Fishing for Māui by Isa Pearl Ritchie

Fishing for Māui by Isa Pearl Ritchie
Published in New Zealand by Te Ra Aroha Press in July 2018.

A book with a Vegetarian/Vegan Character

How I got this book:
Received a review copy via Rachel's Random Resources

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Check for Fishing for Māui in these bookstores:

	The Book Depository
	Wordery
	Smashwords
	Amazon US / Amazon UK

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A novel about food, whānau, and mental illness.

Valerie reads George Eliot to get to sleep – just to take her mind off worries over her patients, her children, their father and the next family dinner. Elena is so obsessed with health, traditional food, her pregnancy and her blog she doesn’t notice that her partner, Malcolm the ethicist, is getting himself into a moral dilemma of his own making. Evie wants to save the world one chicken at a time. Meanwhile her boyfriend, Michael is on a quest to reconnect with his Māori heritage and discover his own identity. Rosa is eight years old and lost in her own fantasy world, but she’s the only one who can tell something’s not right. Crisis has the power to bring this family together, but will it be too late?

"An accomplished story of a family in crisis - Ritchie's great skill is her ability to conjure the inner lives of her characters. Fishing For Maui is a compassionate meditation on what it means to be well". - Sarah Jane Barnett

I was drawn to Fishing For Maui by its New Zealand setting and author, especially the Maori ancestry of the central family. The story is told by a number of narrators across three generations so I felt I was given a good understanding of how New Zealand's changing opinions affected people across the country. The grandmother was raised in a time when having Maori family was seen by the ruling whites as something shameful therefore she raised her daughter, Valerie, to behave in as white a fashion as possible. Valerie has no connection with her ancestry and married a white man. Now being Maori is of interest though and her son, Michael, is desperate to connect with his roots. That his mother cannot help him leads to one of the big divisions within this family.

I loved the multiple first-person narratives in Fishing For Maui. Ritchie presents each character as a clear individual so I was soon able to easily know whose point of view I was reading at any one time. The women particularly are striving to find themselves and to do their best for their family, but in very different ways so it was interesting to witness awkward situations. Family meals where one person believes traditional nutrition is the most healthy way to eat, but another person is strictly vegan, take a lot of delicacy to be successful! Ritchie obviously feels strongly about causes that her characters believe in and I learnt a lot through reading Fishing In Maui. I never felt preached at however. This is an engrossing novel of family life and, for me at least, a real page-turner!

Meet the author

Isa Ritchie is a Wellington-based writer. She grew up as a Pākehā child in a bicultural family and Māori was her first written language. She has completed a PhD on food sovereignty in Aotearoa. She is passionate about food, wellbeing and social justice.

Author links: 
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Books by Isa Pearl Ritchie / Contemporary fiction / Books from New Zealand