Book report
I have read The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. It is a short little book with a green cover. On the cover it is a shape of a whale-tail with the ocean in the background. Themes of the book is unrequited love, equality and culture of the Maoris. The Whale Rider is on my personally list of
”Do not read”, truly not a book I am going to read again and now I am going to tell you why.
Firstly the names i the book is typical Maori-names and I thought it was so hard to read them. Lots of names that I never in my whole life had heard about. It’s not just that it is new and different names compare to what I am used to, it also sounded weird in my head. In Europe and USA the names sound in one way and I am used to hear European name because I live in Europe and used to
American/ British names because of all music I listen to and all series I watch. Halfway through the book I hadn’t figured out if some names were cities or names at people. And that made it hard to know if someone was talking about a person, a place or a city. For example so told one of my classmates that Pourourangi is Kahu’s father and I had thought for the whole first chapter that is was the name of the tribe.
So I was having problem with some words in the book but that was not the main problem. In the same way of not get the names I had a bigger problem, the book didn’t make any sense at all.
Maybe I should have read a little more about the Maori before I started reading the book. It was like a crash between my culture and theirs. Not like when I read a book that takes place in USA or a another country in Europe when something was different. Now everything came like a surprise and a thinker. The book was a something new and something to think about, I truly agree with that. But still a turn the world up side down if you compare to my own culture. One example of this is in the beginning of he book when the bury Kahu’s birth cord. I had to read those pages