The Invisible Road, by acclaimed New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox (The Vintner’s Luck), is apparently aimed at the adult market, however has strong crossover potential to the young adult market. With a teenage girl as the protagonist, and the central conflict concerning fathers, father figures and lovers, there is much for young female readers to identify with. This is a highly original novel where realism merges with the fantastic. Set in the early 20th century, in a place called Southland (a New Zealand-like country), the plot revolves around ‘dreamhunters’-people able to enter a mysterious ‘Place’ where dreams can be caught and then ‘performed’ for the population. But the dreams, it turns out, are messages concerning the nature of humanity; and this creates the complication that drives the novel. Laura Hame, the dreamhunter protagonist, must go beyond the performative and mercantile nature of dreamcatching to understand what the Place is, and what the dreams are revealing. This is an enjoyable novel with a lovely lyrical style, but it is also long winded. This might be because The Invisible Road is a merging of two separate novels- Dreamhunter and Dreamquake-and repetition that is essential in sequential novels becomes redundant here. But this is perhaps a problem in editing, and a fairly minor flaw in what is an absorbing work.

Annelise Balsamo is a writer and teacher

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