sunday, 16 August 2020

MOPHEAD

 

Mophead    Selina Tusitala Marsh

 

It was an exciting experience to read Mophead because I quickly realised that it was a winner, a book young people (and adults) would enjoy reading. In fact, Mophead won the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award and the Elsie Locke Award for Non-fiction at the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Mophead also picked up a 2020 Storylines Notable Book Award in the Non-fiction category. A winner, indeed.

 

Below is a review of Mophead, which I wrote for The Source website in December 2019.


 

Mophead (2019)

Selina Tusitala Marsh

Auckland University Press

88 pages, hardback, NZ$25

ISBN 978 1 86940 898 5

  

Do you want to hear a story/

Um, OK

When I was 10 …

This unusual illustrated story or picture book (or more accurately a graphic memoir) is the author’s cleverly constructed and charmingly-illustrated account of how she came to accept herself, her appearance and her identity. Selina Tusitala Marsh - who was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019 - begins her story by telling how 'when I was 10 I was teased for having BIG hair.'

She describes her hair as ‘wild Afakasi hair’. (Afakasi means a Samoan person with some European ancestry.) She tells how she got thick wavy hair from her Samoan-Tuvaluan mother and thin curly hair from her New Zealand-Scottish-English-French father. ‘My hair was so wild that it defied gravity.’ Teased and called ‘mophead’ and ‘golliwog’, Selina tied her hair in a tight bun and her classmates stopped calling her names. ‘I was the same.’

A turning point in Selina’s life was a visit to her high school by poet Sam Hunt. ‘He was tall and thin. He had WILD hair and WILD words.’  Impressed by the way that Sam was happy to be different, Selina made a life-changing decision. ‘I was going WILD.’ Using a few apt words and her quirky illustrations, Selina sketches in her writing career, her inspiring discovery of other wild women (from Queen Salote to Maya Angelou) and what she calls ‘the wild words of Pacific Island women poets.’

When invited to perform her poetry for such celebrities as Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama Selina is always told, ‘It’s formal. You’ll need to tie your hair back.’ (Her various responses make this book a joy to read aloud.)

As New Zealand’s 11th Poet Laureate, Selina is given a tokotoko (carved ceremonial walking stick) which incorporates a traditional Samoan fly-whisk (fue) made from coconut fibres. To Selina’s delight, the tokotoko reminds her of a mop. 

The story ends (and begins) with Selina’s return to her home on Waiheke Island, with her tokotoko. A small boy mistakes it for a mop and Selina asks him, ‘Do you want to hear a story?’

Mophead is a book for all ages. Its text is exceptionally well-constructed with never a word wasted (as might be expected from a poet). A powerful message is conveyed with wit.

The lively line illustrations and dramatic lettering, which make the book such fun to read, are all by the author. The rear endpapers add another whole layer of enjoyment.

 Trevor Agnew 

16 Dec 2019