A New Kind Of Dreaming (Ali) at 2:25 am

A New Kind of Dreaming

By Anthony Eaton

A New Kind of Dreaming is a story about a boy called Jamie who is an orphan. His mother died when he was small and his father left them alone so he lives with his imprisoned brother ‘Eddie’. Until one day he goes to a detention centre for bad behaviour. Over there in Port Barren, hundreds of secrets are buried under its dry and red sand. First he feels uncomfortable with the environment because he is sensing the secrets of Port Barren. He meets a boy called Cameron who lives with his family. Cameron tells him dark secrets about Port Barren. He tells him about how the local sergeant Butcher found the refugee ship and who each child disappeared when they tried to discover it. After a few days, Jamie finishes his investigation and comes to a solution that Butcher didn’t just kill the girl in the refugee ship, but also killed the children who tried to put Butcher into trouble. After finding out what Jamie was up to butcher does the same with him, Butcher leaves Jamie to die in the scorching heat of desert but he is rescued by Cameron. After spending a couple of days in the desert they were discovered by two tourists. The tourists helped them back to port Barren. When they reached port Barren they found out that Butcher was waiting for them.

The Whale Rider at 1:53 am

I chose this book to blog about because it was time wasting. Some of the things that were boring were the facts that half the book is written in maori, it was very cliché, and it failed in trying to make it sound realistic.


When you flip through the pages and stop and any random one, it would most likely be written in maori. I’m not saying that maori is a boring language, because it’s not. It’s just that if the book is written for ‘the readers’ then it should be written in English so people would actually understand.


While you’re reading the book you sense the common drama, but when reading The Whale Rider it’s so obvious what happens next. There’s one part of the book where she’s communicating with the whales (making weird sounds with her throat) and everyone’s looking at her like, “What the hell?”even though they know she’s a descendent of Paikea, THE WHALE RIDER a.k.a ‘Sea God’


The book is actually a translation of a maroi legend. A man called Paikea rode whales and he made spears turn into birds. A legend is obviously made up, or at least based on some theory or something, but some of the things that were written in the book made no sense. There was a part where Kahu (the main character) rides the whale into the ocean. The whales then don’t want her anymore so they dump her somewhere in the ocean. She’s lost for about 3 days. Isn’t she supposed to die? She could’ve died because of lack of oxygen or she could’ve frozen to death, but no- fishermen found her and she lives. She lives happily ever after. (That’s another reason why it’s cliche)