New Book: Red Rocks by Rachael King

Today I get to torment most readers with a new book that isn't readily available to them. Those of you in Australia and New Zealand--and there are more than a few of you!--should especially appreciate this one. Red Rocks by Rachael King retells the selkie legend and sets it in New Zealand. The rest of us are jealous because that sounds like great reading! I also like the cover.

Book description:

A novel for younger readers.

While holidaying at his father’s house, Jake explores Wellington’s wild south coast, with its high cliffs, biting winds, and its fierce seals. When he stumbles upon a sealskin, hidden in a crevice at Red Rocks, he’s compelled to take it home and hide it under his bed, setting off a chain of events that threatens to destroy his family.

Can he put things right before it’s too late?

Red Rocks takes the Celtic myth of the selkies, or seal people, and transplants it into the New Zealand landscape, throwing an ordinary boy into an adventure tinged with magic. With its beautiful writing and eerie atmosphere, middle readers will be thrilled and moved by this captivating story.

For background information, including links to useful websites, and reviews of Red Rocks, click on the links below and to the right.

You can read more about the book at King's site and at the publisher's page where there is a preview and teacher's guide. Here's hoping it does well enough to get picked up for international release!

And you can order the book from Fishpond New Zealand and Fishpond Australia. (SurLaLune is not affiliated with Fishpond.)

Edited to add: The ebook is available for Kindle in Australia and New Zealand but not for US or UK readers, alas.

Post 5 of 5: Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition: The Cry Baby by Renata Hopkins

The Cry Baby by Renata Hopkins is the winner of the New Zealand Listener's Brothers Grimm story-writing competition. Congrats to Renata Hopkins for a fascinating story! You can read more about her in the 4th post for today.

I enjoyed the last lines most of all:

They didn’t live happily ever after. But they did their best.

You can read the entire story on the site but here are the first few paragraphs to whet your interest. From The Cry Baby by Renata Hopkins:

Once upon a time, there was a man and a woman and they did what men and women do and then there was a baby. Such celebration! Booties, bibs and bears were bestowed, all pink and fluffy and smelling of baby powder. The assembled rellies cooed over tiny fingers and toes and then they left the new parents alone with their infant. Who began to cry. And cry and cry, until her face was puce. The mother and father rocked and shushed and bounced and sang to their squalling babe, but day after day, night after night, the din continued. At least the mother and father had each other, until they didn’t, because the father had to go up country for work. As his car drove away the mother fought the urge to chase it. All that day the clamour continued and by nightfall the mother was in a trance. She rocked and shushed and bounced and sang, but the baby was inconsolable. The cry was like another entity in the small house and the mother began to feel that it meant her harm.

Close to midnight, the desperate mother bundled the wailing girl in a blanket and carried her outside, hoping a cold and twinkling sky would bring some peace. Outside, a windbreak of pines stood like a row of witches’ hats and the eye of the moon shone down. The child took another breath and howled afresh. Though she wouldn’t have called herself the praying sort, the mother invoked any power that might aid her. “Please,” she begged. “Please make this noise stop.” Almost immediately she heard a noise from the darkness: a rustling, then a rasping voice. “What’s in it for me?” wondered the voice. The startled mother followed the sound and saw, on the high branch of a pine, a pair of glowing eyes. A possum. “Anything you want,” replied the mother, too delirious with exhaustion to wonder at a talking marsupial. “If you can make the crying stop, anything.”

And since this is rather spoilerish but may encourage you to read the story, here's the words of Judge Kate de Goldi. It also lets you know some of the tales that inspired the story.

The winning story was a stand-out: The Cry Baby is a superb mash-up of Rumpelstiltskin, Clever Gretel and another old story that hovers in my head but which I can’t quite catch. The writer is completely in charge of tone, pace and structure. The sentences are musical, the vocabulary simple but freighted – contributing to the sense that this is a story that might have been told over and over again by many voices through the centuries.

The cast is kept dead simple: a mother, a baby, a witch – brilliantly transmuted into a possum (the possum appeared many times as baddie but this story easily did it the best). And the problem at the heart of the story is both simple and potentially devastating. It is in this way that the writer mines the “latent truth” of the story: the twinned emotions a mother may have for a new baby – desperate love and desperate fury.

