“He, (Ned), told me he was disgusted with the way Ocean Catch was fishing,” Thomasina says. “He didn’t say why but I figured they must have been exceeding quotas or trawling illegally. You know, breaking some sort of sustainable fisheries things. But I was surprised, because he never cared about this stuff before. ‘Let the environmentalists worry about the environment,’ he used to say.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAY 11, 2014)

North of Boston is Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel, and to me it is a real winner. It certainly held my interest and I found that, at times, I was unable to put this books down.

Pirio Kasparov, heir to a very successful perfume business which her Russian immigrant parents founded, is our protagonist. sponsored: Royal Vegas Casino – when you make three initial deposits, you receive up to 1200 Canadian dollars for each coupled with 30 free spins. She is a gritty, smart and complex woman. When Pirio’s mother died, the girl was just 10 years old. Her deceased mother’s will stipulates that when Pirio turns 21 years old, she will inherit her mother’s share of the extremely successful business, Inessa Mark, Inc. and that if she wants full ownership, the company would revert to her upon her eccentric father’s death. Pirio has joined the company where she works as “CEO in training.” Scent permeates much of the novel – the scent of perfume, ambergris, herbs, flowers, etc. And the smells of the sea also play an important part in the author’s descriptive passages.

Pirio’s fisherman friend, Ned Rizzo, has recently acquired a lobster boat, the Molly Jones. He bought it for $1.00. Ned had been a star employee at the Ocean Catch Company in Boston, (where much of this tale is set), and then, out of nowhere, he quits. His parting gift, a sort of severance pay, is the brand new lobster boat, a far cry from the usual gold watch. But why would someone, or some corporation, just give away an expensive boat? And why did Ned, after working 20 years on corporate factory trawlers and long liners, switch to catching lobsters? Is it because his new boat is precisely for that purpose, or is the reason more complex?

Ned finds himself short of crew one foggy day and recruits the totally inexperienced Pirio to stand in for the usual experienced fishermen. Pirio, wanting to help a friend, expresses her doubts about working as a pure novice. Ned teaches her to bait traps before they leave the harbor. He also tells her that he will teach her the ropes as the day progressed,  essentially on-the-job training. When a freighter collides with the Molly Jones, the ship sinks quickly, taking Ned with it. The huge freighter moves off, never bothering to search for possible survivors – an oceanic hit-and-run!

Pirio jumps free of the submerging ship and is thrust into the icy cold waters off the Boston coast. She manages to survive for 4 hours in 42 – 48 degree Fahrenheit water, a heretofore feat rarely heard of. Pirio seems to possess a physiological quirk that makes her almost immune to hypothermia. So Pirio can now be entered into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!  Her miraculous survival causes the Navy Diving Experimental Unit to request that she stop by for testing. They fly her to Florida, their home base, for just that purpose. “We have no idea how that happened, a Navy doctor tells her. “We’ve never seen that in a human before. She becomes sort of a local heroine, called “The Swimmer.”

Pirio is, if nothing else, tenacious. Her instincts tell her that the collision was no accident. Ms. Kasparov simply wants answers: who rammed their boat and why? But the coast guard seems to consider it an unfortunate accident and not a high priority. When she starts asking questions on her own, it’s clear someone is very unhappy with her involvement. After exhausting her inquiries in Boston, she persists in her quest for the mysterious freighter and soon is hot on the trail of a wide-ranging mystery that ultimately takes her far north of Boston, to the whaling grounds of Canada’s Baffin Island.

Pirio meets a mysterious man at Ned’s memorial service who now seems as eager as she to find the truth surrounding the accident…if it was an accident. This man becomes an important figure in the narratve.

To complicate matters further, Pirio spends much of her time consumed with helping her old school friend Thomasina, an alcoholic and gadabout, with her young son, Noah. Noah also happens to be Ned’s son, and Pirio has a strong connection with him as his godmother.

North of Boston, Elisabeth Elo’s novel, is a winner. It is so much more than a mystery. The characters are well fleshed out, the mystery and ominous ambiance are thrilling at times, the storyline is a strong one, the Arctic setting is fascinating, and the supporting cast of characters is interesting.

I highly recommend North of Boston and look forward to reading the author’s future work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pamela Dorman Books; First Edition edition (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elisabeth Elo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Boston: Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Bibliography:

• North of Boston (January 2014)

“It started before the dream. A woman walks into a bar.

Starts like a joke, you see.

