''Into the River'' is a novel by Ted Dawe, featuring a

coming-of-age story In genre studies, a coming-of-age story is a genre of literature, theatre, film, and video game that focuses on the growth of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood, or "coming of age". Coming-of-age stories tend to emphasize dialogue or internal ...

set in

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, and intended for a young adult audience. It was awarded the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year prize and also won the top prize in the Young Adult Fiction category at the 2013

New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards The New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults are a series of literary awards presented annually to recognise excellence in children and young adult's literature in New Zealand. The awards began in 1982 as the New Zealand Governme ...

. It was briefly banned from sale and supply in New Zealand.

Plot summary

Set in

, the book tells the story of

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youth Te Arepa Santos as he moves from the

East Coast East Coast may refer to: Entertainment * East Coast hip hop, a subgenre of hip hop * East Coast (ASAP Ferg song), "East Coast" (ASAP Ferg song), 2017 * East Coast (Saves the Day song), "East Coast" (Saves the Day song), 2004 * East Coast FM, a ra ...

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The List of New Zealand urban areas by population, most populous urban area in the country and the List of cities in Oceania by po ...

to boarding school, where he has encounters with intimacy, sex, drugs, racism and death.

Restrictions and banning

In 2013 New Zealand's

Film and Literature Board of Review The Film and Literature Board of Review is the appeals body for New Zealand's print and media censorship system, set up by the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993. It reviews decisions made by the Office of Film and Literature ...

, or appeal from New Zealand's classification office (which had given the book an unrestricted M rating) restricted ''Into the River'' to readers aged 14 years and over. This was the first time in New Zealand's history this classification was used.

Auckland Libraries Auckland Libraries is the public library system for the Auckland Region of New Zealand. It was created when the seven separate councils in the Auckland region merged in 2010. It is currently the largest public-library network in the Southern He ...

applied to have this decision reconsidered in 2015. One of the reasons given for the appeal was "the impact that the restriction has had on the value of the book as a teaching resource, and the significance of the book as an aid to countering issues in New Zealand about bullying". The conservative Christian lobby group Family First appealed this decision, and applied for an interim restriction order, which was granted by the President of the Board of Review. The interim restriction order under New Zealand's Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993, bans it completely from being sold or supplied in New Zealand. This was the first time a book had been subject to an interim restriction order in New Zealand in 22 years and was reported by several foreign news media. The banning of the book has led to an increase of interest in it, something that has been cited as an example of the

Streisand effect Attempts to hide, remove, or censor information often have the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information via the Internet. This is called the Streisand effect. It is named after American singer and actress Barbra Streis ...

, in which an attempt to oppose something leads to its wider dissemination as an unintended side-effect. On 14 October 2015, the Film and Literature Board lifted the interim ban on ''Into the River''; ruling by a majority that while aspects of the book were offensive it did not merit an age restriction. The ruling was welcomed by libraries and bookstores. In response, Family First director Bob McCoskrie accused the board of succumbing to book industry pressure despite what he alleged was the book's "highly offensive and gratuitous language, adult themes and graphic sexual content." In response to the interim restriction order, MP

Chris Bishop Christopher Bishop (born 4 September 1983) is a New Zealand National Party politician who was first elected to the New Zealand House of Representatives in 2014 as a list MP. Bishop won the Hutt South electorate in 2017 but lost the seat in 20 ...

proposed a member's bill which would allow partial interim restriction orders, for example, applying the restriction order only to person of a certain age. The Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders Classification) Amendment Bill was drawn from the ballot on 10 November 2016, and passed its third reading unanimously on 29 November 2017.

Editions

Dawe initially self-published the book in 2012, before it was picked up by a local imprint of

Penguin Random House Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, from the merger of Penguin Group and Random House. On April 2, 2020, Bertels ...

. * ''Into the River'', Mangakino University Press, 2012. (

self published Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using POD (pr ...

) * ''Into the River'', Longacre Child, 2013. * ''Into the River'', Longacre Child, 2014.

Awards and reviews

In 2013 it won both Best Young Adult Fiction and

Margaret Mahy Margaret Mahy (21 March 1936 – 23 July 2012) was a New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. Many of her story plots have strong supernatural elements but her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growi ...

Book of the Year at the

. *

, Best Young Adult Fiction, 2013 *

Book of the Year, 2013 * ''New Zealand Books: A quarterly review'' called the book a "visceral, bubblingly hormonal novel" and said " 's a percussively authentic rendering. The elbowing, anarchic humour is tone-perfect." * The World Socialist Web Site praised Dawe's "frankness and honesty" and stated: "His characters express widely held sentiments of bitterness, alienation and anger towards the social set-up, which find no reflection in the vast majority of films, TV shows and books."

References

{{reflist

External links