There was a good turnout for dinner at The All Nations before book group started. It was nice to have a bit of extra time to talk and socialise, though really that’s a lot of what happens during an ordinary book group meeting.
There wasn’t a lot of love for Witi Ihimaera's Whale Rider. To me it just seemed run through a checklist of topics where the protagonist was shown to be woke, meeting his cousins in Kings Cross and seeing them in drag and while it worried his companion it was fine with him, seeing the racial prejudice directed against him and others by the family he stayed with in New Guinea, the environmental issues, it just all seemed a bit pat. Tom noticed that none of the characters developed through the story – they were all the same with the exception of the grandfather who came to see that instead of holding his granddaughter in disdain because she was a girl, she had worthy character traits.
I liked the use of the Maori language throughout and the strength of the family connections between the characters in the book was really interesting but perhaps a bit didactic.
We had the feeling that it might be a book that was really aimed at children and that it wasn’t really aimed at an adult audience, though I also wondered if coming after Toni Morrison’s Beloved if anything wasn’t going to be a disappointment.
For our next book we’re reading another Nobel prize winner’s book, The Outsider by Albert Camus. See you at the All Nations on May 5.
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