A woman walks into a bar. It’s Toronto, she’s there on business. Bidness, she likes to call it, she says to her friends. Makes it sound raunchy, which it is not. It’s meetings, mostly with other women of her own age or else men about twenty years older. Sumptuous lunches in blandly posh restaurants. There is only one thing duller than upscale Toronto dining, and that’s upscale Toronto dining with women of Jane’s own age, class and education. They and Jane wear black, don’t go in for a lot of jewellery, are elegant, serious. The men are more interesting. The men were once Young Turks of publishing. They remember the seventies, when magazines were run by young men exactly like themselves — — smokers, drinkers — and these men have never found one another remotely dull — not in the least. “

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe (DEC 24, 2013)

Lynn Coady’s new story collection, Hellgoing, brings together nine self-contained stories that take a realistic and thought provoking look at a wide range of human relationships in today’s world. Reading them we are pushed or pulled into something like a voyeur role, observing in close-up fragments of ongoing or evolving relationships between an array of distinct characters, be they in couples, with family or friends, or crossing paths in professional or casual encounters. Some of the stories can take you on a bit of a rough ride; they rarely are smooth, easy or the content just pleasant. While they might leave us with a sense of unease they also stimulate us to consider more deeply the underlying questions and issues that the author raises. Are they a reflection of contemporary reality or, at minimum, of certain aspects of it? Very likely. Among the quotes on the book’s back cover, one (by the National Post) reads: “…There is a searing honesty here about humankind’s inability or unwillingness, to make an effort at connection, but the author’s own humanity rescues her vision from descending into despair or nihilism.” I couldn’t have stated my reaction any better. If you look for romantic love or happiness, you will not easily find it in any of these stories.

One story from the collection has remained etched in my mind more than any of the others, titled, “Mr. Hope.” It is written from the perspective of a young female teacher, who, upon returning to her first school, is reliving intense childhood memories, among them her first encounters with her teacher, Mr. Hope. Lynn Coady exquisitely captures the feelings of a young girl, her anxieties but also her independent spirit. Interweaving the vividly reimagined child’s perception with that of the hindsight of the adult looking back, the author tells a story that not only conveys narrative tension and inner drama, she convincingly brings out the girl’s emotional confusion and conflicts in a way that will, in some way or another, sound familiar to most readers.

Among the other stories, some characters stand out for me more than others, such as a nun in a hospital who applies her counselling to get an anorexic girl with a religious obsession to take “some food.” The title story tackles another important and well-known subject: deep and lasting family strains going back decades that the female protagonist cannot shake off. However, a “reunion” demands a different response so many years later. While all stories are written from the distance of a third person narrator, they do often cut through the surface of the characters’ “normalcy” and expose what lies underneath. Coady’s stories focus more on the women’s mental state of mind than that of their male counterparts. There is, for example, the young bride who has discovered that “twenty-something” sex is no longer adequate (or never was) and her new partner is a willing if somewhat reluctant participant in the new experiments. Coady pinpoints many of the ambitions and anxieties that younger women experience, whether in private or professional life. She is an astute observer of people and scenarios and her depiction of her central characters is not without a sense of humour or irony.

Canadian Lynn Coady, is with Hellgoing the recent winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2013 and a finalist for the Writers Trust Fiction Prize.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	House of Anansi Pr (July 31, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lynn Coady
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Giller Prize winner: Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M. G. Vassanji

Bibliography:

• Strange Heaven (1998)
• Play The Monster Blind (2000)
• Saints of Big Harbour (2002)
• Mean Boy (2006)
• The Antagonist (2012)
• Hellgoing: Stories (July 2013) 

“He nudged his chair close and studied the warm little hand. He smelled of sweat, peppermint, tobacco, old coffee. Despite his accent he wasn’t hard to understand – he talked so slowly and so carefully. She would have a long life, he said. She would have one child… You have special talents, he told her. People don’t realize.” 

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  DEC 15, 2011)

… stated the “tiny old man,” one of the many transient visitors to the Hardy farm in the small village of Willow Bend while reading eight-year-old Norma Joyce’s palm.

Canadian author, Elizabeth Hay, centers her superb, enchanting and deeply moving novel around Norma Joyce and sister Lucinda, her senior by nine years. Set against the beautifully evoked natural environments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and spanning over more than thirty years, the author explores in sometimes subtle, sometimes defter, ways the sisters’ dissimilar characters. One is an “ugly duckling,” the other a beauty; one is rebellious and lazy, the other kind, efficient and unassuming… In a way, their characters mirror what are also suggested to be traditional features of inhabitants living with and in these two contrasting landscapes: on the one hand the farmers in Saskatchewan, patient and often fatalistic in their exposure to the vagaries of the weather and the hopes and destructions that those can bring, on the other the Ontarians, assumed to have a much easier life and, to top it off: they grow apples… A rare delicacy for the farmers out west. Hay wonderfully integrates the theme of the apple – the symbol of seduction as well as health!

