Whale Rider.

I saw the film version of The Whale Rider first so already had an idea of the story before reading the book. I think this was the right way around because, as is usual, there seemed to be more in the book! We read of Kahu from her birth to the revelation of her ancestral powers and I loved that Ihimaera also writes of the Maori tales and legends surrounding the Whale Rider. This gave me a fuller understanding of Kahu's significance within her people. Characters' words are frequently given in Maori which also enhanced my sense of a cultural story. (I didn't actually refer to the Maori-English glossary at the back until I had finished reading because I didn't want to interrupt the flow of Ihimaera's writing.) Mostly it is straightforward to work out a translation or the relevant phrase is explained within the text.

I felt that the Maori traditions of oral storytelling shone through in this novel. We learn about Kahu's great-grandfather's insistence that tribal chiefs must be male, even though the women of her family remember female chiefs in the past, and the moral of following your destiny despite the closed ideas of others is put forward in an inspirational way without overly hammering home the message. This book is intended for a young adult audience so, for me, it was a swift read. It gives a vivid portrait of a close-knit and relatively strong Maori community - in contrast to the poverty-stricken depiction I read of in Katherine Hayton's The Second Stage Of Grief.