Her intellectual disabilities shape but don’t define her, and she thrives in the loving community.Īnd it is the loving community that really is the crux of the book – no one is marginalised, everyone is welcomed and you find yourself rooting for this most precarious way of life and deeply saddened to know that it is disappearing, or gone. She has a role in the story and the community. Mary, Toko’s birth mother, is a colourful personality treated sympathetically both by Grace and her characters. There may be deeper parallels here, between Toki and Maui or Christ, but they take a bit of delving and this complicates an otherwise simple story. Once fantasy is out of the bag like that anything can happen, and the story entwines with myth and you don’t know what to believe. Roimata and Hemi’s adopted son Toko is physically handicapped but has a sixth sense, and this mystical element blurs the edges of reality enough that disbelief taints the rest of the story.

You do get the sense that these are people living on the edge and that subsistence living is, in the long term, unsustainable.

To Grace’s credit, she doesn’t paint this with a rose wash and the poverty is raw. If school doesn’t suit the other kids, teach them traditional ways at home – Maori science and folklore. She is a balance between her children who go away to university and come home with skills and ideas, and her husband Hemi, who believes in the old ways, working the land like his ancestors did, feeding the family from the garden and the sea, trusting in the land to provide all they need. Roimata is the strong sensible woman at the centre of the community, and tells a lot of the story. The reader needs to get past this very clichéd plot and enjoy the Maori characters, several of whom tell the story in their very distinct voices. Basically, it’s a book about the imbalance of power, told from the viewpoint of the extended rural family whose lives are threatened by the Dollarman who will bulldoze away their traditional lifestyle and smother their ancestral lands with rather obvious bad things: night clubs, golf, a zoo of trained whales and seals. This is a simple story of good verses evil, weak versus strong, county v commerce, tangata whenua v greedy imperialists. It is a description of a rural Maori community and a way of life that most of us are probably aware is part of our history, but we haven’t been inside. It would be on my list of books to recommend to new New Zealanders, as well as to oldies like me who missed it.

Not sure how I grew up in a kiwi bookshop without having read this.

Potiki by Patricia Grace