Book Review – Mophead

Selina Tusitala Marsh is an Auckland-based Pasifika poet and scholar of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French descent. Her first children’s book, Mophead, was published in October this year and won the supreme award in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. It was also the overall winner in the New Zealand Book Design Awards.

Mophead is the story of a girl who feels she needs to tame her unruly hair to fit in with the world. One day, an event at her school helps her recognise her difference, in all its wild messiness, as a beautiful thing and so she takes a stand. By releasing her hair, she makes a declaration: this is who I am and I will not change how I look to serve someone else’s vision of what I should be.

The tag line is, How your difference makes a difference which encourages all of us to embrace our uniqueness, our special brand of difference, and to celebrate everyone else for doing the same thing.

Mophead is not a picture book or a graphic novel or a memoir – it is none of these things yet it is all of these things. It is for children and it is also for adults. Another key aspect about this book is that Marsh insisted she do the illustrations (she isn’t a professional illustrator) and her publisher said yes! In the world of picture books as we know it, there are so many things about this book that “shouldn’t” work, yet together they produce a remarkable whole. It is “boundary-breaking” and goes against just about every publishing rule in the book except for one – it is a captivating story.

Below is the link to Marsh’s acceptance speech at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults (an online event this year). She is remarkable. You are remarkable. Take a page from her book and make a difference with your difference.

Acceptance Speech