Paul Little: Hayley Westenra - The World at Her Feet

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Seventeen is awfully young to have your life story written, but then not many 17 year-olds have had a singing career (or any career) like Hayley Westenra. So a book was inevitable.

The accompanying blurb promises a "fascinating insight into the contemporary music industry, life in the international show-business fast lane ... You were amazed by her voice. Now be amazed by her story".

There might have been a fascinating insight into what was obviously a bit of a scrap over "who appreciated what aspect of Hayley's talent at what point, and who had the legal right to develop that talent's commercial potential".

This has, writes Little, "been a matter of some dispute". Which we don't get to read about. He concludes, lamely, that it's "perhaps best, and most accurate, to say that an accord was reached".

Ho hum. It is hardly Hayley, or Hayley's family's fault, that they are a nice, average New Zealand family whose lives are nice and average — because they have worked hard to keep it that way despite their daughter's fame at a very young age.

Little takes a little dig at an un-named journalist known, apparently, for writing nasty things, who interviewed Hayley, couldn't find anything nasty to write, he concludes, and so the piece never appeared.

Perhaps that nasty fellow simply found there was nothing much of anything to write. Little has done better than that. At 190 pages of quite large print his book has all of the qualities of an extended woman's mag article.

He writes that "British tabloid journalists might be interested to know that [classmate Georgie] Olsen has a first-hand account of the naughtiest thing Hayley is ever known to have done". This involves a 14-year-old Hayley and her friend putting on make-up and trying to get into an R16 film.

I can't think that anyone would be interested to know any such thing.

In an attempt to liven things up, Little resorts to nonsense like this: "Family members say Hayley's voice is eerily reminiscent of her maternal grandmother's". Why "eerily"?

Nice family, nice story, and one hell of a dull book. Which is what you get when you set out to write the biography of 17-year-old.

* Penguin, $29.95