The Whale Rider | Witi Ihimaera | Excellent coming of age story

The Whale Rider | Witi Ihimaera | brilliant, beautiful, powerful folk tale of girl power

books:

The Whale Rider

	The Whale Rider Witi Ihimaera Harcourt Paperbacks, 2003 - 168 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Eight-year-old Kahu, a member of the Maori tribe of Whangara, New Zealand, fights to prove her love, her leadership, and her destiny. Her people claim descent from Kahutia Te Rangi, the legendary "whale rider." In every generation since Kahutia, a male heir has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir, and the aging chief is desperate to find a successor. Kahu is his only great-grandchild--and Maori tradition has no use for a girl. But when hundreds of whales beach themselves and threaten the future of the Maori tribe, it is Kahu who saves the tribe when she reveals that she has the whale rider's ancient gift of communicating with whales.
Now available in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions.
Feature film in theaters in June 2003!

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Excellent coming of age story

This is an excellent coming of age story for a young girl, or boy! Readers will find delightful lore and learn something of New Zealand. The movie wasn't a disappointment, though I'm glad I read the book first.
Chrissy K. McVay
author of 'Souls of the North Wind'

brilliant, beautiful, powerful folk tale of girl power

I love this movie, so I decided to read the book. As with any book on which a brilliant and well-executed film is based, it's a challenge for the reader to fall in love with the original story. The film was very faithful, and so it wasn't difficult to love this novel as well. But there are some deficiencies. First of all, the characters seem more real and dimensional in the film than the book. This is especially true of the heroine, who seems a mystical and distant child in the book, but comes off more real through Keisha Castle-Hughes' portrayal. Second, the film is much more realistic, only slightly testing the boundaries of reality and disbelief. The book is much more fantastic, though it contains more insight into the tribe's culture. And yet, the book is utterly powerful, honestly moving, and incredibly beautiful. It's a brilliant modern folk tale of a Maori tribe threatened by the modern world to hold onto its traditions. The chief (Koro) rejects his great-granddaughter Kahu who has broken the male line of succession. Koro tries desperately to maintain his tribe, reinforce the old traditions, and keep their connection with their totem animal, the whale on which their ancestor traveled to their lands. Meanwhile, Kahu desperately seeks her great-grandfather's love, not to mention acceptance. It slowly becomes obvious that Kahu--despite her gender and great-grandfather's rejection--is deeply connected to the whales and the sea (which is actually a taboo for a female to engage in), and is the salvation of her tribe. Obviously, fate and destiny care not for gender and traditions, as this girl is apparently destined for great things. It's an incredible story of family, destiny, strength, girl power, expectations, traditions, and culture. Grade: A

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Can't

give a review on something I havn't read, whoever made an idea like that, I give a review after I've read the book.

Has its problems, but still works.

Witi Ihimaera, Whale Rider (Harcourt, 1987)

This relatively obscure little book exploded after being adapted into an award-winning film. The book still hasn't gotten as popular as the movie, though, and that's something of a crime against nature. I have not yet seen the movie-- I wanted to read the book first (and will likely see the movie next week)-- but I know how the whole book-to-movie thing usually goes. And it's usually a crime against nature when the book doesn't get popular even after the movie's a big hit, so I'm playing the odds on that one.

As for the book itself, it's quite a good little tale, full of a young adult kind of magic realism that's likely to make the reader, if he hasn't already, consider the link between magic realism, the literary cliché du jour, and folktales. Ihimaera gives us the Whale Rider creation myth while telling us the story of a Maori chieftain who refuses to see that his granddaughter Kuha is developing into the new chieftain before his eyes because of his traditional beliefs that a male must take the position. (Despite, we find out, the fact that women have held the position in the past. Hard-headed old sod, eh?) We spend much of our time just learning about the characters, with Ihimaera throwing in some interesting perspectives at times; for example, narrator Rawiri, Kuha's uncle, leaves New Zealand for two years to run a coffee plantation in Papua New Guinea (and this allows for some rather odd humor, as well as a blistering excoriation of modern racism in the region), and we find out about Kuha's development only through letters and phone calls for a while. Yet it is rare that Ihimaera takes his focus off Kuha for more than a paragraph or two at a time.

A lovely tale, well worth your time, whether you've seen the movie or not. *** ½

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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