Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story

I began looking for books about New Zealand after a visit from a half-Maori, half-white relative, and an invitation to visit them in New Zealand. This book is the best I found so far for understanding the culture and life of the South Pacific. This bright, adventurous, American woman's story is engaging and romantic, and along with her personal narrative I learned a great deal of well-researched New Zealand and Pacific Islander history. I would recommend it to anyone who's been to Hawaii as well, as part of the book takes place there. Nowadays mixed-race relationships and their offspring are becoming the norm rather than the exception, and this book offers excellent real-life insight into the challenges of falling in love with someone from another culture. And the message here too is to understand another's culture you have to first make sure you understand your own. Really well done, and at heart a love story, with chops.

To begin, Christina Thompson,the author, becomes attached and eventually marries Seven,a Maori man. As might be expected this is a match of differences and opposites which the author slowly divulges through out the book. How deep the differences are and how interesting they are to experience is what attracts Thompson thru the years of their marriage. It is what really drives this story. As these differences appear thru everyday life, they give the author an opportunity to digress into essays on Maori life. Their history,characteristics,Maori family and friends, living in a Pakeha dominated world,,etc. My favorite essay was on the huge effect that the moko-mokai (smoked heads) had on the Musket Wars..just an awesome bit of research and well told to boot! Thompson does an excellent job of morphing her life with Seven into a larger portrait of Maori-Pakeha existence..that is to say-same place, same time, but two different worlds. This a unique book for the US market. As you may be aware,not much is written about Maoris in the US. So, such a thoughtful,well researched, and easily accessible book is a real treat. Thompson's book is differently one of the best books about Maori-New Zealand available in America.

If you like New Zealand or are interested in the beautiful country, you will enjoy this. The author leads you through her life with her Maori husband and weaves in Maori history. A fascinting look at the original New Zealanders. It is a history lesson and a page turner.

I picked up this book at my local bookstore and could not put it down. Thompson's book mixes memoir with historic research to create a very accessible and interesting book. She smoothly combines her research on the literature of colonial-Maori contact with her own story of how she met and married her Maori husband. One of the best books on the contacts between very different cultures that I have read in a long time. And it will make you want to go to New Zealand too.

As an American transplant to New Zealand, I have to say that I found Christina Thompson's book an absolutely fascinating read. And as the author of two books on New Zealand myself (the second one a work-in-progress), I have to say that her volume has add immeasurably to my effort to understand, not only the historic Maori, but Maori today. I can also appreciate her cross cultural experience via marriage, being that my wife was born and raised in France. If Pakeha--Europeans--have historically viewed Maori with some ambiguity, I can testify to the fact that my French in-laws view me in a similar fashion. To put it politely they see me as a creature only a generation off the frontier that doesn't even know how to use a knife and fork properly--the French version of a savage, one might say. Ms. Thompson's Maori in-laws, on the other hand, impress me as being my idea of what in-laws should be. (I hope my mother-in-law doesn't read this.) I have only one complaint about this book, and that is that I found the lack of signposts disorienting. That is to say that the reader has no way of knowing when Ms. Thompson's journey began. Was it in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s? Except for that omission, I would have to give this book five stars.