The Sky People is a collection of short stories by Maori writer Patricia Grace. Most of them concern Maoris who live in modern day New Zealand and are at the low side of the socioeconomic ladder.

I was disappointed with most of the stories. Grace writes in a cryptic style with many unexplained point of view changes, changes in voice, and unusual words and sentence structures. I got the feeling the author was saying "if you don't understand me, I'm not going to explain it to you." Of the stories that were a little more straight forward, I still had trouble determining the point of the story. Despite this, a few of the short stories were really excellent. My favourite was "Ngati Kangaru" where a Maori family launches a plan to take back New Zealand using the same methods Europeans used to conquer it themselves. Funny and clever.

Recommended for: someone looking for Maori literature. ( )

I have been championing Grace for a while now on LT (with limited success). This collection of short stories is by no means her best, but that still makes it better than most, in my opinion. Grace effortlessly blends Maori folklore and legend with the more down to earth lives of her characters, who tend to be poor, undereducated Maori struggling to make their ways in urban New Zealand, or fighting the encroachment of urban New Zealand into their worlds. Grace makes the Maori world simultaneously ancient and fragile, proud and ashamed of what it has become. Her characters are lifted by their histories and weighed down by their presents, as they are oppressed because of their race and, more often than not, their genders.

If I started by saying that this wasn't Grace's best, it is possibly because her style suits longer works, in my opinion, and because there were perhaps too few truly memorable pieces. It is, however, still an outstanding collection by most people's standards, and another one of hers that I would like to recommend.