Hay’s novel is as much an engaging portrait of the quirky Norma Joyce as it is a delicately woven family drama, beginning in the harsh “dustbowl” years of the 1930s. Still, Hay gives us much more than that: her exquisite writing shines when she paints in richly modulated prose, rather than with the brush, a deeply felt love poem to nature: its constantly varying beauty in response to a weather that seem to toy with it as in a never-ending dance.

While Lucinda runs the household on the farm with efficiency and dedication under the admiring eye of their widowed father, Norma Joyce succeeds in daily disappearing acts to avoid taking her place as a dutiful daughter. Into their routine lives enters, one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Maurice Dove, attractive, knowledgeable and entertaining, a student of weather patterns, Prairie grasses and much more… Ontario meets Saskatchewan with unforeseeable consequences…

Norma Joyce has always been a child of nature through and through: “She had her own memory of grasses. Five years old and lying on her back in the long grass behind the barn, the June sun beating down from a cloudless sky until warmth of another kind pulsed through her in waves […] she remembers every name of every plant.” Now, at eight, she has found in Maurice the ideal teacher and she turns into the “perfect student.” Her small hand reaches out to claim him… He, while enchanted with Lucinda, had been “taken aback by [Norma Joyce’s] ugliness, a word he modified to homeliness the next morning […] then at breakfast he thought her merely strange, and now, interesting.”

Hay is too fine and imaginative a writer to let the story develop predictably. There will be many twists and turns with the family moving to Ottawa and Norma Joyce even further away to New York. At every turn, Hay builds an environment in which human beings interact with the natural surroundings they are placed into. Her description of the Ottawa neighbourhood is intimate and real; New York has its own attractions and disappointments. As Norma Joyce grows up, she feels forced into a difficult journey, that, she later realizes has been an essential phase for her to gain confidence in herself and to discover “her special talents” as the old man had predicted: “Her life would stop, then it would start again…”.

As a reader, I was totally engaged with Hay’s exploration of Norma Joyce’s maturing that teaches her, among many other lessons, to let go while allowing herself to also accept new experiences into her life. Her life-long connection to the prairies sustains her at a deep level, her community in Ottawa helps her to find new avenues to her inner soul. At a different level, Hay plays with references to Thomas Hardy, to established naturalists to underline the importance of landscape and our traditional connection to it. She evokes images that remind us of fairy tales, such as the drop of bright red blood on the white pillow or Norma’s ability to pre-sense events happening many miles away. For me they form part of a richly created background to what is a very authentic and meaningful account of one young woman’s road to herself, an extraordinary achievement for a first novel. A Student of Weather collected several awards and, deservedly, was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2000.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Counterpoint (January 2, 2002)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Late Nights on Air Garbo Laughs

Bibliography:

• Crossing the Snow Line: Stories (1989)
• Small Change: Stories (1997)
• A Student of Weather (2000; 2001 in the US)
• Garbo Laughs (2003)
• Late Nights on Air (2007; 2008 in the US)
• Alone in the Classroom (2011 in Canada)

Non-Fiction:

• The Only Snow in Havana (1992)
• Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (1993)

“The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molton gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected off the water until my sight was infrared. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 3, 2011)

In her debut novel, Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran tells the story of one happy-unhappy family, seen through the eyes of Meena, the youngest of six sisters. Set against the backdrop of suburban British Columbia, Basran paints a richly coloured portrait of a close-knit Punjabi community, caught between the traditions of “home” in India and their Canadian home, where their community is surrounded by a predominantly white, rather laid-back English-speaking society. With an impressively confident approach to a complex subject matter and a lively and engaging writing style, the young Indian-Canadian author explores the emotional turmoil, faced by a girl/young woman like Meena, experiencing the two cultures intimately. Traditional family values are assessed against the young heroine’s need for independence and emotional fulfillment.

From a young age Meena is an astute observer of her surroundings, expressing her thoughts and feelings more easily to her private notebooks than to any one person. Her subdued, hard-working mother, a widow since Meena’s early childhood, appears to be in a state of permanent mourning. The traditional customs and rituals that sustain her physically and mentally, also provide her justification for her strict treatment of her daughters. Speaking little English herself, she insists on Punjabi spoken; she demands of her daughters the traditional obedient behaviour that makes them acceptable as future wives and her constant concern is to find “good” husbands for her daughters, meaning that they are somebody with a good income and, very important, a professional designation, such as a lawyer or a doctor. Love? That may come later, or not.

By the time we share Meena’s intimate musings on her life, all sisters, except one, have or are about to be married according to the traditions. Harj, her favourite sister, was expelled from the family after being falsely accused of misbehaving by one of the many “aunties.”

