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OLDER FICTION
Smith, Pauline Vaeluaga

Dawn Raid

224 pp. | Levine Querido | March, 2021 | Trade ISBN 978-1-64614-041-1 $17.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-1-64614-022-0 $17.99
(2) YA Illustrated by Mat Hunkin. At age twelve, Sofia is beyond excited when the first McDonald's restaurant opens in New Zealand, and she records her delight in her diary. Over the next six months, she uses the diary to record family mishaps, her love of go-go boots, and her growing awareness of politics and human rights abuses. It is 1976, and the New Zealand government is cracking down on "overstayers," immigrants who came for work at the encouragement of the government but stayed after their visas expired. Sofia's dad is Samoan and her mom Pākehā (a New Zealander of European descent), but it is not until her older brother joins the Polynesian Panthers that Sofia learns about rights abuses targeting Indigenous families. Early in the novel, Sofia writes a school assignment, a speech about herself, and she is selected to represent the school in a district-wide contest; the novel closes as Sofia gives her competition speech and, through it, spells out her own growth as an activist. New Zealand history and the Dawn Raids will be unfamiliar to most American readers, so the diary format works well--Sofia writes about what she learns as she learns it, providing readers with the necessary historical information. Smith, of Pacific Islander, Scottish, and Irish heritage, authentically describes the culture of a mixed-race New Zealander, filling the book with details of language, customs, and food. Hunkin's lively line drawings throughout help set the novel in the 1970s (would contemporary readers be able to picture the much-coveted go-go boots without art?).
Reviewer: Maeve Visser Knoth | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2021

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