Review: Falling into Rarohenga

There’s always a doubleness to my reading of YA pukapuka: I read them as me, now, but it also wakes up the ghost of my younger self. I can feel child Elizabeth on my shoulder reading along with me.

We both loved Falling into Rarohenga, the latest young adult pakimaero from novelist and playwright Steph Matuku (Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Mutunga, Te Āti Awa). It’s the story of 14 year old twins, Tui and Kae, with short chapters alternating between their two points of view. True to YA convention, Falling into Rarohenga is action-packed right from the get-go: on page 15 bam! The twins are sucked into the underworld on a quest to save their mother. And we’re off!

Falling into Rarohenga is situated entirely within te ao Māori in an open and welcoming way that made me wish that I had had this pukapuka 30 years ago. It would have taught me so much that, as a Pākehā, I need to know. Key tikanga and pūrākau are taught in way that feels organic:

‘You’re in Rarohenga, Kae.’

‘But … there’s no coconut trees,’ Kae says, bewildered, and Auntie and I both groan and roll our eyes.

‘Rarohenga, you egg,’ I say. ‘Not Rarotonga! We’re in the Underworld. Where the spirits go.’

I was unsurprised to learn that Falling into Rarohenga started life as a film script; Matuku paints Rarohenga with a brilliancy that feels cinematic:

The sun shines above, but it’s a sun with tā moko, the tattooed swirls carved in fiery red against its white cheek. Around the sun, holding it tight, is a braided net of shining golden cords. The ends stretch wide across the sky and vanish into the blue.

This glorious technicolour is echoed in the book’s design – more superb mahi from Huia Publishers. All the pages have a red tint around the edge for a reason that becomes clear later on in the pukapuka.

Underneath the banter and fast-moving plot, though, there’s real emotional heft to Falling into Rarohenga: the person the twins must save their mother from is not one of the atua or taniwha they encounter but their own father. He has been absent for a long time – mention is made of a restraining order and jail time – but now he’s figured out a way to steal their mother back. His violent fixation on the twins’ mother and disregard for his own children make him a genuinely frightening figure, and he gives the kōrero a sense of real uncertainty and peril that cuts through the otherwise folkloric feeling of safe narrative ground. Through the course of the pukapuka, the character growth of Tui and Kae is shown by their increasingly mature understanding of the abuse that has taken place within their whānau.

One of the things I look out for when I feel child Elizabeth reading with me is the positive queer representation I wish she had had. As is common in YA, we see both Tui and Kae develop brief crushes. It would have been a great opportunity for some low-key normalisation of queerness but instead Falling into Rarohenga goes out of its way to establish that Tui, the female twin, is attracted to a male tūrehu, and that Kae, the male twin, is attracted to Hinekōruru, a female atua.

These passing feelings of attraction play a very minor role in the narrative and could so easily have been differently framed – or left out altogether – that it made me wonder why the twins’ apparent heterosexuality (that is, not-gayness) was being so firmly insisted upon. For me, it struck a really jarring note in a story that is otherwise warmly inclusive. That said, overall I recommend Falling into Rarohenga for fans of YA, tween and up.

Pukapuka (book) Pakimaero (novel), tikanga (customs and procedure), pūrākau (legend), mahi (work), atua (god), taniwha (supernatural being), kōrero (narrative), whānau (family).

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage