“Jenny Patrick is a writer/jeweler from Wellington,” says the author notes at the front of all her books. What they seem to forget to say is Patrick is a great writer with almost all her novels hitting the New Zealand bestseller list.
Landings is different from Patrick’s previous novels which were set in the oppressive coalmining town of Denniston in the 1880s. Landings is about “New Zealand’s Rhine”, the Wanganui River, the people who live on it and the steamboats that traveled it at the turn of the 20th century. It centres around an insane girl of upper class origins and her relationship to the rest- the hoteliers at Pipiriki, the former convict (now a hermit) and so many more into whose lives for a little while Patrick gives us a glance.
The writing is simple-an easy read-aloud (Patrick wrote for radio before she became a novelist). Though tenses sometimes are confused and with the use of multiple voices there are quite a few slips of the pen that some editor didn’t pick up. Nonetheless, the yarn is worth it, very much so. Patrick makes one really FEEL for these people and understand them as if they were your old friends.
