What I'm Reading: author Jeanette Goode on books

Jeanette Goode

Like most people I am entertained by the world wide web but, for me, there is no substitute for a good book. Books are like doors and, like doors, they need to be opened.

Inangahua Gold, by Kathleen Gallagher, was a book that I bought online during lockdown in March. The cover is manilla brown, it feels soft and vintage. The illustrations are hand-drawn sketches. They are of a kakaruwai, the South Island robin and an īnanga. It was a door that said, "Open me."

I turned the page and read the synopsis on the inside cover. "This book is for the bone diggers, the song-carriers, those interested in the roots, the old connections, and for those with listening ears."

Gallagher took me on a journey through the landscape of an inner and outer world. The first law of ecology is that everything is interconnected to everything else. Her lyrical prose is a potent love letter to an environment full of interconnected imagery.

A Little Blue is my version, for children; a love letter to a unique natural environment. I love where I live on the West Coast and wanted to weave the magic of this place into a story for children. A Little Blue is about a boy called Simmy, who is sent to live in a wild isolated place on the West Coast. He misses his mum and the city life he is accustomed to. It isn't until he discovers that the kororā, the little blue penguins, are his closest neighbours that things begin to change.

When I wrote the first draft of this story, I was living on the Coast Road in a little blue bach set in the rocks very close to the ocean. The waves would sometimes go right under the bach. I was living on the edge and I loved it. There were little blue penguins nesting in the flax all around the bach.

I now live at the mouth of the Nile River in Charleston, a starkly beautiful place with big dramatic skies, surging tides and the constant river. It is home to little blue penguins who have a nesting colony behind the house. When I came to live here, I felt I was walking into my own story. The first night I drove out here, the penguins were all over the road.

To cross the threshold of a book is to enter an inner world, or, as the poet Wordsworth said, to "see into the life of things". Reading is a way through, a way in, a way out. It is a way of life. The rewards last a lifetime.

A Little BLue, by Jeanette Goode

Jeanette Goode is a children's writer and illustrator. A Little Blue ($23) is available from www.jeanettegoode.co.nz. It is endorsed by the West Coast Penguin Trust, with a donation from every sale going toward conservation and protection of the kororā, little blue penguins.