wow... This book was HORRIBLE! The mystery was there but just the author's writing style and the LONG drawn out things made it horrible. There were so many things wrong with the book: 
 - not spelling out the word damn... like seriously? It's a literary fiction book and you can't spell out the swear words? 
 - I had no idea what the astrological signs had ANYTHING to do with the plot 
 - The author takes way too long to describe things and it made so many things um-necessary to the plot 
 - I hate the author's third person speak. It's not a play, so saying things like "we interrupt the narrative..." just does not work for me 
 - I really wish Catton had included a pronunciation guide for Maori words, a map of New Zealand, especially 1800s New Zealand, and/or if you're not going to use well known words, to put a translation guide in the back 
 - 
 Way 
 too many characters and how they're related 
 - Very poor editing and just linguistically, having multi-paragraphs that are in parentheses is really bad writing. 
 I seriously don't understand why there was so much praise for this book. It was bad.