NOTE DE L'ÉDITEUR : Potiki (le benjamin, en maori) est un enfant né difforme, mais il a reçu des dons exceptionnels de connaissance qui font de lui un « initié », un être qui sait. A travers son récit — et celui de sa mère, Roimata —, on suit les épisodes dramatiques de la lutte opposant la petite communauté maorie aux représentants d'une civilisation dont ils refusent les valeurs. Lutte violente et inégale. Atmosphère envoûtante créée, sans doute, par la présence magique des mythes anciens dans les réalités quotidiennes de ce peuple. Par ce livre, on approchera aussi une culture d'une vigueur et d'une poésie surprenantes, encore peu connue des Occidentaux.

NEW ZEALAND BOOK COUNCIL : […]

In 1985 Grace […] completed her third and most successful novel, Potiki, which won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction […]. In many ways it is a synthesis of the skills developed in the earlier work (including the children's writing), with carefully crafted cadences and aural effects unifying the prose, and evoking not only the people's diverse individual voices and the sounds of their environment but their harmony with it and each other.

[…]

The more aggressive political stance struck many reviewers, John Beston commenting that Pakeha readers find themselves charged « not with past and irremediable injustices, but with continuing injustices » (Landfall 160, 1986). Their embarrassment […] extends to the inclusion of much untranslated Maori, especially the ending, and the absence of a glossary. In Potiki as earlier in Parade Grace disempowers the reader who can read no Maori at crucial points within the cultural form of fiction in English. Potiki makes more evident how subtly subversive a writer she habitually is.

[…]