The first words of Greenstone beautifully compose the scene: “The whare sits in the clearing among its ghosts and rains, memories of passion and Maori curses…”

For the Maori, whose history speaks of warrior spirit and victory, one of those curses is that they have experienced defeat and demoralization during the years before this tale begins. The “clearing” is sited along an ancestral river where whites live in “This Side,” Maori in “That Side,” names giving emphasis to Maori loss and hinting at confined freedom. Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s humorous and gentle yet sometimes violent novel is set at the time of her own childhood during WWI and shortly thereafter. It focuses on the Considines (“Puppa” and “Mumma”), a white couple with a plenitude of white children filling the land, and on their young granddaughter, Huia, who lives with them. Huia is unique among the children because she is great-granddaughter of the current rangatira (Maori chief) and will become “paramount chieftainess” of the river tribes” when he dies.

Huia’s name is that of a bird native to New Zealand that only recently had gone extinct. This, and Huia’s one-quarter Maori ancestry, help make the story seem a drama of modern influence contending with stressed or fading hereditary identity. Whenever Huia crosses the river she experiences “emotional racial transition.” Greenstone’s “greenstone” is a tiki symbolizing familial and tribal history and pride, to be a source of comfort and strength in challenge. Ashton-Warner is attentive to these themes, filling her book with Maori words (glossed at the end), plus songs and chants and tales, including some composed by Puppa. Huia feels great loyalty to Puppa but in no way doubts her heritage is Maori, a feeling that grows as she does.

By the end of Greenstone, Ashton-Warner makes us feel as though we have visited a place that had in it great beauty amidst inherited pain. ( )