Books and reading
Unquenchable spirit: ‘Three Minutes for a Dog…My Life in an Iron Lung’ by Paul R Alexander
Imagine being six years old, coming in after a day spent playing outside in the heat of a Texan summer’s day. You are hot, much hotter than normal even on a warm day like this. You have a sudden, terrible headache. Then your neck becomes stiff and painful.
Your mother notices and you see the fear – no, terror – in her face.
It is 1952 and the childhood disease called polio has been stalking the land, including your neighbourhood, striking down children of all ages without warning. You have become its latest victim.
The next two years are a blur of agony, misery and confusion in a hospital ward alongside numberless other polio patients. Because of the damage inflicted by the virus on your little body, you are now almost completely paralysed. Your lungs are unable to function on their own and you now exist in a machine known as an ‘iron lung’ which does the breathing for you. The only part of your body that protrudes from this metal cylinder is your head. An emergency tracheostomy has left you unable to speak, so you can’t call for help or to ask for any of your basic needs to be met. Many times a day you nearly choke to death.
Finally your parents decide to take you home. They do so knowing that you may only have a short time to live, as the doctors have suggested, but they firmly believe that home, with their loving care, is a better place for you. There are too many polio patients in the hospital, too few nursing staff. They worry that you will die there and without their love to surround you, what kind of death would that be?
This is the beginning of Paul Alexander’s memoir of his extraordinary life, published in 2023. Obviously he did not die, or not for a long while. When he finally passed away in 2024, he was the person who’d spent the longest time in an iron lung in the world.
In the book, Paul states that one of the main reasons for writing it was to help the public understand the dangers of polio, which has not (as is commonly thought) been eradicated worldwide. Indeed, given the trend in the USA and other parts of the world against childhood and adult vaccinations that protect against these types of devastating illnesses, it’s easy to understand that impulse. Do we really want to see whole communities live in fear of silent killers like polio once again?
As a six year old Paul did not understand what was happening to him. He could only endure. Gradually he was able to realise that he had to make a plan for his life, to work out what he could control and what he couldn’t.
A care worker encouraged him to try to learn a breathing technique colloquially called ‘frog breathing’ that would allow him to spend time outside of the iron lung, thus enabling him to taste some aspects of a more normal life. It’s hard to do and requires a lot of instruction and practice. To encourage him, she promised that if he could sustain three minutes of frog-breathing on his own, she would give him a puppy. Eventually, he won that puppy – and it later became the evocative title of his book.
Polio robbed this little boy of early schooling, but with the support of his parents he was able to be home-schooled and graduated high school – at a time when formal home schooling and adjustments for students with special needs were pretty much unheard of. He then completed studies at university, finishing up with a law degree and utilising his education in a career in law.
None of this could have happened without the steadfast love and commitment of his remarkable parents. To bring home a child requiring 24-hour care is one thing. However Paul’s medical needs were complex and the machinery that kept him alive even more so. There was a steep learning curve for everyone involved. Paul’s father improvised a communication device using a stick which Paul manipulated in his mouth; later this morphed into a way to write his university work, and later still, he typed his manuscript on a computer with a device that had its origins in his father’s simple idea from decades before.
The book also pays tribute to the many other caregivers and friends that played vital roles in Paul’s life. There is a lost romance which is a sad tale; possibly something the author never truly recovered from.
The writing is laboured at times, sometimes repetitive, not always easy to fall into the narrative. But as a heartfelt and passionate plea for understanding of the lives of others, it’s a story worth paying attention to.
And as an example of an unquenchable human spirit, I can’t think of a better one.
Three Minutes for a Dog…My Life in an Iron Lung was published in 2023 by FriesenPress.
Creativity and friendship: ‘Millie Mak Makes Her Mark’ by Alice Pung
The third and final book in the ‘Millie Mak’ series (my review of book 2 is here) takes young readers back into Millie’s world: family, friends, being creative with crafts and textiles.
Her world extends just a little in the two stories within this book. In ‘Home Work’ she discovers that looking after younger siblings doesn’t always have to be frustrating and annoying. She meets new friends and has insights into the lives of others, beyond her own small family. She experiences heartache and worry when her beloved Pop becomes unwell. And through it all, she uses her creative skills to stitch together bonds with her closest friends and her neighbours.
