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

Plot summary

Set in New Zealand, the book tells the story of

Māori Māori or Maori can refer to: Relating to the Māori people * Māori people of New Zealand, or members of that group * Māori language, the language of the Māori people of New Zealand * Māori culture * Cook Islanders, the Māori people of the C ...

youth Te Arepa Santos as he moves from the

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to Auckland 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 The Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 is an Act of Parliament in New Zealand. It repealed the Indecent Publications Act 1963, the Films Act 1983 and the Video Recordings Act 1987 Video is an electronic medium for ...

, 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 ...

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. * ''Into the River'', Mangakino University Press, 2012. ( self published) * ''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 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards. * New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards, Best Young Adult Fiction, 2013 * New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards,

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

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External links