A review by octavia_cade
To The Is Land by Janet Frame

4.0

It has a pretty slow start, but this first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography improves as it goes along... until you find that you've finished it without actually stopping for dinner. There's a sort of gentle mesmerising effect that's heightened by the familiarity of the natural world - to New Zealand readers at least. And I might have experienced Otago and Southland some generations on from Frame, but it's still very recognisable even over distance. In fact, the point where I felt closest to her was in Frame's schoolgirl insistence that what she wanted to write about were the subjects of her home - the little native wax eyes instead of those flashy foreign nightingales, for instance.

Place should have an influence on writing, and Frame's realisation of her place, and how it affected what she wanted to write, is the central theme of this book I think. It was certainly, for me, the most interesting.