A woman of steel

Patricia Grace, 83, has long championed the writing of stories about Māori by Māori for Māori. So should I, as a Pākehā woman, be reviewing her memoir?

I hope so, as someone deeply affected by Grace’s novels, which opened my eyes wide to the experiences – and mistreatment – of Māori. At high school, I studied (1986), about a (1992), about a Māori girl’s removal from her whānau, and (2004), drawn from Grace’s father’s experiences in World War II’s Māori Battalion.