There is sly humour (the possum’s voice is wonderfully contemporary but it has a glaring grammar slip; it is also impatient in a way that one somehow sympathises with). The story manages the swift temporal and geographic movements that fairy tale demands, but somehow never seems hurried. The baking of the substitute bread baby is rendered most sensually, the vanquishing of the possum is bloody, violent and deeply satisfying. Above all, the primitive nature of new maternity – in all its complexity – is thoroughly and lingeringly evoked.

Photo Credits: Living in the Kitchen with Puppies blog (with a dough baby recipe, no less!) I saw this and just had to share.

Post 4 of 5: Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition: Renata Hopkins

The winner of the Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition is Renata Hopkins. It's no suprise she is a professional writer, but not usually of fairy tales, but of soap operas! See my next post today for more about her winning tale.

From ‘You really just can go anywhere you want with the story’ by Guy Somerset:

Hearing that Renata Hopkins is currently away from her job as a Shortland Street* scriptwriter looking after her eight-month-old son, Rowan, I can’t help but wonder if he was in any way responsible for some of the thoughts that went into The Cry Baby, Hopkins’s winning entry in our Brothers Grimm story-writing competition.

***

The possum – a nice touch that culminates in a terrific pay-off at the end of the story – “just arrived pretty fully formed. Because at one point I was thinking of doing a kind of version of Rumpelstiltskin and there are elements of that story I suppose in what I’ve done. Initially, there was a little man that pops up somewhere, like there is in that story. But then at some point it was suddenly a possum.”

A Grimm story is, I’d imagine, a liberating form for a writer – especially one working on Shortland Street. You can be nasty in so many different ways.

“The thing I love about those stories is they kind of dispense with cause and effect. To a great degree, things just happen and that’s just part of the story and you just take that on. I think there was a version of Rumpelstiltskin I read that starts off something like, ‘A farmer once told a king his daughter could spin straw into gold.’ And you think, ‘Well, whyyy? Was there just an awkward pause in the conversation and you thought you’d say my daughter can spin straw into gold?’ You really just can go anywhere you want with the story.”

*According to Wikipedia, for those not in the know, "Shortland Street is a New Zealand prime-time soap opera centering around the fictitious Shortland Street Hospital, first broadcast on Television New Zealand's TV2 on 25 May 1992. It is the country's longest-running drama and soap opera, being broadcast continuously for over 5000 episodes and 20 years, and is one of the most watched television programs in New Zealand."

Post 3 of 5: Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition: Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf by Wendy O'Malley

Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf by Wendy O'Malley is one of the two runners-up in the New Zealand Listener's Brothers Grimm story-writing competition.

In the words of Judge Kate de Goldi:

Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf, which I enjoyed enormously for its bogun-ish chutzpah: a young slightly macho, heftily comic motorcycle magazine editor is well gulled by a nymph in red lycra shorts while he is putting the Zumba – “the latest all-mountain bike in the Xtacy’s upcoming 2013 range” – through its paces. The story very nicely completes its modest intentions; it is well paced and structured, it invokes the comic lesson-in-humility of some Grimm stories; the narrative voice plays most amusingly with political incorrectness and ends with a little metafictional flourish: the narrator reports from A&E: “I ponder this postmodern truth: a broken leg is but a small price to pay for a twist on a classic story like this.”

You can read the entire story on the site but here are the first few paragraphs to whet your interest. From Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf by Wendy O'Malley:

Once upon a time, there was a big bad wolf that got done over by Little Red Riding Hood. That was Bonk’s headline. I am writing this editorial from the hospital waiting room where I ended up due to no virtue of my own. I’m not one to assign blame where it’s due, but this time I can squarely point my middle digit at my mates Bonk and Dare.

It started in the Man Cave where our sordid adventures usually take form out of beer-slurred boastings that morph into “frack, there’s no backing out now” scenarios. As editor of Xtreme Magazine NZ, it is my duty (in other words job) to risk my neck, recording the levels of danger and thrill on diverse adventures, for the benefit of my adrenalin-addicted readership. It is Bonk and Dare’s job as field writers to assist me in my lunacy and to come up with new insane ideas when my brain bucket is empty.

