Spring Book Reviews

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton ($28, pb, Canongate)

Even if you think you’re not the nature-writer reader, Raising Hare will warm up every morsel of your heart, make you read hurriedly in both fear and excitement, and entertain like no other book about an animal has. Chloe discovers the baby hare, the leveret (such a great word), motionless. After a few days she realises its chances of survival are waining, and decides, not without deliberation, to try and keep it alive. Through the few reference points she finds in outdated literature, she learns how to rear this creature while avoiding, somehow, to humanise it. She calls the hare ‘it’, referring to her only as ‘she’ after the hare’s birthed a kindle of leverets. This unsentimental approach gives Dalton authority to write from nature’s perspective, but we the reader naturally become infatuated with the details of this unfamiliar creature’s habits. You feel the terror as the harvesting season looms and the preying minks and kestrels wait with beady eyes for their dinner. The hare goes missing, she comes back, and goes missing again. Chloe manages to learn through careful observation, and in opening up her house to this beautiful animal, the ways hares play, care, and hunt. If the world were to read this marvel of a book, mankind’s relationship to nature would be better for it. 

365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental, illustrated by Joëlle Joliet ($25, hb, Abrams)

I love any day that celebrates being a parent. The modern reality of parenthood doesn’t leave a lot of energy at night for reading, but when there are books available like 365 Penguins you’ll feel as enthusiastic about reading to your kids as you do about going to bed. It’s written in pockets of funny announcements and musings from a confused family as a penguin arrives by post every day for a year. The illustrations are simple, in neon orange, blue, black and grey, capturing the family’s dilemma of where to store the mounting penguins. My favourite image is of the penguins looking out from inside the house, watching the family calculate how much 100 penguins cost to feed if they eat 2.5 pounds of fish a day when a pound costs three dollars. It’s a beautifully unrealistic portrait of life with penguins, while inadvertently reminding us of the fun in the ridiculous and unimportance of constant literalness. The story builds towards a simple and moving message about climate change, it’s the perfect ‘in’ for young children to learn about the melting snow caps without being gruesome and nightmarish. Be careful though, these illustrations are so endearing you’ll want to tear the pages out and frame them on your walls. And when this book is only $25 and A3 in size it’ll be hard not to… 

In Dark Places by Michael Bennett ($35, pb, Paul Little Books)

Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) is, if you’ve read any of the books from his crime trilogy, a raconteur. At our 2025 Booksellers conference, he talked well into our lunch hour and not one person was fidgeting for a sandwich. Everyone was captivated. This is the same for his masterful piece of investigative reporting, In Dark Places, which exposes the injustice served to Teina Pora, who was wrongfully incarcerated for the rape and murder of Susan Burdett. In 2011, 19 years after Susan’s murder, Bennett received an email from an investigator who showed him the excerpts from police videotapes of Pora’s interview. I’m not giving away the ending when I say he didn’t do it. While this book was published in 2016 it has aged well, serving not only as a record of one man’s life-altering injustice, but as an insight into the path that got a young Māori boy from South Auckland, with foetal alcohol syndrome, imprisoned. Yes Bennett’s narrative style captures the story and soul of Teina Pora, but this book feels like more than one man’s story. It finds the needles in the haystack of how this investigation was mishandled, and also provokes debate on broader issues such as the conditioning of prisoners to be ‘inside’, so they forget how to be if they ever get out. 

Building People: The Drawings of Craig Moller Vol. I ($45, pb, Six Point Press)

Upon opening Building People you’ll find a quote from Hester Underhill: “If you’ve taken up drawing because you want to be the next Rembrandt, things might not work out. But if, like me, you’re the kind of person who gains a lot from slowing down, drawing will do you the world of good”. Like the book’s design, this quote rips you from the busy vortex that is life and props you up in the present. You’ll want to caress the covers, fondle the pages, and browse with ease through the many personalities of Moller’s building people. 113 pages of his watercolour paintings follow, opening up space for you to scrutinise the variations in colour, rogue angles, and building expressions. They’re confronting, abstract and wholly unique. Fellow Architect, Marian Macken, closes the book with an essay on the ‘Essence and Joy in Craig Moller’s Building People’, explaining how “architects don’t really make buildings, but rather drawings from which others construct,” and therefore, from a Heideggerian point of view, “drawings are the being of architecture”. There’s something about this that makes the book you’re holding feel like a work of architecture, crammed with drawings waiting for others to construct, and it boggles the mind because it’s so beautifully compact in comparison to the enormity of the content. Your Dad will love this if he’s an artist / architect / connoisseur of fine books.