Check Out All Day At The Movies Designed By Fiona Kidman Compiled As Hardbound

A good NZ read reminding me I should really read more of it, Une superbe saga familiale tient le lecteur en haleine grâce à de multiples scènes de vie écrites comme des nouvelles : chaque chapitre relate une petite histoire, présentant un couple, une famille, un jeune homme ou une communauté, illustrant un pan de la NouvelleZélande, tranche de destin lié pour un temps à celui de la descendance dIrène! Ce livre offre des êtres touchants, en proie aux séquelles de la cruauté dun homme, père ou beaupère.
. . morcelés entre résilience et souvenirs pour se construire ! Cest aussi un pays qui sébauche sous la plume vive de Fiona Kidman, tout aussi hétéroclite que peut lêtre la famille dIrène!
Une auteure peut connue en France, à découvrir ! Enjoyed this far more than I had expected to.
I dont usually like books that keep changing narrator, but this one kept me turning the pages and a day later it was finished.
The story of a family starting in closedminded, parochials New Zealand and finishing almost in the present day, we see how small differences in character and experience become vastly different lives.
"Comme au cinéma" de Fiona Kidmanp
Ed, Sabine Wespieser

Bonjour les fous de lectures, . .

Ce roman nous embarque en NouvelleZélande,
Fiona Kidman nous raconte, comme au cinéma, la vie d'une famille sur plus d'un demi siècle.


Ce sont les femmes qui dominent ce roman,
L'histoire commence avec Irène qui, avec sa fille deans, quitte Wellington pour les champs de tabac.

Irène la lettrée va lier son destin à Jock, un pourri jusqu'à la moelle.

De cette union naîtronsenfants,
Pendant plus deans , nous allons suivre ces vies cabossées, découvrir des secrets bien enfouis.

Chaque enfant d'Irène se cherche , tâtonne, peine à trouver sa voie, vit plus ou moins bien sa vie.

S'en sortirontils et si oui, à quelle prix

Voici un livre sur les saccages de l'enfance, sur le pardon si il est possible, sur la survie.


Fiona Kidman en profite pour nous parler de l'histoire de son pays, des traditions, des problèmes de discriminations, de la place des femmes dans la société.


Je referme ce livre avec un sentiment mitigé, . . il se laisse lire, j'ai appris pas mal de choses sur la NouvelleZélande mais j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à me projeter dans les personnages et à ressentir de l'empathie pour les différents personnages.
When war widow Irene Sandle goes to work in New Zealands tobacco fields in, she hopes to start a new, independent life for herself and her daughter but the tragic repercussions of her decision will resonate long after Irene has gone.


Each of Irenes children carries the events of their childhood throughout their lives, played out against a backdrop of great change new opportunities emerge for women, but social problems continue to hold many back.
Headstrong Belinda becomes a successful filmmaker, but struggles to deal with her own family drama as her younger siblings are haunted by the past.


A sweeping saga covering half a century, this is a powerful exploration of family ties and heartbreaks, and of learning to live with the past This is the first novel I have read by

this NZ author.
And clearly I am in the minority but I did not enjoy it, I found the characters very wooden and one dimensional and while the novel was attempting to deal with serious subjects it was done on such a superficial level.
The only reason I continued to read it is because it is my reading for my online book club this month.
I felt bored and disengaged and had to force myself to continue, but I put it down three times and started reading other books because I felt it was a complete waste of my time.
A really enjoyable novel about Irene's four children, Jessie, Belinda, Grant and Janice, Irene is smart and bookish but left as a pregnant widow at the end of WWII.
She is unable to go back to her job after having Jessie so she moves to a tobacco plantation I guess I forgot that we had those.
She falls in love with a Jewish man, gets pregnant and then the man is killed in a fire.
Left pregnant, she marries Jock who seems to hate everyone his wife and all his children.
He treats his own biological children the worst of all, He's a reprehensible human being, So is Charm, the woman he marries after Irene dies, I loved so much about this novel the moving through time from postwar Irene to almost the present day, and the setting around NZ, and the writing style.
The Bolinda reader was terrific in terms of tone and mood but what a pity that she didn't research pronunciation of NZ place names and words.
Would it kill Bolinda to get a NZ narrator I was a bit disappointed by this book.
It felt like an oldfashioned kiwi novel from thes, just extended into the present day.
And am also sick of getting absorbed in a novel before I realise it should come with a trigger warning.
Good weaving of the different storylines though, Fiona Kidman is such a beautiful writer,
A carefully woven account of a family and its secrets,
Hard to put down, A compelling family story beginning during the aftermath of WWII and continuing until the present, The author captures the changing political and social life of New Zealand through the eyes of one woman and her descendants.
Set in New Zealand in the postwar period, a war widow is left to find work and survive.
The choices she makes follow her and her family, and a really interesting and absorbing social history of New Zealand is the result.
to follow. I love it when this happens: I started reading All Day at the Movies last night at about nine oclock, fell asleep very late at night with the book over my nose, and didnt get out of bed this morning till I finished the book at about eleven.
It wasnt that the novel is a pageturner it was more that it was so utterly absorbing that I just didnt want to put it aside.