The aunties, a kind of informal morality police, assume the responsibility of monitoring the young people’s behaviour in public, reporting without delay, when they observe, for example, when a girl alone is talking to a boy. Meena and Harj used to make fun of these aunties, whether related or not, referring to them as the IIA – the Indian Intelligence Agency. With a few evocative sentences, Basran expressively captures the characteristics of different aunties and others in the community: some speak deliberate “Bombay British” (showing off), others are FOBS (Fresh Off the Boat) or DIPs (Dumb Indian Punjabs)… Her sense of humour and irony is conspicuous, revealing an attractive mix of intimate knowledge of and critical distance to such reality. For example, one so-called auntie, claims to visit India every year, “to look for the latest fashion”…”Our styles here,” she explains, “are a year behind.” Nonetheless, while India in her mind is “very progressive,” she prefers to “keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India” here in Canada. This somewhat twisted logic that may well contribute to undermining any adaptation of Punjabi customs to those of their chosen home country, creates fundamental problems for Meena.

While the young people are not allowed to voice an opinion at extended family gatherings, they realize that they are left with few options as regards balancing the old and the new. Some rebel and are expelled from the comfort and security of the community, others pay half-heartedly lip service and play the “obediency game” at a superficial level, yet, others submit and suffer quietly… Meena, watching her mother’s seemingly unending grief, but also her sisters’ marriages, is increasingly questioning the meaning of love, marriage and family:

“I hated the ritual of belated mourning. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know…”

In her other reality, that of school, university and later in professional life, Meena encounters much ignorance and insensitivity vis-à-vis her and her background. Being reticent herself, she cannot easily explain her life and is usually treated as an outsider. As can be expected, she finds it easier to open up, emotionally and intellectually, to young people, who, for whatever reasons, also feel like outcasts in their respective communities. Liam, one of her classmates, is one person, who can “pull her out of herself.”  Wandering the countryside and beaches around Vancouver, their developing friendship is touching in its innocence, fragility and complexity. Having to resort to secrets and lies at home, she feels pushed into a dual existence. And there is Kal, her gentle childhood friend…

Whether, over time, she can detach herself from the strictures of her traditional upbringing and how she will handle any future decisions for her life, moves the narrative forward in very affecting and, at times, surprising ways. As we accompany Meena’s exploration of a rainbow of emotions – from love, physical intimacy and happiness to loss and pain. Basran’s expressive language takes on additional lyrical qualities when she expresses her heroine’s deep feelings. In the end, what are family values? Can they adapt?

Not wanting to give any spoilers, suffice to say that I was captivated by Meenas’ voice in conveying her reality, her life between two worlds, the growth beyond victimhood. One could quibble over small details, such as lacking clarification of some Punjabi terms and, possibly, the brevity with an element of stereotyping when describing the non-Punjabi environment. Yet, these are not serious flaws. Basran, is without doubt a new author to watch. With Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and the winner of the 2010 Search for the Great BC Novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mother Tongue Publishing (October 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gurjinder Basran
EXTRAS:	Interview on YouTube
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri

Bibliography:

• Everything Was Goodbye (October 2010)

“The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  SEP 02, 2011)

Three Pines is a village near Montréal that is so small it does not appear on any map. For its size, this town has had an inordinate number of murders; solving them is the job of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec and his team of detectives. This time, the victim is a woman, Lillian Dyson, whose art criticism years ago was so caustic that she was responsible for putting an end to budding careers. Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light is all about artists—their insecurities, craving for recognition, pettiness, resentment, and jealousy.

Two artists, Clara Morrow and her husband, Peter, live in Three Pines, and Peter has been moderately successful. However, it is Clara who is having a private solo exhibition, a vernissage, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. For years she toiled in relative obscurity, receiving nothing but “silence from a baffled and even bemused art world.” Now that Clara has come into her own, Peter has mixed feelings about his wife’s long overdue fame.

This novel deals with relationships and emotions. Gamache is still barely on speaking terms with Olivier Brulé, who bears a grudge against him. Moreover, Gamache still has nightmares about a bloody raid he conducted that went terribly wrong, nearly taking his life and that of his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvior. Jean Guy is a wreck, who relies on pain pills to get through the day and is planning to end his miserable marriage (“all the petty sordid squabbles, the tiny slights, the scarring and scabbing”).

Louise Penny understands what makes people tick. She knows that they often show one face to their family, friends, and neighbors, while they bury their true feelings under a façade of amiability. A Trick of the Light exposes the soul-destroying anger, the disappointments, and the bitter rancor that can eat a person up from within. She specifically examines the mind-set of alcoholics, who are capable of doing extensive damage before they are ready to admit that they desperately need help.