‘The Lotus’ introduces other concerns: the anxiety experienced by one of her friends; issues of the environment, especially the problems of ‘fast fashion’; the hardships faced by people in other countries and past times. Once again, the ‘Fru-Gals’ use their special skills to find solutions to some of these and in doing so, their friendships are reaffirmed and strengthened.
The Millie Mak books are odes to the values of kindness, creativity, neighbourliness, doing your bit to help, and having fun.
The lovely black and white illustrations by Sher Rill Ng once again bring Millie and her friends to life on the page.Millie Mak Makes Her Mark was published by HarperCollins Children’s books in August 2025.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.Strangers on a train: ‘The Paris Express’ by Emma Donoghue
Brilliant historical fiction, The Paris Express invites readers to join a group of disparate strangers as they ride the Paris Express train through Normandy on an October day in 1895.
Based on a real event, and peopled with fully-drawn characters (many of whom were on the actual train on that day) the novel takes us into their worlds: among others, a wealthy man and his family, a Black American artist, a young woman performer in a Parisian cabaret, a boy travelling alone for the first time, a female student of physiology, a young pregnant woman, and many of the crew and staff of the train and the French railway company that operated it.
Among the hundred or so passengers is also a young, fiercely political woman who has vowed to strike a blow against an unfair world that treats the poor like expendable commodities. She has it within her power to destroy the train and its passengers as they hurtle towards their destination.
The story is well paced: the tension ratchets up as the journey proceeds, and we learn more about the people on board and their interactions with each other. What will happen to these strangers? Will they survive this journey?
The brilliance of the novel lies in the author’s ability to capture a moment in time: late-century French culture, commerce and politics under the microscope of this one journey. Vivid details of the way the train crew operate this complicated piece of machinery and the conditions under which they work. The worlds of art, literature and theatre of the late 1800s. References to empire and the government. The early technologies of photography and a nascent ‘moving pictures’ industry. Developments in transportation: motor cars; and the seed of an idea that would eventually become the underground Paris Metro. Women taking up study and work in areas such as medicine and science.
The turbulence of the time is brought to life through the characters: deeply held political convictions; the fear engendered by violent acts carried out by anarchists in major European cities such as Paris; the growing feminist and suffrage movements; a sense of the old world disappearing as the nineteenth century draws to a close.
This book is a thriller because it is very hard not to care about the characters and their fates as the train continues on its high-speed way to Paris. It is brilliant historical fiction because the real is blended so skillfully with the imagined, that we can’t tell the difference and don’t really care, as the story is so engrossing. The author’s note at the end helpfully sorts out which was which and adds some poignant epilogues to the real-life historical figures.
I listened to the audiobook version, beautifully read by Justin Avoth, who inhabits the characters’ voices with great aplomb.
If you enjoy historical fiction, you are sure to love The Paris Express.
The Paris Express was published by Picador in March 2025. The audio recording published by McMillan Digital Audio in 2025.
Weasel words of past & present: ‘Unsettled’ by Kate Grenville
I had been waiting for this book, from the moment I first heard about it.
Kate Grenville’s earlier work, The Secret River (published 2005) has become something of an Australian classic. It’s fictionalised account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life as a convict, then a wealthy settler on the Hawkesbury River sparked discussion of the realities of the interface between white and black histories of this country.
Since then she has written several other works of historical fiction, and some non-fiction, inspired by or about the lives of her ancestors and their times.
Now she has turned her sharp analysis to the question of ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Subtitled ‘A journey through time and place’, Unsettled is her account of a pilgrimage of sorts, in which she travels through the places of significance in her family stories, passed on to her by her mother. She is searching for the hidden side of those stories, the people deliberately or carelessly written out of history: the First Peoples with whom her ancestors would have interacted.
In my research and writing about my own family history I have struggled with these questions and the silences of the past. What part did my ancestors play in the dispossession of the First Nations of this land? Were they perpetrators of any of the many acts of violence towards Aboriginal people that took place in colonial and later times? How would I feel if I discovered evidence of this? What would I do with that knowledge?
Like Ms Grenville, I came to the conclusion that all of my ancestors were, in some capacity, complicit in the long act of dispossession since 1788. Many (like the convicts sent here on the transport ships from England and Ireland) unwillingly so. Others (like Grenville, I have ancestors who ‘took up’ land as squatters, benefiting enormously from what was essentially a free-for-all land grab in the early years of white settlement) did so very willingly indeed. Later generations lived (as I do today) in country that was stolen, unceded land.
