Becky Manawatu's debut novel Auē was published by Mākaro Press in 2019 to huge acclaim.
Kataraina, the sequel to Auē, is a continuation of this family story — this time privileging Aunty Kat’s place in the world.
From the outset, we are ready for a tense experience, as the opening poem announces: if you sense you'll have to run, be prepared.
Later, all is visceral, where for certain characters, a "hologram of fear played out on to the inside of your skull bones and behind your eyelids".
Emotions are vivid, borne out of desperation.
The novel’s setting is perfectly detailed with normal instances of family life.
The landscape is evocative and familiar, yet Kat is unusual, holding power by absorbing other people's mamae (pain) without being damaged by it.
This spirituality runs through all strands of the book.
As father Hēnare observes, she brings out something lovely between his parents, acting as a buffer to their frequent rifts.
She lives in a house possessing a "certain sort of care" with Hēnare, mother Colleen, and siblings Toko and Aroha.
Grandmother Liz, while ritually peeling stars from apples, observes her mokopuna and is amazed by the new feeling with which she has entranced their world.
Yet this state of benevolence is transitory, the future to play out for the family to quite devastating effect.
In an unsettling motif, the reader is haunted by repeated accounts of the shooting of Kat's husband.
This incident, among similar ones, echo throughout the novel.
Kataraina has a complicated structure, fracturing the reader's attention as the family has been fractured by violence and sadness.
Not only are there frequent time jumps between Kat's childhood, her adolescence and the present, but two additional storylines, which by the conclusion have threaded together.
From various perspectives, we view the main character in her volatile marriage and the people around her.
Some characters sense the element of magic, which runs through another storyline dating back 128 years before the central event. This is the story of Tikumu, a Māori woman confronting colonialism in the region which decades later will become home to Kat.
In another narrative, a little off to the side, scientists study in the field close to Kat's marital home.
All these narratives slowly begin to converge, and Johnson's Swamp — as it is informally known — becomes the heart of intrigue and discovery, holding the souls of those around it.
At times magical realism and myth actively participate; at other times they recede, waves of history and storytelling altering each other.
Kataraina is dense in content and imagery, such as the "greenness" which is linked to the main character.
Nature frequently takes centre stage, although it has been compromised by spiritual and environmental rot.
Descriptions are vivid, of a kahikatea towering over a landscape's wound and a broadleaf "folding over the whenua like it was on its knees, mourning". While the time jumps make the reader work hard to follow each account, beyond this is a deeply affecting, multi-layered generational tale of trauma and recovery, and a strength that lives on to set grievances right.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant
