Word: whanganui
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Dates: during 1966-1966
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Nothing is more boring and embarrassing than an amateur conjurer. Magic must be perfect; real rabbits must emerge from the trick hat. The reader, noting that Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel is dedicated to a river (New Zealand's Whanganui), that among the chief characters are 13 darling children, most of them under one tin roof, and that various Maori gods and spirits are freely invoked, may suspect that he is being conjured into accepting a crock of anthropological whimsy. Not so; the magic here is real...
Richmond D. Considine, an ex-writer, "once a celebrity in the outside world where celebrity seems to matter," is crippled by arthritis and presides over his family in a remote forest clearing on the Whanganui River in the North Island of New Zealand. His wife, mother of all but one of the children, buys groceries by teaching school. Seasons pass; in the end the family is "rescued" from rural misery and taken downriver to a big house in town. Only Huia, a half-Maori girl sired by one of Considine's sons, remains behind to live as a Polynesian...
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