It is a difficult truth to stare in the face and one that, for generations, white Australians preferred not to see.
Hence the weasel words used to describe the acts of stealing land and the people who stole it (taking up land, opening it up, squatting, land grants, settlers, pioneers, explorers) and ones that were used about the people from whom the land was stolen (blacks, savages, nomads, going walkabout, as examples.) The latter demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding of the subtle and sophisticated worldview and culture of the First Peoples, while the former justified the wholesale robbery of the land and all it contained by the invading colonists.
This book is all about seeing things differently:
Now that I think about it. That’s the thing – I’m thinking about things differently now, rather than sliding along on the well-lubricated surface of unremarkable words. Thinking in a way that allows a whole other story to be glimpsed. No, not even a story, just a suggestion of a suspicion, embedded so far below the surface it’s easy to pooh-pooh it as ridiculous.
Unsettled p35This is a very personal journey and a very personal story. But Grenville’s skill as a storyteller weaves a tale that is both individual and general to all Australians. While imparting her unique responses to the places she visits, the experiences she has on her travels and what she finds in her research, the questions she poses are for us all to consider.
Her comments about the popularity of family history resonate with me, and I think are meaningful on a bigger scale as well:
we…need to be asking questions about our forebears. Not to reassure ourselves, and not to make any claims for ourselves, but to learn how we really fit – and the ways we don’t fit – into the story of being here.
Unsettled p206I could not agree more.
Here is Kate Grenville discussing the impulse that set her on the journey of exploration that resulted in Unsettled.
Unsettled was published by Black Inc Books in 2025
No happy endings: ‘Mercy’ by Emma Woodhouse.
A Newton takes their own life, or that of another.
So says the curse of the Newtons.If you have read some of my other blog posts, you may have realised that I am a bit of a sucker for historical fiction that is inspired by, based on, or closely follows real-life people, places and events. Mercy is one such story, narrating in fictional form the true-crime saga of a working-class English woman who, in the 1840s, was charged with murder.
Her case became the talk of folk in inns and on streets across the land. Did she commit the terrible crime she was accused of? Did she deserve to hang? Or was she a victim of the brutal environment in which she was raised and the inequality between rich and poor?
The notoriety of her name grew as not one, but two juries were unable to deliver a verdict. This was unheard of. It was up to a third and final jury to pass judgement on a woman accused of a most heinous crime imaginable. Would she be found guilty? And what would become of her young daughter, raised in the same harsh milieu as Mercy herself?
The other reason I was drawn to this story? The protagonist’s family name, which I share. While not believing for a moment that my name holds within it a curse as Mercy’s seems to have done (and honestly, given how events played out in her family you can understand how that idea came about), a novel centred around a cursed family name is always a little intruiging…
The author has used historical documents from the archives and old British newspaper reports to skillfully weave a story told from three main points of view: Mercy herself; her daughter Maria; and the local justice of the peace who prosecutes the initial murder case against Mercy. This gives rich detail of the events as they were reported at the time, while also painting a vivid backdrop of the grim environment in which they occurred.
And it is grim. There is little or nothing held back. The story opens with an earlier murder, this one perpetrated by another Newton, Mercy’s cousin John, who beats his pregnant wife to death one stormy evening. It sets the scene and as readers we know that despite an occasional glimmer of hope on the horizon, the future for Mercy and her family is, in reality, nothing but bleak.
For me this bleakness became a little too much and I found the novel hard going because of it, while still admiring the detail and story-telling skill involved. As a tale that paints a realistic picture of how things were for working-class folk in Victorian times, it’s to be commended. Just not an easy read. And don’t expect a happy ending in the usual sense, because for these people they were few and far between.
Mercy is published by Cranthorpe Millner Publishers in July 2025.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy.
Island life: ‘Spirit of the Crocodile’ by Aaron Fa’Aoso & Michelle Scott Tucker with Lyn White
A middle-grade story about a youngster growing up on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, this well-told yarn skilfully introduces aspects of daily life and the unique Torres Strait culture in a lively and relateable way.
