Click to listen to an interview with Christina conducted by Radio National’s Ramona Koval

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow

Click to listen to an interview with Christina conducted by Kathryn Ryan of Radio New Zealand National’s “Nine to Noon”

http://www.radionz.co.nz

If it were nothing more than a memoir, Thompson’s first book would make fascinating reading as the story of a mismatched but loving pair making their way in a world where they can never really be at home ... Charming, insightful, honest, balanced, the book offers a unique look at the pressures of marriage across cultural, racial, and geographical boundaries. Thompson creates a vivid portrait of Seven, a tolerant, calm, nonjudgmental man, “the easiest person to be with I had ever met,” but also deeply mysterious to her, wholly other, even after two decades together.

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This offbeat, intimate and absorbing history of Maori and European encounters is not all about killing and cannibalism. There is that, true, and more: gruesome details about tattooing, for example, and head preservation. But it is really a story about mutual incomprehension, illuminated, if not dispelled, by the author’s own romance with the Maori, and with one in particular, a man called Seven, whom she married. Against most rational expectations, the marriage has worked. The book is a lesson in the limitations of rational expectation ...

It all falls neatly into Western categories about “advanced” and “primitive” peoples. But Ms Thompson is not so pat as that. She tells an anecdote about a friend who liked to joke that he was a Bengali trapped in the skin of a European. Her own sensation is not so much of a terrible mistake, but of discovery and arrival; a kind of fatedness. Not that she claims to understand anything. On the contrary, she believes in being willing not to understand, while simultaneously remaining curious and open ...

It is the charm of this book that the circle never quite closes — that, in its final pages, history itself becomes another foreign country, another adventure.

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Spontaneity is at the core of how Thompson defines an "interesting personal history": Freedom, risk and the "charm of the unexpected" are its essence, and indeed for her the essence of life itself. How she created hers, and the complexity, dynamism and ambiguity that followed, are the focus of "Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All," a multilayered, highly informative and insightful book that blends memoir, historical and travel narrative.

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Thompson’s ... observations about the enduring effects of colonization can be penetrating. She puts her vantage point of insider-outsider ... to good effect, tracing the genealogy of racial stereotypes and cutting through some of New Zealand’s most cherished myths about itself. Like the one about how injustices of the past have been addressed, or that, unlike Australia, New Zealand is not racist. “What, after all, does the cluster of social indicators that includes low life expectancy, poor health, high unemployment and low levels of educational attainment suggest, if not poverty?” she asks. “And what is the root cause of Maori poverty, if not colonization?”

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Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is a highly unusual blend of personal memoir, travel writing and anthropology, and I like to think it’s the happy result of a scholarly writer looking round at this particular theoretical minefield and deciding to make it her home ... Her book is about stereotype and the limits of understanding, I suppose; and, to be honest, it isn’t straightforward ...

I really enjoyed this book — and this despite it missing two quite important ingredients: jokes and sex. How Thompson manages not to discuss the nitty-gritty of sex in either part of her narrative is astonishing, to be honest ... But I suppose an author must be allowed to draw a veil over her own sex life if she wants. What she says about herself is that she has “always been happiest swimming in some strange sea, and, “I was always drawn to the unfamiliar.”

All I think we can know for sure is that she and Seven don’t spend a lot of their time together discussing the empirical as a reality-projecting mode of textuality. But on the other hand it’s quite clear that having a Maori husband has, in every sense, helped her to keep it real.

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A fascinating glimpse into the adventure of cross-cultural relationships, whether personal or on the scale of British colonialism ... Come on Shore and We will Kill and Eat You All is a unique book that will appeal to readers on at least two levels. First, it is a memoir -- the story of a young woman who traveled far away from home and found love and adventure. Second, it is a history of relations between two very different cultures and an examination of how the present is a child of the past.

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This book stands out because of its sharp, fine writing and the fresh glimpses it gives of New Zealand. It also goes beyond, covering a broader canvas that includes Australia and Polynesia and reaches across the Pacific to the American Midwest and New England ... Her story is told with a strong and compulsive narrative drive.

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In this unusual hybrid of history and memoir, Harvard Review editor Thompson examines the historical collisions between Westerners and Maoris through the lens of her marriage to a Maori man ... Thompson’s deep knowledge of the history of Europeans in the Pacific allows her to trace the misunderstandings and stereotypes that have marked perceptions of Polynesians up to the present day. A sensitive observer and polished stylist, Thompson is never dully tendentious or dogmatic. The narrative moves smoothly by way of well-told anecdotes both personal and historical ... her prose never disappoints.

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Perceptive, endearing look at the often fraught contacts between Maoris and Westerners, both in history and in the personal life of Harvard Review editor Thompson.

Thompson gently portrays her husband’s decidedly non-Western worldview: his resistance to planning for the future, his superstitiousness and his sense of communalism ... “What was funny about living with Seven,” she writes, “was the way those musty paradigms ... would periodically spring to life.” She closes with a heartfelt letter to the couple’s three sons, each containing “a little bit of the conqueror and conquered,” asking them not to be sentimental about their dual ancestry since, in the end, their parents aren’t as different as they look.

Honest, forthright self-examination engenders a well-wrought sense of shared destiny.