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A Question of Blood
A fourth-generation farmer with no one to inherit his farms, a daughter concerned about her aged father going to Antarctica; college kids pumping gas; a clash of cultures in Turkey; an office cleaner who discovers something unethical in a file... These situations, and others the characters in Karen Phillips' stories find themselves in, are familiar to us all. The ways they come to terms with them are explored with empathy and an understanding of human nature.
Karen Phillips began writing in 2009, winning the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Novice Award that year. Since then her short stories have achieved success in other competitions and have been published in Takahe and Flash Frontier. She lives on a hill overlooking the beach at Ahipara with her husband, two cats, twenty olive trees and sometimes a big, black Labrador dog. This is her first collection of stories.
Karen Phillips began writing in 2009, winning the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Novice Award that year. Since then her short stories have achieved success in other competitions and have been published in Takahe and Flash Frontier. She lives on a hill overlooking the beach at Ahipara with her husband, two cats, twenty olive trees and sometimes a big, black Labrador dog. This is her first collection of stories.
134 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
About the author
Karen Phillips
4 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Karen Phillips
Karen Phillips began writing in 2009, winning the Katherine Mansfield Novice Award and the Heartland Competition that year. Her stories have been published in Takahē, Flash Frontier and the Fresh Ink anthologies. Her debut short story collection A Question of Blood was published by Steele Roberts Aotearoa in 2017. She lives in Ahipara in the far north on a hill overlooking the sea, with her husband, twenty olive trees, a hive of bees and a big black Labrador.
Please see: Karen Phillips
Karen Phillips began writing in 2009, winning the Katherine Mansfield Novice Award and the Heartland Competition that year. Her stories have been published in Takahē, Flash Frontier and the Fresh Ink anthologies. Her debut short story collection A Question of Blood was published by Steele Roberts Aotearoa in 2017. She lives in Ahipara in the far north on a hill overlooking the sea, with her husband, twenty olive trees, a hive of bees and a big black Labrador.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 11, 2021
I bought this collection of short stories in a Kaitaia bookshop, just because it was in the 'Top 10 NZ Fiction' line-up, and I was feeling like I should support local authors, regardless of whether I'd heard anything about them. I even bought at the same time her second collection of short stories, in the hope that I wasn't purchasing a dud.
Thankfully, this certainly was no dud. Karen Phillips writes beautifully. They're slice of life stories, and Phillips portrays the lives of her protagonists with sympathy and lyricism. I'll admit to my eyes watering during a few of the stories...
If there's one criticism to be levelled, it's that I wanted more detail in some of the stories. 'Accident' is about a mother coming to terms with her son going through the court process ('"I though I didn't love him any more,' she said. 'That was the hardest part'."), but what he actually did is brushed over, almost an irrelevancy. Perhaps that's merely my criminal lawyer background rearing its ugly head, when the story is purely about the mother's feelings. Likewise, in 'Night Cleaner', a cleaner reads things in a file which she shouldn't, and it's weighing on her mind... Yet we never know what she read, and with no specifics, it's hard to really get caught up in the narrator's moral dilemma.
Overall though, this was a very enjoyable collection of stories, capturing a variety of different lives and experiences. Phillips is no one-trick pony, writing the same story or characters over and over. Her second volume of stories is now down from my to-be-read bookshelf, very soon to be started.
Thankfully, this certainly was no dud. Karen Phillips writes beautifully. They're slice of life stories, and Phillips portrays the lives of her protagonists with sympathy and lyricism. I'll admit to my eyes watering during a few of the stories...
If there's one criticism to be levelled, it's that I wanted more detail in some of the stories. 'Accident' is about a mother coming to terms with her son going through the court process ('"I though I didn't love him any more,' she said. 'That was the hardest part'."), but what he actually did is brushed over, almost an irrelevancy. Perhaps that's merely my criminal lawyer background rearing its ugly head, when the story is purely about the mother's feelings. Likewise, in 'Night Cleaner', a cleaner reads things in a file which she shouldn't, and it's weighing on her mind... Yet we never know what she read, and with no specifics, it's hard to really get caught up in the narrator's moral dilemma.
Overall though, this was a very enjoyable collection of stories, capturing a variety of different lives and experiences. Phillips is no one-trick pony, writing the same story or characters over and over. Her second volume of stories is now down from my to-be-read bookshelf, very soon to be started.
Displaying 1 of 1 review