Junior and teenage novels including The Changeover (1984), The Catalogue of the Universe (1985), Aliens in the Family (1986), The Tricksters (1986), Memory (1987), and Underrunners (1992) use New Zealand city, bush, or beach settings. It is widely acknowledged, however, that her work became increasingly “New Zealand” in the 1980s when she started producing young adult fiction. I feel they’re just as ‘New Zealand’ as anything else” (qtd. The New Zealandness of her work was an issue to which Mahy gave much thought, and she responded to suggestions that she was not writing of her own country by stating: “I’d like to speak up perhaps for some of the things I’m doing when I write. “New Zealand’s most famous writer is also a writer whose work is in so many respects ardently un-New Zealand-or at least ardently not the New Zealand we have, over time, assumed is the proper subject and setting for our fiction,” writes New Zealand author Kate De Goldi of Margaret Mahy (272).
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