As a murder mystery, this is a fairly routine effort. There is little suspense (the list of people who had motive, means, and opportunity to kill Lillian is not particularly large) and most readers will not be shocked when Gamache unmasks the culprit. Penny is a stand-out for other reasons: her eloquent use of language, analysis of people’s psychological foibles, and her beautiful and sometimes humorous description of life in a place so tiny that everyone is intimately acquainted with everyone else. Ruth, an old drunk who insults people with wild abandon, Olivier and his beloved partner, Gabri, and Armand’s lovely wife, Reine-Marie, are all on hand, along with an assortment of art dealers, gallery owners, associates of the homicide victim, and the detectives who are under Gamache’s command. Penny explores what makes art memorable and also what it is like to struggle creatively. This alone makes A Trick of the Light both fascinating and, at times, poetic.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 287 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Louise Penny
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Missing Persons by Claire O’Donohue

Bibliography:

Chief Inspector Gamache novels:

• Still Life (2006)  /  
• Fatal Grace (2007) 
• The Cruelest Month (2008) 
• A Rule Against Murder (2009)
• The Brutal Telling (2009) 
• Bury Your Dead (2010)
• A Trick of the Light (2011) 
• The Beautiful Mystery (2012)
• How the Light Gets In (August 2013)

“Robbie’s eyes flicked between the [graph] paper and the patio we were building. I could see that he was really studying this stuff. He’d ask me a question and I’d answer and we went back and forth like that. It was great. Before that, I never taught anybody anything.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 29, 2011)

The world that Alexander MacLeod’s protagonists inhabit is not an easygoing or a comfortable one, it is – a realistic one. Set in different urban milieus, most of his characters are young, struggling to get ahead in life. Some confront personal adversity, hoping for companionship or friendship, others attempt to find solace and even redemption. With his debut story collection MacLeod exhibits an exquisite writing talent that succeeds in capturing, with precision and depth, both the inner workings of the individual’s psyche and their social and physical circumstances. The back cover of the book describes the author – very aptly I find – as a writer of “ferocious physicality.”

Five of the seven stories are written in first person voices, drawing the reader intimately into each of the narrators’ point of view of specific experiences in their lives. In “Miracle Mile,” Michael, while preparing for an important international running meet, reflects back on his long friendship with his closest competitor. As children they always raced together, sometimes at night through a cross-border train tunnel beneath the Detroit river, risking their lives in the process. One dangerous run is so vividly depicted, that I felt myself holding my breath until I knew that the kids were both safely on the other side. In this and other stories the author describes at length the many material details that underpin any physical activity that his protagonists are engaged in: be it running, swimming, holing bricks, or maneuvering a bicycle on the icy roads in winter.

Most of the central characters are young men, very few women hold an important place in the stories. One exception is the story of Stace, the central character in “Adult Beginner I.” We meet her when she stands at a roof’s ledge, fearful and reluctant to follow the urging of her gang of friends who have been jumping – at night – from the roof of a hotel straight down into the Detroit river below. The night is dark and only a few lights can guide the direction of her fall into the water… a water that is anything but inviting. Her deep-seated fear has a complex history that is told in flashbacks, going back to her youth and her first exposure to the Atlantic Ocean. MacLeod’s compelling ability to describe vividly both the inner struggles and the outer condition that a character finds him- or herself in, comes to the fore as he evokes the ocean wave that Stace was suddenly forced to confront. “The wall of water came into her vision, looming over her mother’s shoulder like an old-style gangster thug sifting out of the crowd in a grey trench coat with a brim of his fedora pulled low down. He was so thick and so wide, he blocked out the sky. He shoved her mother forward headfirst into the sand before grabbing the girl and carrying her off in the opposite direction.”

For me, this one of the most affecting and richly developed stories in the collection. ‘The Loop” is another favourite of mine. Teenager Allan and his bicycle have been delivering every day for three years medications and other drugstore supplies for old-fashioned pharmacist, Mr. Musgrave. Allan’s description of the wide range of regular customers he meets – from the nice, half-blind old Mrs. McKay, to eighty-nine year old Mrs. Hume, to huge, spooky Barney is meticulous and his relationship to them all is touching and very perceptive. He is fully aware that his customers’ conditions are confronting him with aspects of human life that should be beyond a young teenager’s knowledge or understanding; he nevertheless experiences empathy, and in some cases affection, for his “clients.” And one day, he surprises himself when compassion overrules reserve and even disgust. “The Loop” is one of the gentler stories and with “Adult Beginner I” my favourite in this collection. They both stand out in contract to the somewhat raw and dark emotions and physical aggression that lie beneath many of the stories told. I find myself torn between my attraction to the author’s brilliant writing and my lesser curiosity of most of the topics he expands on and the characters who represent them. Other readers may well find all of the stories captivating and engaging.

