Gracehopper

Description

Title: Gracehopper
Author: Mandy Hager
Publisher: OneTree House, Wellington, 2024
Format: Paperback
Condition: Excellent

Description:

Grace is eighteen and she has spent most of her life being her mother’s carer. Katherine’s PTSD traces back to the 1999 Jiji earthquake in Taiwan — she was giving birth to Grace when it hit. They were evacuated to New Zealand and never went back. Katherine has never fully explained what happened there, who Grace’s father is, or why. Grace copes with all of this through Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee’s martial art, whose philosophy she has turned into a survival strategy. Then Charlie Darwin reappears — her preschool best friend, now back from Europe and growing into something that unsettles her entirely.

Gracehopper is a novel about what it costs to hold a family together when you are the one holding it, and what you lose of yourself in the process. It is about identity — being visibly of Asian descent in a Wellington that cannot place you, carrying a history your mother will not name. And it is, eventually, about the healing that becomes possible when you stop managing everything alone.

Hager does not make any of this easy or tidy. The themes — PTSD, suicide, drug use, cancer, disability, racism, achondroplasia — arrive without flinching, but so does the tenderness. The NZ Listener named it one of the 50 best children’s and YA books of 2024 and called it “a novelist at the top of her powers.” The International Youth Library added it to its White Ravens list of outstanding international releases for young people. It was a finalist for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2025.

Mandy Hager was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal in 2019 — New Zealand’s highest honour for contribution to literature for young people. She has won the LIANZA Young Adult Fiction Award three times.

Though marketed as YA (14 and up), this is a book for anyone who reads at that level.

Why We Stock It:

Wellington-set, Taiwanese-rooted, and told from inside a family that looks like many NZ families — one person keeping it all going quietly, while the rest of the world assumes everything is fine. Mandy Hager has been writing that story, in different forms, for decades. This is one of her best.