The Secret Green
by Sonya Wilson

The Secret Green, a novel for 8–12 year-old readers, is a welcome sequel to Wilson’s acclaimed Spark Hunter, winner of Best First Book at the 2022’s New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. However, for those readers unfamiliar with Spark Hunter, there is no difficulty connecting with either the characters or the context of this new tale; essential components of the backstory are delivered neatly and clearly within the first few pages of The Secret Green.

We meet the protagonist, Nissa, in her Invercargill Intermediate school classroom, almost a year on from the adventures narrated in Spark Hunter. It is immediately clear, however, that Nissa’s return to everyday life has not been entirely successful. Her continuing dislocation from her current surroundings and her all-consuming connection with Fiordland are ably and poignantly conveyed in one of the opening passages of the novel:

She might have looked asleep to her classmates, but her eyes were only half shut, staring down the length of her nose at the little collection of leaves on her desk. Only five of them today: three jagged-edged beech leaves, one spiky tōtara needle and one branchlet of rimu, its piney scent long since gone. Five little wonders of nature. … She’d taken to carrying at least this many leaves with her wherever she went. A handful of Fiordland in her pocket. She needed to keep the place with her. She missed the forest, and all the forest contained. The missing sat like a knot in her chest, like a stone in the bottom of her belly.

As Nissa reluctantly emerges from this daydream, her teacher demands her topic for her forthcoming research project. On the spur of the moment, Nissa settles on historic mining in Fiordland, a decision greeted with groans by her classmates and concern by her teacher. This simple classroom scene, with its depiction of the casual teasing and intolerance so typical of preadolescent kids, efficiently establishes a number of essential elements of the story: it demonstrates the enduring depth of Nissa’s continuing obsession with Fiordland, and introduces the kind and caring Tama, the eternally hungry, joke-cracking Josh, and the skiting but good-hearted Finn, three classmates of Nissa’s who will be some of the story’s key characters. It also presents the first hint of the ‘new industry in Fiordland’ which will emerge as an existential threat to the magical world Nissa loves, and must now strive to protect.

The story’s inciting incident is then swiftly delivered: in Nissa’s woodpile that afternoon, the youngsters discover ‘a small, cinnamon-coloured creature lying on its side, long thin arms and legs dangling over the edge of the wood, wings closed loosely at her back.’ It is Nissa’s old friend, Agnes, the fantail spark, barely clinging to life after travelling hundreds of kilometres from the depths of Fiordland to seek Nissa’s help. The central quest is thus established; Nissa must return to the forest, this time to save the sparks and their precious habitat from the ‘men, fixing to dig,’ who now threaten the pristine ancient wilderness. In the process, she and Tama will be exposed to the greatest, most jealously guarded secret of all – the Green, a sight so overwhelming that the sparks have so far found it necessary to erase it from the memory of any human who has glimpsed it. Whether the young pair prove themselves impervious to material greed, and worthy of the sparks’ confidence in them, constitutes just one of the many tests which await them.

Once Nissa, smartly harnessing the ongoing media interest in her previous escapades, has got them back into Fiordland, the true adventure, sprawling over more than forty chapters and three hundred pages, begins. It’s a big story, zigzagging back and forth between the wilds of Fiordland and the suburbs of Invercargill, as the youngsters navigate their way between the magical, endangered world of the mystical sparks, and the pragmatic preoccupations of anxious parents, avid reporters, and unscrupulous developers.

The narrative also tracks backwards in time, offering vignettes that reveal telling aspects of Fiordland’s life and occupants during the late 1800s, and the perplexing and casually exploitive, if not downright destructive, human behaviour that has been observed through history by the primordial sparks themselves. Overall, human nature emerges as flawed and blinkered at best; at worst, it is revealed to be avaricious, unreliable, and corrupt.

Wilson draws her characters with confidence and depth, and there are subtle and interesting nuances in the portrayal of the adults in the story which ensure no sense of stereotype is evident, even amongst the most hard-bitten of the Wild Horizon investors who aim to carve up the final wild with roads and mines. Refreshingly, despite their own formidable wisdom and power, the sparks are also highly individualised characters, complete with their own quirks and flaws, and are every bit as prey to suspicion, distrust, and manipulation as their human counterparts.

Nissa, the young protagonist, is a complex, sensitive character, and the weight engendered by her sense of loyalty and responsibility to the sparks and to the wider environment is ably conveyed, as evinced in this episode when she is first thrust into her saviour’s role:

Hero? Nissa’s skin was prickling all over now, tiny needles of panic poking and poking. She hadn’t had enough time to think, to work out what she was supposed to be doing. Tama was staring at her.  Everyone was staring at her. This was all suddenly way, way too much. This place. These creatures. All their wide-eyed expectation. She was no hero. Although Forest Common had all the hallmarks of a fairytale, this was not some fantasy story where she was secretly some kind of chosen one, a princess who didn’t know she was really a princess, raised to return and save the kingdom with her previously untapped magical powers. She was a thirteen-year-old girl from Invercargill.