Fiona Kidman DNZM OBE b,is a prolific New Zealand novelist, poet, scriptwriter and short story author, Shes written more novels than are listed at her Wikipedia page, because on the day I looked the list doesnt include The Infinite Air, see my review or this latest novel, All Day at the Movies.
With the possible exception of The Captive Wife, which I loved but have not reviewed on this blog I think it may be her best yet.


Beginning in the brutally conservatives, the novel is constructed as a chain of interconnected stories, tracing the fortunes and secrets of a New Zealand family.
Far from being the golden age so often associated with the postwar period, this era was a difficult one for women.
For Irene Sandle, widowed in the last year of the war, her only solace is the child born from Andrews last leave, but she lost a satisfying job at the library because in thes there was no such thing as maternity leave.

When she went back to ask for her position after the birth, it had been filled.
The land girls who had worked in the countryside came flocking after jobs in town, She did have a war widows pension after all, and a roof over her head, the head librarian explained.
It wouldnt be fair to take her back, That wasnt exactly the point, because the roof was over her parents house, For a time that was all right, but it wasnt any more, p.

Chafing for freedom that she cant have under her parents roof, Irene takes little Jessie with her to Motueka, where she finds work as a manual labourer on a tobacco farm.


To read the rest of my review please visit sitelink coma Family saga set in NEW ZEALAND



The book opens with the story of Irene and her daughter, who move to the tobacco plantations in New Zealand in search of work.
Subsequent chapters follow her descendants over three generations their individual stories, relationships and where they end up in the world.
The book starts inand comes to its conclusion in,

Irene experiences a love affair but in the end sadly needs to take a more pragmatic decision about her future life.
The unconscious family dynamics permeate the actions and desires of the next generations, strength, fallibility, anger and disappointment,

The author has many accolades to her name and is a truly gifted writer.
She explores the subtleties of human interaction and family with a deft and insightful hand, Family ties can be wonderful, they can also be broken, and life itself intervenes with its characteristic capricious perversity.


I was utterly drawn in by the writing style and the sketched characterisation, I felt tantalised by the people who populate the book and wanted to know more about them.
And that is where the book didnt quite work for me the book felt like a compilation of short stories held together by the family structure and I wanted to get to know the characters more than I was offered.
Perhaps I am just greedy for really wellexplored characterisation, and oh, the potential for that really was there.
Dame Fiona Kidman is a consummate story teller and a very deft weaver of the written word.
Love the form of this essentially a family saga told through multiple perspectives, That sounds all very dreary, but in fact it is engaging, moving and revealing throughout, Sustained excellence. Dame Fiona Kidman, what a national treasure this woman is, She writes fiction novels and short stories, poetry, memoirs yes, more than one, film scripts, She has won numerous awards and fellowships for her writing, she has been involved in the publishing and advancement of all New Zealand writing and books.
A true heroine of New Zealand publishing, but more importantly of telling the stories of womens lives in this country.
It seems to me that this latest book collectively takes all these past stories, including fragments from her own life story, seamlessly stitching them together into a moving, acutely observed chronicle of a family over a sixty year plus period.


There is history too in this novel, even if it is in the very recent past for many people in this country.
Those of us around who remember, and may or may not have taken part in protests of theSpringbok tour will recall it as a pretty traumatic, divisive time, even though it was only fordays.
The tour has a prominent part to play in this book, Not so prominent but of equal import in the story and plot making are a variety of other events that were crucial to the times, if not necessarily so to the characters.
For example, theWatersiders Strike, the death of Prime Minister Norman Kirk in, the Ruth Richardson Mother of All Budgets in, United Womens Convention of, are just a few of the milestones that are peppered throughout this novel, and lend enormous authenticity to the characters, their actions and lives.


