Review: Ordinary People Like Us, by Kelly Ana Morey

How do you read a book published after the untimely death of its author without that fact haunting the experience? Turns out you can’t — and that’s a beautiful thing.

Kelly Ana Morey (Ngāti Kurī, Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri), died after a short illness, aged 57, on September 1, 2025. She left behind an unfinished book she called her ‘Epic Māori Novel’ which, under the guidance of author Catherine Chidgey and editor Harriet Allan, has been published on the first anniversary of her death as Ordinary People Like Us.

This book is a delicious read. It follows five generations of women in a saga that travels from 19th Century Te Hāpua in the Far North, across to the gum-digging fields of the Hokianga, down to Auckland from the mid-twentieth-century to present-day and over to England. The spiralling story travels through the lives, loves, and struggles of Bird (born in 1865), her daughter Kaa, grand-daughter Annie, great-grandaughters Lorna and Jen, and millennial great-great-granddaughter Pax. All the while a trio of watching spirits chatter and interject. 

Ordinary People Like Us opens with an epigraph offering a definition of the word māori: (modifier) normal, usual, natural, common, ordinary. The characters here are both māori — in the sense that their lives, if viewed in a brief obituary, would appear ordinary — and Māori. Morey once wrote, ‘I can’t be the ‘Māori’ writer people want me to be, all I can be is myself.’ Under her meticulous, compassionate touch, her characters are free to be just that — themselves, and extraordinary in so many ways.

Morey also plays with how these characters, mostly of Māori-Croatian heritage, define themselves and each other. 

Take Jen. When Kaa, her great-grandmother, first meets her and immediately detects the newborn’s whakapapa, she sniffs in an ‘exaggerated fashion as if it’s faint, distant and elusive, implying this great-granddaughter smells too much like a Pākehā. Is this the future? Is this what’s going to happen to us? One day we’ll wake up and there will be no more Māori people left in the world. We’ll all smell like Pākehā. Auē.’ 

Years later, Jen’s boyfriend asks why she doesn’t talk about being Māori. She responds: ‘…Obviously, I am, and that’s hardly a secret. I might not look the part, but there’re numerous people in my family who do. What else is there to say? We’re ordinary people, living our lives like everyone else.’

Still later Jen is surprised at the vehemence of her mother Annie’s response when she questions her own heritage and wonders ‘if we are not that Māori.’ Annie replies: ‘You’re Māori because those women who came before you were Māori. It’s not about waving your bone carving around. There’s more than one way to paddle a waka.’

Annie Novak is Bird’s granddaughter, and arrives in Auckland by bus in 1949 to attend Queen Victoria School for Māori Girls. Since ‘that thing happened to her back home’ she has become aware of a ‘haunting lament at the edge of hearing’ — the ability, inherited through her maternal line, to ‘listen beyond the ordinary’. The keening gets louder every time Annie imagines throwing herself under a train or stepping off the top of a building. Morey excels at this gentle melding of the supernatural with the concrete world. 

Annie’s choices, sometimes flawed, impact on her love life, family relationships, career, living circumstances as she moves through life. The same can be said for Bird, Kaa, Lorna, Jen and Pax, who show both courage and caution in facing down their own struggles — be it unplanned pregnancy, loss, infidelity, rejection, addiction.

The attention to detail in setting and scene is a delight. While deep in story, Morey traces huge changes that have taken place in Auckland from the 1950s to present day, brings late twentieth century London to life, and expresses her love for art and objects in vivid detail particularly through Lorna’s passion for antiques.

Morey has the most fun with the kēhua (spirits) of three kuia (including Bird and Kaa) who gather to kōrero about their lives, deaths, and descendants. Like all the best aunties, they’re stroppy, judgmental, gossipy, and hilarious, interjecting wit and mischief throughout the story, sipping tea sweetened with condensed milk, warming themselves around a mānuka fire, stealing sushi from a real world art gallery fridge — and worse — just for the fun of it.

‘I don’t make up the afterlife rules,’ muses Kaa. And later: ‘Annie’s hangi pants certainly don’t come from our side of the family.’

In these moments it’s easy to imagine Morey at their side, cackling along with them. Indeed there is a lovely moment where the author herself appears in the narrative delivering a classic Morey one-liner.

But it’s not all played for laughs. The kēhua also deliver moments of beauty and awe as they move between the past, present, and spirit world: ‘Who knew the portal between life and death would be so humble? So ordinary… …This rundown shack out here, under the wide expanse of the sky and its stars, has more meaning than any shiny old Pākehā Pearly Gates.’

The final scene with these three, when the crochet hooks come out, brought tears to my eyes. I have since re-read it twice for the joy of it.

I should declare that I was friends with Kelly Ana Morey at high school — a bigger deal for me than her, I’m sure. She was extremely glamorous. We wrote to each other for a while, then lost touch before rekindling a briefer but no less lively correspondence through Facebook Messenger in 2011. Kelly promised she’d try ‘to become famous’ so I could turn her letters over to the Turnbull Library.

I won’t be sentimental, because nobody wants to infuriate the ghost of Kelly Ana Morey. But I feel safe in asserting that the marvellous Ms Morey would have revelled in the irony her premature death casts over the book as her characters wrestle with the rich and complicated lives and deaths she has imposed upon them.