Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Ashleigh Young, Giramondo Publishing, $24.95.
This is the second title in the Giramondo’s ‘Southern Latitudes’ series, and is the winner of the prestigious $200,000 Windham–Campbell Prize and the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Nonfiction.
This collection of 21 personal essays communicate the story of a young woman growing up in a small New Zealand town as she makes her way as an adult into the wider world.
Young roams freely from one obsession to another: the music scenes in regional New Zealand, family relations, eccentric characters, the desire for physical transformation – trying to find some measure of lucidity amid ambiguity.
How best can one tolerate every moment of experience: the insignificant as well as the devastating? Improbable connections are revealed in her essays that uncover strange timbres, moving viewpoint with an arid, sardonic insight and nimbleness in being clever.
