No Kava For Johnny

In good condition - dust jacket good slight markings - due to differing weights in books, postage maybe adjusted at checkout.

This is the 'Weird Mob' of Samoa. It is as irresistibly funny and appealing as the same author's Nino Culotta stories (They're a Weird Mob and Cop This Lot) - the most talked-about best-sellers Australia has ever seen.

Ioane Papatiso (it means John the Baptist, and you say the first name 'Yo-ah-nay') is a small Samoan who is always in big trouble. He never starts any trouble, but whenever there is a free-for-all in his village, or things go wrong in a big way, you can always say that if he had not been present the trouble would not have happened.

Ioane has a big brain, and he means well. It is strange that anyone so well-meaning should have to go to the police station so often. But then it is not everyone who wanders out of hospital still wearing hospital pyjamas; and it is not everyone whose home-brew lays out his guests all over the plantation. Ioane is not popular with the matai (chief) of his village either; but that is only because of a few big, big misunderstandings. He is such a pain in the head to the matai that he is sent away from home on the off chance he may prove useful somewhere else. (Nino Culotta suffered a similar fate in They're a Weird Mob. Ioane and Nino have a lot in common.)

So this is the story of Ioane's happy-go-unlucky young life, told by himself. He tells it in English, which he has now cracked to the maximum after learning it at school and in the household of a mad Australian pharmacist at Apia. The mad Australian is John O'Grady himself, slightly disguised. O'Grady has in fact lived in Samoa, and he knows the real-life Ioane on whose true story this delightfully funny, affectionate book is based.