Alexander MacLeod was a 2010 Giller Prize finalist with this collection that also has been named “Book of the Year” by other institutions in Canada. He is the son of award winning Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, who won the International Foreign Fiction Prize (IMPAC) in 1999 for his novel No Great Mischief.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Biblioasis; Reprint edition (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher page on Alexander MacLeod
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Tinkers by Paul Harding

Bibliography:

• Light Lifting (April 2011)

“Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness that could drown a man.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (APR 8, 2011)

Michael Crummey opens his new novel with Judah, sitting in a “makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days.” Only Mary Tryphena Devine comes near him these days, urging him to take a little food – or, if he doesn’t want to eat – to just die. Judah’s story is the primary, yet not the only otherworldly theme that glides through this multigenerational family saga, touching everybody in its wake. The novel is set in one of Newfoundland’s wild and rough eastern coastal regions, and, more specifically, in two remote fishing villages, Paradise Deep and The Gut.

Crummey, himself a Newfoundlander, has written this highly imaginative, superbly crafted folkloric tale that blends with great ease strands of supernatural magic of old fairy tales and beliefs into a chronicle of the early colonists’ precarious existence. Spanning over one hundred years, starting with the early eighteen hundreds, the author spins a tall tale of life in the early settler communities, that delves deep into personal relationships, social strife between the Irish and West-country English, the political and the religious powers, competing for influence and control.

In the first few pages, Crummey hints at important future developments, but then he quickly moves back in time to events when Mary Tryphena was a child and a whale had beached itself on the shore of Paradise Deep. The villagers, starving and desperate for food after another meager fishing season and an icy-cold winter of scarcity, cannot believe their luck. However, when they carefully cut through the animal’s flesh, a human-like body emerges from its belly. Devine’s Widow (Mary Tryphena’s grandmother and one of the most powerful personalities in The Gut) while preparing the body for burial, turns him over, and the strange, completely white figure starts coughing up water, blood and small fishes…! He cuts an unusual figure among the locals and he stinks of sea and rotten fish, a smell that is so overpowering that nobody wants to be near him…

The locals, God-fearing yet illiterate, and with the priest not due for a visit for some time, cannot agree which of the biblical names belongs to the “story with the whale” and as a compromise decide on “Judah.” While suspicious of him from the outset – not just physically is he an oddity, being completely white from head to toe, he also appears unable (unwilling?) to speak – the villagers, who have a tendency towards superstition, start blaming the intruder for all the mishaps that are befalling them. Until, that is, when Judah joins one of the fishing boats and leading them to the most amazing catch. Is this a one-off occurrence or will the fate of the poor fishermen from The Gut finally change for the better?

Judah’s survival is intricately linked to the Devine family, the most important clan in The Gut. Paradise Deep is controlled by the Seller clan, wealthy merchants who own more than their share and exert their power over the communities by any means, legal or not. The clans’ disputes and quarrels go back to a personal fight between Devine’s Widow and King-me Sellers, the matriarch and patriarch of the respective clan, but over the generations it expands into a constant rivalry between the Irish and West-Country English, between poor illiterate fisher folks living in The Gut and the merchants/land owners from Paradise Deep. Crummey weaves such an intricate six generation portrait of the two clans and the people around them that it is difficult to go into details without revealing too much of the events or the many individuals that stand out as full-fleshed characters. For his realistic and factual backdrop, the author touches the political developments on Newfoundland, such as rise of the first fishermen’s union at the turn of the nineteenth century, and far away places where some of the younger generation escape to or fight in the first World War. Nonetheless, he never loses his focus on the local people of the two villages and, especially the women who carry a tremendous burden to ensure the survival of the next generation.

To help the reader through the myriad of names and characters that come to life in the story, a genealogical chart is displayed upfront with the names of the numerous offspring through the six generations. I can only recommend, however, not to look at this chart, if at all possible, prior to at least reaching part 2 of the novel. While such a chart is useful to remind us who is related to whom, and in what generation we find ourselves, it does hint at some surprising cross connections that are better discovered in due course as it will take away some of the pleasure in discovering and reading this rich tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press; Reprint edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Crummey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “whale” of a tale: Fluke by Christopher Moore Another “folklore” novel: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Bibliography:

• Flesh and Blood: Short Stories (1998; 2003)
• River Thieves (2001)
• The Wreckage (2005 in Canada only)
• Galore (2011) Commonweatlth Prize

