Remember getting one of those books from a kindly relative that features you – your name and everything! – dropped into a story? Sapling editor Briar certainly does – and she takes a stroll down memory lane before exploring some of today's local offerings in personalised books. When I turned six or seven, I received a gift of a book – not unusual, in itself. In a shocking revelation, I was a kid who loved books – something you could surely work out if you look at my life toda

It isn't news to anyone that Aotearoa is currently marking a significant anniversary, as we pass the 250 years since James Cook circumnavigated this country's islands in the H.M.B. Endeavour. Some see it as a cause for celebration, others commemoration, and still others consider it a time to better highlight the impact colonialism has had on Aotearoa and its tangata whenua, from that first arrival through to today. It's also not news to anyone in the literary community that t

Kia ora e hoa mā! You probably know that Te Wiki O Te Reo Māori/Māori Language Week is next week – but some of you may not realise that all of September is Mahuru Māori. So we're kicking things off right now! Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori have put out some amazing resources together this year and in the past, from cheers to yell at sports games to requests to memorise when ordering coffee. But it occurred to us at The Sapling that there was one wee gap that we could help fill

Briar Lawry reviews Maurice Gee's latest, The Severed Land, as well as The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles and Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee. There are a great many high-calibre children’s authors in the world who manage to do new and exciting things with fantasy – pushing the genre’s limits, reconfiguring our expectations of what the supernatural can be, taking us to places we haven’t yet been when we thought we’d seen everything. Recent months have been esp