A recent Philadelphia Inquirer review has offered high praise to Christina Thompson’s new book, Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, which explores how the author, an American scholar and now Harvard Review editor, met, married and made a family with a Maori foundryman named Tauwhitu.

“If it were nothing more than a memoir, Thompson’s first book would make fascinating reading as the story of a mismatched but loving pair making their way in a world where they can never really be at home,” notes the July 20 review by award-winning memoirist Floyd Skloot. “But Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is more than a memoir. It incorporates Thompson’s extensive research into New Zealand and Maori history, and the early European exploration of the Pacific islands. It explores sociological considerations of the culture clash between colonizer and colonized, and the ways that such myths as the Maori’s savage ferocity are perpetuated.”

The review concludes: “At heart a love story, Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is a moving examination of exploration — both inner and outer — and the way our travels into remote places on Earth can become travels into the remote places in our hearts and souls.”

Thompson will discuss her debut book on Thursday, September 25, in Dewberry Hall on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus.

Just over a month after its publication, poet Honor Moore’s new book, The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir, continues to earn headlines for its frank portrayal of her father, the late Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore. A civil rights leader, anti-war spokesman and advocate for the poor, Moore was a bishop in Washington during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and later served for two decades as the bishop of New York. But during this time and throughout two marriages, he also led a secret life, including a 30-year relationship with another man.

“The connection between sexual identity and Judeo-Christian values is fraught with complexities, which are explored in detail in The Bishop’s Daughter,” writes Washington Blade book critic Kathi Wolfe in a recent review, which goes on to praise Moore’s “erudite and lyrical” writing and the memoir’s exploration of “the impact that homophobia had on a major 20th-century religious figure.”

As The Bishop’s Daughter speaks to the difficult intersection of religion and homosexuality in the 20th-century, so too does the book confront head-on the questions of risk and responsibility faced by the memoir as a genre in 21st-century America.

Honor Moore will speak about her new book, about her father’s struggles with his sexuality and about the challenges of each of her chosen genres — memoir and poetry — on the Fall for the Book Festival’s opening day, Sunday, September 21, at Old Town Hall in downtown Fairfax.