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Karangahape Road... K. Road to the initiated.
It's here that you'll find Flash and Sonny, Geronimo and Cheyenne, Jazz and Roxy: a jungle of operators while lives connect and collide, overlap and glance off one another. Drifters, surfers, taggers. The gangsters and the street kids, those who hunt and those who run: a jostling urban tribe fighting for turf.
K. Road unsettles with its urgent song: the sharp fear fuelling those close to the edge. It sings of loyalties and betrayals, of debts that must be repaid, of the fragile ties that bind us all.
But it's Jazz and Roxy, teenage lovers on the run, who try to escape this cruel, subterranean existence. Their ticket to survival is Jazz's extraordinary gift: their love story heart-breaking.
As tender as it is brutal, K. Road's plaintive riff lingers long after the music is over.
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Review by: goldfishstar (Natalie)
Dated: 24th of January, 2006
Reading a New Zealand based novel is always different for me, as I find it much easier to picture the events of the story taking place, and the people in the story - as more often than not I can relate characters to people I actually know.
This book was exactly like that...
Now, while I might not know the shadier type of characters this book portrays on K. Road, I do know the rugby boys, the surfers, the business men, the goths and the odd gang member. And Mr Dawe did a wonderful job of describing all these people and the intersections that their lives had with each other.
I was a tad confused when I'd gotten to 3/4 of the way though the story and Jazz and Roxy (some of the main characters) still hadn't been introduced, however, once they were it all made a lot more sense to me...
Now, if you have trouble with movies that work on two different time levels - think the English Patient - then you may have minor issues with this book, as that is what happens.
The story is told on two different levels, the first 3/4 is focused on one group of people and the events around a certain period of time, and then there is the last quarter which is almost solely focused on Jazz and Roxy and what is happening with them during the same time. These run parallel to the first section of the story, and intersect at certain points leading to the culminating points...
Now, if that doesn't completely confuse you, then go out and get the book, as it is a good read!
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