‘I’m just a kid,’ she whispered.

Throughout the story, the kids in general are simply, delightfully kids, whose lively, natural diction and dialogue convincingly reflect their ages and personalities. Their variously evolving relationships feel authentic, and not over-worked, while the gently emerging romantic interest between Nissa and Tama, with its archetypal narrative arc of misunderstanding and misjudgement leading to conflict, but ultimately also to the conquering of external challenges and the acquisition of self-knowledge, is well-drawn and very subtly developed – nothing here to make the targeted readership cringe or squirm.

As is appropriate for a novel aimed at 8–12 year-olds, the story moves at a brisk pace. Short chapters which deliver the key events inside the forest and fiords are cleverly interspersed with social media posts, emails and articles, communications which reveal much about attitudes and involvement of those outside the central frame of the story. These inserts also offer a degree of irony and humour, and a shift in tone which leavens Nissa’s rather earnest and intense point of view. The plot is never dull, filled with original twists and turns, and the various players, whether friend or foe, behave in ways that emerge naturally from their motivations and preoccupations, their decisions and actions always keeping the reader guessing, and page-turning.

Overall, there is a well-moderated balance between realism and fantasy throughout the narrative, with the sparks – who are not, as Nissa points out, fairies but entirely real, primeval beings – providing the bridge. Their world is conjured vividly and delightfully, their Forest Common and burrows and nurseries and storerooms reminiscent of the habitats of the borrowers and brownies that have charmed previous generations of readers. But alongside this familiar literary tradition of the magic of miniature lies the very real richness of the New Zealand native environment, which the sparks treasure, protect, and harvest with wisdom, respect and skill. Following Tama and Nissa’s admission to the sparks’ domain, via the mighty Anchor tree which has the power to shrink them, they encounter a group of the sparks who each represent one of the region’s precious species:

Mason, … a shiny black stag beetle spark who was busy trying to corral several other species of beetles and weevils under a pile of damp leaves. … Rā, kinned to the Fiordland skink, … a browny-orange creature who came with the tree fuchsia — Harvey or Henry? — a lancewood spark, a tussock spark, a magpie moth spark and a red admiral butterfly spark, pink pine, mountain daisy, dragonfly and many, many more. … They visited the apothecary, shelves laden with powdered angiangi and tōtara bark poultices and horopito decoctions, and the food storage burrows, heaving with gourds and bark baskets containing rimu fruits and beech seeds and puffball mushrooms.

At times, perhaps, the detailed descriptions of the native forest and terrain may stretch the commitment of a preteen reader. I confess there were (a very few) occasions when I had to resist skimming long passages detailing the glories of the wilderness. But while the environmental message is overt, and the existential struggles between man and nature and capitalism and conservation are spelled out in unequivocal terms, there is so much genuine passion for Fiordland and its myriad inhabitants evident in the narrative, and in the consciousness of the story’s well-meaning characters, that there is never the sense that one is simply being preached to. When Nisa returns to school, and finds the courage to speak what is in her heart, she delivers a further version of the revelations she has shared with Denise the reporter, and makes ecowarriors of the whole classroom:

‘I have seen magic,’ she said. ‘I have seen trees that are a thousand years old with root systems so ancient, so extensive, that they can measure the health of the forest, talk to all other trees, passes nutrients and messages between them. I have seen a lichen that is two thousand years old. I have seen fungi that glow in the dark. I have seen a woolly bear caterpillar, a makokōrori, weave its own cocoon to emerge as a moth. Magic. All of it. Where they want to build that road, there are species of fern that evolved with the dinosaurs. There are birds living there that are extinct everywhere else. There are bright blue mushrooms, there are orange-barked tree fuchsias, there are tiny purple endemic orchids, and there is green: ageless ancient trees, millions of other plants. There is so much beautiful, wondrous green. And it’s only survived all this time because it’s so hard to get to. It’s our final wild. And there are people who are about to wreck it all.’

While unashamedly a call to environmental action, The Secret Green is first and foremost a rollicking adventure, and an exploration of the meaning and demands of true friendship. A remarkable combination of absolute realism and total enchantment, this book will captivate young readers across a wide spectrum of tastes and backgrounds, and awaken in them, as it did in me, a compelling desire to immediately visit, and to forever protect, the magical ancient realm that is Fiordland.