Ezra is twelve, and he and his best mate Mason love their life on Saibai, where they fish, go to school, play sport, learn Island dance and song, and try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to stay out of trouble.
But the school year is drawing to a close and next year they must leave Saibai and travel to Thursday Island, where the nearest high school is located. This means being away from home and family for much of the year. While Mason is keen for the adventure, Ezra is not so sure. Why can’t everything just stay as it is?
Then trouble arrives with a dangerous, out-of-season storm combined with a surprise high tide that hits the island. It poses a threat to everything Ezra holds dear – his home, even his loved ones. And he and Mason are called on to help out in the emergency. Can Ezra measure up to the expectations? It’s a scary time and even the adults around him are troubled by this disaster. Is this another result of climate change, along with the rising sea waters that may eventually swallow their beloved island?
The story opens with the excitement of a crocodile spotted on the island’s jetty. The crocodile is the totem of Ezra’s clan – Koedal – and as the novel progresses, he draws strength from the knowledge that his totem animal represents ancient power and toughness.
Readers will learn much about aspects of Torres Strait culture and traditions: food, dance, ceremony, the importance of family and community connections and ties that keep individuals strong. It’s fantastic to see a book for younger readers that focuses on a First Nations community about whom many Australians might know relatively little.
My one disappointment is that there is minimal language other than English used in the narrative. As most people in the Torres Strait speak at least two, if not three, languages fluently, it would have been a great opportunity to introduce more words from Torres Strait Creole and the Saibai language of Kala Kawa Ya.
I have a personal interest in this book and its subject matter: I spent some time on Saibai back in the 1980s and my son is a member of the Koedal clan through his father’s people. So naturally I was interested in the portrayal of the island life today and from a youngster’s perspective.
I found Ezra’s character entirely relateable to any twelve-year-old facing the challenges of growing into the teenage years, facing major change, family complications, and environmental challenges.
He makes mistakes, but by the end of the novel he has learnt some valuable lessons about himself and importantly about others and his community. He learns that it feels good to be involved and to work with others to help make things right again after the storm. He also learns that the right thing to do is usually pretty obvious.
Spirit of the Crocodile is published by Allen & Unwin in 2025.
I have a confession to make. I am often not a fan of the big literary prize winners. With a few notable exceptions, they can feel dry, without much of a plot or characters that I can relate to. I know I will ruffle some feathers admitting this and of course everyone comes to their reading experience in a different way with their own expectations.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the 2024 Booker Prize winner and was a nominated read for my book group early this year, but I missed that meeting and my turn only just came up on the borrower’s list at my local library this month. But I had heard many positive things about this book and I was keen to try it and form my own view. Unlike many Booker winners, it is a slender book, a novella really, so I was not faced with one of those weighty tomes to wade through. I took a deep breath and began.
In some respects this one lives up to my previous experience of literary prize winners. Here’s how:
- There’s not really a ‘plot’ to speak of. The narrative takes place over a single day, following six astronauts in an international space station as they orbit sixteen times around the earth. Things happen, but they are not events that move the plot forward in the traditional sense of a novel.
- There’s not a lot of character development or movement either. We learn a little about each of the astronauts, who are from six different countries, and something of their lives before embarking on this mission. But that’s kind of it. No great emotional insight to speak of, no huge conflict (inner or interpersonal), no emotional arc over the book’s duration.
- The author has a tendency to say in many words, and sometimes very long sentences, what could perhaps be said in just a few.
Did I grow impatient and annoyed, as I would ordinarily do whilst reading a book like this? No, I did not. I know these characteristics have irritated some readers and I can understand why, but what stood out instead for me about Orbital were these features:
- Exquisite descriptive writing conjuring exactly what the view from a space module’s window must look like at various times of the ‘day’ and ‘night’.
- Startling insights into the regular routine of life on board. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have never considered, for example, that orbiting the earth like this means that the astronauts experience multiple sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour period. Actually the human construct of time means very little in space. How do astronauts adapt to this?
‘The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.’ p76 - Glimpses into the psyche of an astronaut. Either the author interviewed current or past astronauts or else has a vivid imagination and emotional intelligence; either way, she brings the inner world of her characters to life so that readers can understand a little of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of space travel: the competing demands of home and space, what feels real and what simply imagined.