Poetry:

• Arguments with Gravity (1996)
• Hard Light (1998)
• Emergency Road Assistance (2001)
• Salvage (2002)
• Went With (2007)
• Under the Keel (April 2013)

“He’d thought about fire a couple of times some months ago, fire being, after all, his metier. A lot of softwood in that house, it’d go quickly. He’d have to get a burning permit. What, while the forest fire warning gauges all screamed Extreme? No, he’d come here for this, to tear it down. Fire was for his work, which was pleasure. Tearing down the house was a responsibility. Tartarus took his responsibilities seriously.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (MAR 16, 2011)

Jack Tartarus comes to his family house on Crab bent on destruction. What follows instead is a reconstruction of his life on this small island near Vancouver, a reuniting of family and neighbors, a closer understanding of those who have died, and the forging of new bonds.

The book begins in a cold anger, as Tartarus, a famous artist working with photography and fire, picks away at the siding of his well-built house with a crowbar — in revenge, he says, for the death of his parents. The opening has an awkward energy to it, as clumsy as the book’s title and as jagged as its cover. Well before the novel is over, though, “Tartarus” and “Crab” have become fully rounded portraits of a person and a place, and the cover no longer fits at all, requiring rather an atmospheric seascape or watercolor of a fine old wooden house standing proud in a clearing of tall pines. This transformation to warmth and understanding more than once brought tears to my eyes, though I wonder looking back if the trajectory was not a little too predictable, too easy.

Because Szanto has a way of setting the reader in the middle of the action and filling in the back story later, this is a somewhat difficult book to follow at first, as characters are introduced without pedigrees and past incidents surface in cryptic references only to sink out of sight until later. This also makes it difficult to summarize, so I will confine myself to the first few chapters. We hear first about the losses. Jack’s parents, both dead, though we do not yet know how. His wife Maureen, obviously deeply loved. His sister Natalia, not dead, but moved away to the mainland with her musician daughter Justine. Jack’s closest friend, a former teacher named Don, had once been Natalia’s lover; he still lives on the island, in a small house near the water, his life almost fully occupied with looking after his father Frank, whose mind is going quickly. There is also a wild disheveled young woman who emerges from the woods, clawing and biting Jack in her desperation to halt the destruction; she too will turn out to be a figure out of Jack’s past, though he does not recognize her at first.

All these people, alive or dead, we meet in the first chapter. The second chapter, surprisingly, steps back from the main story and follows Don on his nightly errand for a volunteer group called Friends in the Night, making a round of the local restaurants to pick up unused food for the local soup kitchen. The chapter will eventually further the story, because the owner of the last restaurant on the list, a vegetarian establishment called Eating Thyme, is a former hippie called Etain, who is well on her way to becoming Don’s acknowledged lover. But the chapter’s main purpose is to build a sense of the island as a living community, where people know each other’s business and care for one another. There is a similar section a few chapters later, about a store clerk nicknamed Turtle, a kind of ecological vigilante who sees himself as the guardian of the island’s balance. Although the cast of named characters in the book is relatively small, this sense of community is important to the regeneration that will touch almost all the principal figures before the end.

Yes, there are flaws. The plot depends upon our belief that Jack’s desire to tear down the house is implacable, and this does become difficult to sustain. There is also the question of his professional obsession with fire, which certainly works as a metaphor, but less easily as a literal ingredient in the plot. There are some awkward moments near the end when the novel flirts with becoming a ghost story, then shies away again with perhaps one too many rational explanations for things that might better have been left untied. But all of the characters grow and continue to grow in reality and warmth, their relationships develop as satisfying and believable, and the island of Crab emerges as a very pleasant place to live. Only I would change that book jacket!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Brindle & Glass (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	George Szanto
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another from this publisher: Catch Me When I Fall by Patricia Westerhof

Bibliography:

• Friends and Marriages (1994)
• The Tartarus on Crab (March 2011)

Conquests of Mexico trilogy :

• The Underside of Stones (2005)
• Second Sight (2005)
• The Condesa of M. (2005)

Islands International Investigations (written with Sandy Frances Duncan) :

• Never Sleep with a Suspect on Gabriola Island (October 2009)
• Always Kiss the Corpse (October 2010)

“Love, she taught me, is not a feeling. It is an austere and practical discipline. A service. It demands loyalty, devotion, and self-sacrifice.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAR 16, 2011)

Whenever she doubts her role as “just a housewife,” Vicky recalls “Oma,” (her grandmother) giving her the above advice. Oma had escaped to Canada from Holland in January 1945 with Vicky’s father and her other four children with nothing but the clothes they wore, the family Bible and a piece of paper giving the name of somebody to contact. Now, Vicky wants to make good by bringing her Alzheimer suffering father into her home. In her first collection, Catch Me When I Fall, Patricia Westerhof weaves eleven stories into a sensitively imagined, multi-layered tapestry of life in a small farming community in central Alberta. In Poplar Grove, home to Dutch-Canadian immigrants for three generations, the different families have formed, over time, a close-knit community of friends and neighbours where hardly anything escapes the kindly or the scrutinizing eyes of some of the older inhabitants.

