New Zealand books are easy for me to obtain, and there's plenty of choice. I had gradually become aware of Laurence Fearnley as a writer I had yet to dip into, which seemed rather a lack, given that she has been writing novels, some of them award winning, for around twenty years. So I put my name on the hold list for her latest, "The Quiet Spectacular" at the library, and eventually it came round to my turn (the hold list being surprisingly long).
The book is set in the south of New Zealand, in an unnamed area clearly based on Dunedin, and on a rural dormitory town and wetlands slightly to the south of the city. Christchurch, where I live, also gets a mention as the childhood home of one of the main characters, and residence of her parents. I find when the setting is familiar, the reading experience is changed by the inevitable mental fact checking that goes on. I didn't find anything to quibble with (and the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 inevitably got a small mention).
The book centres around three women. Loretta is a school librarian with two grown children, a soon to be teenaged son, a husband and an ex. She appears to be suffering some sort of mild mid-life crisis, and has embarked on a project to catalogue adventurous women in a book (imaginary or real) called "The Dangerous Book for Menopausal Women". Chance is a teenage girl whose goat farming father and brothers are interested only in go karts, while her mother is literary but cold and mentally cruel to her. Riva is an older women, who has given up a successful business making women's outdoor clothing in the United States, and returned to New Zealand where she is restoring and protecting a wetland reserve. Riva is mourning the death of her sister Irene, but has promised Irene that on the fourth anniversary of her death, she will do something spectacular to celebrate, and will then stop mourning her and get on with life.
These three women separately discover the wetlands, and a hut that Riva and Irene had built there, and eventually meet up. I found the variety of female characters interesting. Men are peripheral here. But though Riva says of men that she can "take them or leave them", it is not an anti-male book (the author, by the way, is a woman despite her male-sounding name). Chance's father, for instance, seems to be a good hearted person, in the glimpses we see of him, while her mother Trudy is not at all sympathetically drawn.
The book was interesting enough that I felt I would like to explore Fearnley's earlier work - in particular, "The Hut Builder" which won the fiction section of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards.
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