50books_poc | Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa by Tina Makereti

I first read "Shapeshifter" in the #eqnz fundraising anthology Tales for Canterbury, and it made me cry happily again here. It wasn't the only one that made me cry, either, whether in sorrow or joy. I think I loved every story in this collection. "Kaitiaki" and "Blink"; and "Topknot" and "Ahi" and "Mokomoko" which are probably scattered in order to avoid making a trio. From the tamariki to the kuia, Tina Makereti portrays her characters with depth and understanding and flawless prose.

There were one or two I felt I didn't grok as fully as I should -- for example, in "Tree, the Rabbit, and the Moon" I was reading either not enough, too much, or the wrong things into the title: it resonates with face-in-the-moon stories to me, but I couldn't make that connect to the story -- but that's a fault in the reader, not the story. Similarly, so many of the stories connect obviously back to Māori legend that I briefly wondered if they all did and I was just not knowledgeable enough to pick them all up; but the stories all work perfectly as themselves, so it doesn't matter at all.

(I'm not allowed to create new tags for the community, but would have tagged this with: new zealand/aotearoa, māori, a: tina makereti )