Review: Hoods Landing, by Laura Vincent

As the first fiction offering from Āporo Press, a publishing house still finding its shape, Hoods Landing arrives to a curious audience. It’s a rare type of pressure and most peculiar kind of double-labour: being a publisher’s first while gestating one’s own literary career. Thankfully, debut novelist Laura Vincent rises to the occasion, not only meeting the moment but laying her claim in the canon of contemporary New Zealand fiction.

Hoods Landing is a small town family drama about the big C. A story set over three generations, two family matriarchs and one looming question: What’s up with the Gordon family?

Set on the rural fringes of Auckland, readers are welcomed into the world of the Gordons, an eccentric matrilineal line steeped in secrets, second sight and buried grief. The novel follows Rita, the youngest Gordon Girl, as she steels herself to reveal her cancer diagnosis over Christmas dinner. What surfaces is a family wound grown from wrongs long left in the dark. Joining the Gordons for dinner are elderly lesbians, a sexy baptism and a chorus of the dead, culminating in a darkly tender love story dedicated to everything that festers.

Vincent (Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāpuhi) is an author from Waiuku whose writing has appeared both locally and internationally. A published poet, an experienced lifestyle and travel writer, she spent five years as the Sunday Star-Times’ Wellington café reviewer. Her food blog Hungry and Frozen inspired a cookbook of the same name, a sensibility that seeps into Hoods Landing, where food and whānau are often baked together. 

Here, food becomes a quiet ensemble member. The low rumble of the kettle settles among restless characters like an old friend. Acts of service replace dialogue and food often takes centre stage in moments of rupture or repair. Mealtimes become an arena where the choreography of family life plays out, revealing old patterns, tender or fraught, in who cooks, who serves, who eats first. Vincent’s portrayal of food extends beyond the domestic. It speaks to something older and deeper. These non-verbal measures of care, acts to soothe tension or sidestep it entirely, speak to te ao Māori sensibilities. A world where food carries both spiritual and social weight. It is a vessel of transformation, able to break formality, lift tapu or stain the sacred when subverted. Both bridge and boundary, food becomes the mediator between te ao kikokiko, the world of the flesh and te ao wairua, the spiritual world. In Vincent’s hands, it becomes an offering – a way to speak love, loss, and return without words.

Vincent’s writing often tends towards the idea of return, but to what exactly is harder to name. Normalcy? Belonging? Perhaps both, or neither. The novel holds space for ambiguity. This quality is reflected in the lives of the Gordon family, who inhabit the edges of geography, polite society, and, most elusively, genre. Vincent self-describes it as a ‘Southern Gothic–via–rural South Auckland anti-tragedy,’ resisting the urge for easy shelving. It sits alongside works such as Greta and Valdin, Nights in the Gardens of Spain and How to Loiter in a Turf War.

As a queer author reaching towards her whakapapa, she gains a distinct vantage point. From the outskirts of cultural constructs she writes into the centre with clarity and suspicion. The Gordons carry this tension in their negotiation with hospitality and Māori values.

‘“It’s manaakitanga,” said Mahalia, at one gathering when the conversation inevitably turned to judgement. “It’s our heritage.”

“Pffft.” Judy didn’t take kindly to this usurping of her status as family historian. “It’s good old-fashioned country values, that’s all.”

“It’s manaakitanga,” said Irene, each syllable chaperoned by the pounding of her stick.’

Such moments show how values, even those unperceived as cultural, are inherited, contested and performed daily. Vincent engages imaginatively with the concept of contemporary Indigenous identities and Hood’s Landing joins a growing body of thought on how to live in the present – a way of being that is not always straightforward. The tension is sharpest for those long removed from their whenua, uncertain how to return or how to raise children in a culture they have only partially inhabited. In this space, even small acts, food rituals, substitutions, and adaptations, become ways of negotiating what it means to belong. The characters turn to tarot, rather than karakia, and their view of the church as a communal gathering place (in lieu of a marae) becomes a living negotiation of post-colonial belonging for Māori. It lays bare inheritance as fragile, contested, and at risk, but still carefully nurtured for the future.

This complex negotiation of identity and family life is mirrored in the reading experience itself. Reading Hoods Landing feels like sliding into the middle seat of a packed van bound for a funeral. Everyone is talking at once, you’re not entirely sure how you’re related to the deceased and love and resentment are fighting for control of the wheel. Vincent sets herself a formidable task with this debut: a time-hopping drama that sweeps across decades and an entire town of characters. The sprawl can be disorienting at first, but her confident voice and careful pacing keep the story buoyant. Tragedy, absurdity and affection rise and fall under Vincent’s control, like a ten-guitar party strumming in unison and dissonance alike.

For lovers of The Golden Girls, of popping by unannounced and of ‘just five more minutes before we go home,’ Hood’s Landing is an exciting debut — messy, chaotic, generous and unmistakably whānau.