THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

The Child bro.s team up to put our old mate, Jack Reacher, through his paces with another energy-packed adventure. This is their collaboration (following THE SENTINEL)  Jack Reacher, former military police officer and all-around tough dude  is still wandering the world by foot, looking for the opportunity to right peoples wrongs.  In this case, it's a woman who's certainly capable of fighting her own battles.    While wandering through the desert, Reacher comes across a crashed out Jeep with war vet Michaela Fenton slumped across the wheel.   Michaela takes the blame for Michael’s apparent death.  She's heartbroken and claims she'd be "better off dead”.  The criminal she is most scared of  “only breaks cover when someone who was a threat to him is dead”, a man called Waad Dendoncker, who has all the makings of your classic Bond villain.   In the opening of the book a man who sounds very much like Jack is waiting for someon...

A lively, witty novel about letting go of the past and finding your place in the world.  Shortlisted for the 2020 Text Prize, ' The Museum of Broken Things ' introduces a dazzling new voice in contemporary young-adult fiction.   "I didn’t always live here. Not so long ago I was living in a thriving metropolis with more than one coffee shop on each block and four full bars of reception. I went to Heathmont High School, home to one thousand students, two best friends, a deeply average orchestra, and one cursed statue. Well, allegedly." Reece still isn’t used to living in the small beachside town of Hamilton: she misses her old school, her old friends and her old life. She can’t go back and she can’t move forward: nothing feels right anymore. Not that she’s trying very hard—she hasn’t even unpacked yet, and the only new friend she’s made is a middle-aged barista.  But when Reece inherits a strange artefact that belonged to her beloved grandmother, she begins to unravel ...

Congratulations to Whiti Hereaka , who has won the $60,000 2 022 Ockham Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction announced yesterday. Wellington novelist and playwright Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Tūhourangi, Pākehā) has won the $60,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book Kurangaituku – a richly imagined contemporary retelling of the traditional Te Arawa story Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman, told from the perspective of the ‘monster’ Kurangaituku. Ms Hereaka received the prize ahead of novelist, lawyer and academic Gigi Fenster (A Good Winter); debut novelist and winner of the 2019 Adam Foundation Prize Rebecca K Reilly (Greta & Valdin); and novelist, poet, literary critic and academic Bryan Walpert (Entanglement). The ceremony was held live and in person, emcee’d by Jack Tame at Q Theatre, Auckland this evening. Her novel Kurangaituku is described by the judges as an epic poem of a novel, resona...

"I will use my tongue for good..."  Right there, in the first line of his opening poem Chris Tse sets his agenda.  'Super Model Minority' is his 'final' book in the “loose trilogy” of collections ('How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes', 'HE’S SO MASC').  This time its a look into the future, and it's troubling, absurd and alarming.   It's a riotous walk through the highs and lows of modern life with one of New Zealand's most audacious poets. The first two collections were about a “queer coming of age”, in the past and the future.  Now it's about the here and now.  The first section Tse considers the impacts of intergenerational trauma.  The poem, more of a statement,  'Version Control' states in the first lines "It has come to my attention that we have fucked things up..." followed by a potted history of witchburning for gays.  It continues to list, with venom how the homosexual world has been pursued and pursecu...