This novel is the story of a family, a family torn apart even before it had begun.
A man dies during WWII leaving behind a pregnant wife, Irene, The story opens inwith Irene and her now six year old daughter trying to start a new life with a tobacco picking job in Motueka.
None of this goes to plan of course, and by the end of the first chapter, some thirty pages later, Irene has almost lost her daughter, found and lost a potential husband, been part of a horrible death, and in her shock, found herself an actual husband.
And what a bad life choice that turned out to be, But what does one do barely coping with one child, and a second child on the way.
Irene was hardly unusual for her time, choosing to marry a man, Jock, making the best of what she saw as the best of a bad situation.


Tragedy strikes again some years later, with the death of Irene, Widowhood is indiscriminate in its choices, Little told are the stories of men widowed due to wives dying in childbirth or of illness, leaving them unable to cope with babies and young children.
Enter the stepmother, who often started in the household as a housekeeper, or was a widowed friend, neighbour, or just a lonely woman who saw an opportunity to change her life.
More often than not, totally illequipped to take on the care and upbringing of distraught grieving children not her own.
Jock and his four children, Jessie, Belinda, Grant and Janice find themselves in this very situation.
The new stepmother may be Charm by name, but certainly not by nature,

Life treats each of the four children differently in its unfolding of events over the years that follow, as the fallout of those early days takes hold, and never goes away.
There is never any excuse for cruelty, Jock and Charm, really are the most awful pieces of work, making the lives of each of these children a total misery.


It is going to give too much of the plot away to say what happens to Jessie, Belinda, Grant and Janice.
Suffice to say that collectively, there is teenage pregnancy, banishment, adoption, marriage, child sexual and physical abuse, racism and bigotry, what would probably be diagnosed now as dyslexia, depression and mental illness, domestic violence, drugs, imprisonment.
Wow you hooked now You want to read this A phenomenal amount of action packed intopages! All against the backdrop of New Zealands ever changing social and political times.


It certainly is worth reading, if for nothing else than the documentation of change over the last sixty years or so in our society, and how attitudes have also changed.
For example, to women working and having real careers, something that was almost unheard of in thes women having control over their reproduction, again only just getting underway in thes changes in attitude to unmarried mothers, teen mothers, adoption to children with learning difficulties.
Although I have my doubts if things would really have been any better for those children living with Jock and Charm under todays Child, Youth and Family Service.


Admittedly the novel is a bit of a whirlwind, There are many potential plot lines that could be furthered explored and developed, many characters I would love to have known more about.
But this is a minor criticism, The fact that I wanted to know more shows how engaged I was with the novel, with the characters, their lives, the decisions they make, what happens to them.
Dame Fiona leaves no stone unturned in her telling, with a geographical reach as impressive as her social/historical reach Hokianga, Auckland, Rotorua, Turangi, Wairarapa, Wellington, Motueka, South Canterbury, even as far out as the Campbell Islands.
Her characters live in cities, farms, small towns, They are poor, middle class, protestant, catholic, successful career people, students, teachers, marginalized, academics, hairdressers, And this is the real beauty of this novel, She wants people to get on, to live and work together in harmony, empathy, understanding and kindness for each other.
That despite our infinite variety in where we come from, how we live, we what do, we are essentially the same.
It would be so easy for her to rail in anger and rage at the way women have had to fight for their equal place in our society, at the injustice served to those who dont quite fit the traditional, conservative mould of much of New Zealand society in its short history.
And yet she doesnt. She quietly gets on with telling the stories of damaged people, always with an eye to things getting better, not reflecting or dwelling in the past, having those four children Jessie, Belinda, Grant and Janice constantly trying to make it right and do better for themselves.
So, for two of them it doesnt work out, which are the tragedies of this novel, as happens in many families, but in the last pages there is a reunion of sorts, realistically awkward, which does give hope for the future of this fractured family.


I truly hope you read this book, especially if you have lived through these times, have strong memories of what NZ society was once like, how things have changed for the better.
Plus it is just such a great story, I loved it. Is this Dame Fiona's best book I have no idea, but I certainly intend to read more of her so as to find out.

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