[In the following review, Ross claims that Hulme has created honest, evocative images of the human condition in Te Kaihau/The Windeater and predicts important writing from her in the future.]

That the author of the much-praised novel The Bone People should make violence, despair, maiming, drunkenness, and such other human weakness and misfortune subjects for a volume of short stories should not be surprising. After all, The Bone People must have been the first international best seller to chronicle child-beating.

In Te Kaihau/The Windeater, as in the novel, Hulme sidesteps the pitfalls of sensationalism and constructs instead a compelling image of humankind's state, first on the level of the Maoris in New Zealand, then on a universal scale. “While My Guitar Gently Sings,” for example, re-creates a Maori family and follows its dissolution, the narrator mourning her mother's death while sitting amid the aftermath of a drunken brawl. She cries too over the loss of the old ways and the vacuum created. Attempts at recovery fail, however, as illustrated in another of the stories, “He Tauware Kawa, He Kawa Tauware,” which records a pathetic attempt to rediscover and revive Maori tradition.

The vision bleak, the landscape dark and lonely, the characters maimed both physically and spiritually—such is the world Hulme brings into being through a style imbued with those same qualities. At times, unfortunately, the writing calls attention to itself, the eclectic and imitative nature, the penchant for obscurity, and the self-conscious experimentation marring the narrator's intention. When the vision and the language blend, however—and they most often do—the stories open to view the human condition, naked, brutal, alone.

Whether written before or after The Bone People, the fiction collected in Te Kaihau/The Windeater displays a greater sense of discipline, with most of the excesses that scarred the novel trimmed away. Much more will be expected from so inventive a prophet, disguising herself as a maker of fiction.