SOURCE: “Roots and Sinew,” in Commonweal, Vol. CXIII, No. 6, 28 March 28, 1986, pp. 186-88.

In the following review, Miller praises The Bone People.

Once upon a time a female Maori tobacco field worker who owned a portable typewriter started writing a story about a magic child washed up on a New Zealand beach. The tobacco field worker spent twelve years writing the story in her spare time. Now that she is done with it, she takes it to three major publishers down under. They all hate it. So she bundles up the manuscript, mixes a bucket of quick-setting resin, and prepares to embed twelve years of work in a commemorative block of solid plastic, when—ta-ra! ta-ra!—three angels swing down from the skies on god-hoisting tackle. These lovely deae ex machina start a feminist collective which publishes the fieldhand's book.

And lo, it comes to pass that Keri Hulme...