Butterscotch

By Lyn Loates (David Ling Publishing, RRP $34.99)

 

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Reviews: General fiction

Gravel Roads The Land of Painted Caves Major Pettigrew's Last Stand The Good Daughters Lovers in the Age of Indifference The Lotus Eaters La Rochelle's Road The Raven's Heart The Brave The Map of True Places

Reviewers have all noted this new novelist's imaginative fictional use of the 1950s Parker-Hulme schoolgirl murder of Parker's mother, but few if any seem to have picked the repressed memory of sexual abuse that ties in that other major Christchurch scandal, the Civic Creche Case.

The book could therefore be characterised as Heavenly Creatures meets Peter Ellis, all the more so because it is written in the same breathless tone as characterised the girls' fantastical creative world in that movie.

Readers of Anne Perry (formerly Juliet Hulme) will therefore no doubt enjoy this book. I did not, but to be fair, a Listener reviewer named it as one of the 10 best books of 2009, and Loates' journalistic background certainly equips her with considerable powers of description.

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