So it was on this murky morning at our editorial meeting in the Man Cave, as we combed our brains for something original and edgy that we hadn’t already written about. I was adjusting the shocks on the Zumba, the latest all-mountain bike in the Xtacy’s upcoming 2013 range. As part of their marketing strategy, the major bike companies sent us a bike to trial and review, and then pack up and send to the next magazine’s HQ.

They had us by the hairy bits, though. If we wrote a scathing review, we could kiss their advertising goodbye. So we had to sneak our true opinions in by using code words that only our hard-core readers could decipher. If we wrote that the bike was kick butt on a technical descent, that was code for “kick its butt off the cliff and save your time and money, mate”.

Post 2 of 5: Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition: Evil Fairy Tales

Evil Fairy Tales by Alice and Pagan Tawhai is one of the two runners-up in the New Zealand Listener's Brothers Grimm story-writing competition.

In the words of Judge Kate de Goldi:

Evil Fairy Tales: this is a simple story that blends Maori and fairy-tale tropes very well. It is beautifully written, seeming somehow both economical and leisurely. It obeys a number of fairy-tale “rules” but without overt display. A distinctly sinister undertow bobs beneath the smooth sing-song surface, making the story linger unnervingly in the reader’s head.

You can read the entire story on the site but here are the first few paragraphs to whet your interest. From Evil Fairy Tales by By Alice and Pagan Tawhai:

Once upon a time, there was a girl called Alice who lived with her mother in an old khaki-blue shearer’s quarters, far away from the river. There were two bedrooms, each with enough bunks to sleep six men. Alice slept in one room, and her mother slept in the other. Alice liked living a little way out of town. It meant she could sleep with the window open at night, and let the sweet dark air in, without having to worry that someone might jump the wild hedge, bursting with small starry white flowers fading to slender reddish-pink throats, and climb in her window. In town, her mother would have made her keep the window shut. Alice’s mother’s number one priority was to keep Alice safe.

The river was on the other side of the tiny town, which had more people than it had houses. Her mother was a cleaner in the next town, which was bigger. But there were lots of cleaning ladies, and sometimes there wasn’t enough work, so she didn’t get the hours. That meant less money, and sometimes there was hardly any food. Alice was a skinny pale girl, turning red when she blushed; from white to red and back again at the drop of a hat.

Her mother told Alice always to: “Keep away from old men, never accept food from strangers and don’t let anyone you don’t know take your photo.” “And always,” she said, “always keep safe.”

Post 1 of 5: Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition: Words from Judge Kate de Goldi

Over the last few months, the New Zealand Listener sponsored a writing contest:

In May, to mark the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm’s book of fairy tales, the Listener, in association with the Goethe-Institut and Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters, launched a competition inviting readers to write a Grimm tale for modern Aotearoa New Zealand.

The results were announced last week and I want to devote a few posts today with content from the contest. Otherwise, I would be overwhelming a single post and this also makes it easier to categorize each post a little better for the blog and search engines, since different fairy tales are highlighted. For those of us not from New Zealand, this is an extra treat a seeing how another culture reinterprets the Grimms' fairy tales, too.

First, I wanted to share the link and an excerpt from the article by the competition's judge, From Brothers Grimm story-writing competition By Kate De Goldi:

My thanks first to the Goethe-Institut, the Listener and Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters for the opportunity to take part in this imaginative story enterprise. It was very good to think again, and in some depth, about the Brothers Grimm and their marvellous stories, and equally interesting to read through the submissions.

And what an amazing range of approaches, narrative perspectives and subject matter was pursued within the fairy-tale grid and given word limit. One thing was very apparent: participants took up their pens to address some pressing social concerns – the treatment of our landscape; the parlous position of the elderly, children in poverty, threatened species; the need to accept difference, consumerism, filial neglect, estranged birth parents, to name just some themes. Writers also marrying ti kanga with European motifs, letting loose European magic in the New Zealand landscape, and – particularly successfully – using the cadence of Maori oral tradition within the structure of old fairy tale.

You can read the full article by following the link. Not many of de Goldi's books are readily available in the US, but you can read more about here at Kate de Goldi. One of her most lauded books is available in the US at The 10 PM Question and in the UK. I have yet to find a bookseller in Australia and New Zealand that makes linking and recommending easier.