If the book is a gift, you can request a Booksellers NZ Exchange Card so the recipient can exchange the book with us or any Booksellers NZ member bookstore within 28 days. See Description
Selected as a 2024 Storylines Notable Book in the Young Adult Fiction (age range from 13 years to 18 years) category.
Reviews
Tania Roxborogh, Kete Books ~ Migration has echoes of things I know: the word ‘ngāti’ attributed to different groups of people in the same way as we’d have the British class system, and ‘māma’ and ‘pāpā’ for mum and dad. The wānanga itself is a strict military training academy complete with the same squabbles and hierarchy you’d find in the dorms of many boarding schools…’
The threat of war and the impact of colonization are just the backdrop to an engaging and unputdownable read. As the story progresses, the reader is caught up in the lives of the characters through the wonderfully rendered narrative. The novel shows us the experiences of our point of view character, Farah, as she enters the wānanga military academy as a new recruit. The descriptions of place and character are masterclass. We are introduced to birds, bugs and critters with strange names doing some strange things while reminding me of ‘our’ creatures. Migration is funny, real, exciting, incredibly well-written. Treat yourself. You may lose a few days to reading while the dust and laundry gather but it will totally be worth it.
Ceridwyn Roberts, The Sapling ~ Steph Matuku’s latest YA novel grapples with themes of enforced migration, loss, societal expectations, and coloniser violence. It is ‘unputdownable’, a match for The Hunger Games, and better than other series.
The novel begins with a prologue of enslaved people escaping from their cruel captors through a portal to another world. When the story starts, 3,000 years later, the young people who powered the portal are seen as gods in the new civilisation. While never explicit, it’s clear that te ao Māori is a key reference point, with kete, ngāti and wānanga all represented in the text.
About the Kiwi author
Steph Matuku (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama, Te Atiawa) is a freelance writer from Taranaki. She enjoys writing stories for young people, and her work has appeared on the page, stage and screen. Her first two novels, Flight of the Fantail and Whetū Toa and the Magician were Storylines Notable Books. Whetū Toa and the Magician was a finalist at the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. In 2021, she was awarded the established Māori writer residency at the Michael King Centre where she worked on a novel about post-apocalyptic climate change.