- Fascinating facts about the humdrum and ordinary. How do people in space eat, sleep, wash, exercise, spend leisure time? What are their daily chores and responsibilities? How do you exist in such close confines for months at a time with a small group like that, with no outlet or way to be with others or to be truly alone?
- What is it like to do a spacewalk, outside the space station module? Terrifying? Electrifying? Like coming home? Perhaps all of these.
What I most enjoyed about Orbital, though, is the way the author puts into perspective our globe, our earth: our (so far at least) one-and-only home, and the way the astronauts’ feelings gradually change over time about it as they gaze down on it from above:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold…to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakenly home…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It is not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.
Orbital p73Orbital was published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024
A nod to the gothic: ‘The Midnight Estate’ by Kelly Rimmer
I’m a bit of a sucker for ‘book within a book’ stories. Done well, they can have you intruiged from the moment you realise there is a connection between the two seemingly unrelated narratives. Think Magpie Murders which added a delightful dual-timeline component as well as two murder mysteries to solve.
Australian author Kelly Rimmer writes excellent historical fiction, often weaving together legacies from the Second World War with modern-day protagonists in very moving ways. The Midnight Estate is a little different, although here, too, past events cast long shadows over the present.
Fiona Winslow moves back to country NSW after an emotionally exhausting year, planning on restoring the crumbling mansion that belonged to her beloved uncle and was once home to herself, her mother and her cousin. Since her uncle’s death it has stood empty and neglected and she is faced with a mammoth task, not helped by inexplicable opposition by her mother towards her plans – and rumours in the town that the house is haunted.
While cleaning and sorting her uncle’s old furniture and belongings, she comes across a box of books, sent by the publishers to her uncle, who had been a famous award-winning writer. As she begins to read The Midnight Estate, Fiona is puzzled, then intruiged by apparent similarities between her family’s story and the novel’s. Her uncle’s name is not on the book, but who wrote it? And why do some of the characters resemble people she knows?
The old mansion house, while a beautiful haven for Fiona as a child, begins to feel less welcoming, as she begins to piece together parts of a family story that go back a generation. There are dark secrets that must be uncovered before Fiona can reconcile what she thought she knew about herself and her family with what she learns, and finally feel that she has come home at last.
There are enough creaks in the night for The Midnight Estate to feel like an old-fashioned gothic mystery. However, the novel’s theme deals with an enduring and contemporary issue, that of coercive control and intimate partner violence; skillfully done and very believable.
The Midnight Estate is published by Hachette in July 2025.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy.
Keeping it real for kids: New picture book releases from HarperCollins
Andrew Daddo’s Grandpa’s Guide to Happiness follows on from the earlier Grandma’s Guide to Happiness, another in a recent trend of books for children celebrating the special role that grandparents can play in youngsters’ lives. The grandpa here knows that it’s the simple things that make life worth living: keeping busy, tinkering in the shed, enjoying time outdoors, playing music and games (even if you’re not very good at either), spending time making happy memories. Celebrating ‘a job well done. Or done well. Or just done’ with a cup of tea and maybe cake.
There are some chuckle-worthy moments, including the twosome on Grandpa’s motorbike, wearing helmets but no other safety gear, accompanied by the text:
‘I love my Grandpa’s old motorbike, with the special spot just for me.
When he gets it going, he reckons we’ll ride it for real.’
It was then I noticed that the illustration showed the bike chocked up on bricks. Cute.The illustrations reflects Christopher Nielsen’s passion for mid-century culture and design and add another level of humour to the story.
Worst Farmer Ever is written by Pat Cummins with Michael Wagner, Cummins possibly better known as captain of the Australian cricket team. A cricketing theme does sneak in at the end, so no surprises there. It’s a cute story of Farmer Pat who, with son Albie, goes about their farm spotting problems that must be fixed: a hole in the fence of the cow paddock, a leaking water trough, apples being eaten by birds.
Pat has what we might call creative solutions to these problems, much to Albie’s delighted admiration. But while the text tells one story, little eyes will enjoy seeing the real results of Farmer Pat’s ‘fixes’ in the clever illustrations by Louis Shea.
The Amazing True Story of How Babies Are Made by Fiona Katauskas is not a new book, but a special updated release to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its publication.
WIth cartoon-like (but accurate) illustrations and plain, factual text perfect for younger children, the whole story of human reproduction is told: from the physical differences between baby boys and girls, changes during puberty, sex and the fertilisation of egg and sperm, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding.
It’s an inclusive telling which also explains multiple births, IVF, caesarian births, etc.
Along with the frank and honest narration there are touches of humour especially in the illustrations.
This one is a perennial; it deserves to stay on the shelves for a very long time.
All of these titles are being released by HarperCollins Children’s Books in July 2025.
My thanks to the publishers for copies to review.What if kindness? ‘A Different Kind of Power’ by Jacinda Ardern
Just before Jacinda Ardern was sworn in as New Zealand’s 40th Prime Minister in 2017, she was asked by a journalist what was it she wanted to do in the role: the ‘untethered, big-picture stuff.’ Her response was:
‘I want this government to feel different…I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.’In her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, she writes that at that moment she recognised that kindness was the word that encompassed everything that had left an imprint on her, from her childhood, her parents, her community and the people she’d worshipped alongside or worked with, ‘always in the service of something better.’
Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naive, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.
A Different Kind of Power p202I was so pleased to be gifted this book (thank you, Andy!) written by a world leader who showed us all that leadership does not have to be cuthroat, that power does not have to mean ‘power over’ but can mean empowering others, and that kindness can, indeed, be part of the equation.
The narrative encompasses those early influences: her warm loving family and a childhood in small communities; mostly happy memories despite some challenges along the way. A young political awakening because of the sights and sounds of her first childhood community, and a burgeoning awareness of how poverty and other circumstances can push a community and its people into difficulty. Different grandparents and the various lessons absorbed from each.
Initial volunteer political work, education, leading to her first paid roles in the world of politics. Becoming a Member of Parliament (I still can’t get my head around New Zealand’s electoral system, but thank goodness for it, as it allowed Jacinda to take on this role, which ultimately – and to her and others, somewhat unexpectedly – culminated in the Prime Ministerial position.)
She writes about the highlights and lowlights of her time in politics and as PM, which of course you’d expect in a political memoir. If you have followed the news over that period you’d be aware of some of the biggest challenges she faced: the shocking and brutal shootings at a Christchurch mosque in 2019; a volcanic eruption at a major tourist attraction, and of course the Covid global pandemic.
Because of the very personal style of writing about these events, I found myself wondering ‘what would I have done? How would I have reacted?’ What I took from her memories of these times is that the personal, empathetic component of a leader’s response is just as important, if not more so, than the logistical resources and decisions he or she can implement.
The scene inside a crisis centre where she met with victims of the Christchurch attack and their loved ones, is vividly portrayed. She had to balance the need for police and forensic procedures at the crime scene, followed by official identification of the victims, with the urgent need for their families for a quick burial as required by their Muslim faith. Understandably there was grief, anger, and confusion in the room. Knowing how important both empathy and clear communication were at this time, she managed to achieve a calm stillness where minutes before had been a cacophony of noise and distress. She writes: ‘Perhaps even bad news can be better than unanswered questions.’ (p248)
I would agree. I would add: it also depends on how that news is delivered, and by whom.
I especially loved the personal insights she shares along the way of her story: crying in a bathroom stall after an error which saw her chastised as a new staffer in Parliament; feeling that her sensitivity was her ‘tragic flaw’ that would keep her from staying with the political work she loved. Meeting Clarke, her partner; their journey to parenthood to Neve. (The opening scene of the book has to be the best hook ever. I won’t describe it here for fear of a spoiler, but it’s brilliant.) Juggling family and political life.
She describes her decision to leave the Prime Minister’s office and politics, and her reasons why, none of which come as a surprise when thinking about the person she is. I was pleased, though, to read that she has continued her advocacy and her work for hope and kindness since leaving office, through establishing a Field Fellowship for empathetic leadership, academic work at Harvard university, climate action work, and support for the Christchurch Call to Action to eliminate terrorist and extremist content online, among other projects.
At a time when so-called ‘strong men’ seem to hold parts of the global population in their sway, we need more leaders like Jacinda Ardern, not just in politics. It often seems to me that simply increasing the number of women in political or CEO roles does little to change things for the rest of us, if they are operating on the ‘business as usual’ principle. More of the ‘kindness principle’ may help to rectify that.
A Different Kind of Power is published by Penguin Random House in June 2025