Each story stands alone, told in most cases by a narrator of the younger generation, depicting a distinct set of circumstances of one or another family or individual. While telling the stories in a lively, often humorous, and quietly understated way, Westerhof explores deeper human concerns and, in particular, inter-generational tensions and conflicts. The parents and grandparents – the older generation – feel deeply connected to their faith and traditions and are secure in the many rituals established within their church community. Not seeing any reason to question their beliefs in the spiritual and societal order, they come across to the younger generations (and the reader) as somewhat too rigidly stuck in the past; they respond helplessly or aggressively to the rebellious behaviour and actions of the young. The young, at the same time, are experiencing doubts themselves and/or are confronted by what may appear to them as overwhelming challenges, yet, feeling unable to consult their parents or approach the kindly Reverend Dykstra for help or advice.

Westerhof, quite ambitiously it seems to me, aims to tackle such a wide range of social, moral and social problems – a different one in each story – that one wonders how they can all happen in a small community such as Poplar Grove. We meet young Eustace, terrified to admit to his parents that his Jewish girlfriend is pregnant, whereby, in his mind, her background seems to be the bigger of the two offenses. Ruthie, who is gay, suffers through her parents “re-education” attempts until she can no longer cope and leaves. Others, like Helena, try very, very hard to fit into the strictures of the church and community only to discover, in her case, deep secrets that nobody wants to bring into the open. Her story, “Killdeer God,” to me is the most powerful story that delves deeper into the inner struggles of the young than most. In general, there is little substantive or honest dialog between the two generations about the concerns and deeper moral or ethical questions and only a few times do we receive indications that change in the rigid positioning may be on its way.

Nevertheless, I felt that I was being pleasantly passed on from one member in the community to another, being introduced to each personal story. Some characters reappear in one or the other story in the collection adding to the overall impression that these brief family portraits come together as a tapestry of a particular community at an important transition period. Westerhof may want us to discover Poplar Grove as a prism through which to view the wider ranging concerns and problems faced by society as a whole, especially in remoter rural regions. In that sense it is less surprising that so many challenges befall this small community.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Brindle & Glass (March 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patricia Westerhof
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another good book from this publisher: A Matter of Sylvie by Lee Kvern

Bibliography:

• Catch Me When I Fall (March 2011)

“Wayne lifted his Trans-Labrador Helicopters T-shirt. His breasts were like tinned apricots that have not broken the surface tension in a bowl of cream. No flicker of alarm or warning crossed the doctor’s face. He looked at Wayne’s chest as if it were the most ordinary boy’s chest in the world. Thomasina loved him for it. She could not have looked directly at Wayne’s chest without Wayne’s knowing she felt there was a deep, sad, problem. When Dr. Lioukras looked at Wayne’s breasts, he saw beauty equal to that which he would have seen in the body of any youth, male or female. It was as if he saw the apricots growing on their own tree, right where they belonged.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 06, 2011)

Being born a hermaphrodite is a very hard road to hoe. It is especially hard when you are born in remote Labrador in 1968. The nearest specialist is miles away and and this is not a town that relishes diversity. Even today, in large urban areas, there is a lot of controversy about what to do about gender when an infant is born with ambiguous sex organs. Some doctors utilize blood tests to determine gender and others go by outward appearance. A true hermaphrodite is born one in 81,000 births.

When Jacinta and Treadway have a home birth, assisted by their friend Thomasina, they are shocked to see that their infant child has one testicle and a vagina. They immediately take the baby to the hospital where the doctor determines the child to be a boy. His sex is determined because his penis is large enough to call him a boy. He is named Wayne and brought up as a son. However, he has a full set of female sex organs within him and feels that he has a shadow female self that Thomasina calls Annabel. Lifelong medication shuts off the development of Wayne’s female self and promotes his development as a male.

Wayne is not told that he is a hermaphrodite. He takes pills every day that he believes are for a blood disorder. His father, Treadway, tries to get Wayne to be “one of the guys” and keeps hoping Wayne will join in with other boys in their activities. However, Wayne is not like that. He likes to draw, is fascinated with bridges, and loves to sit and talk with his mother. Treadway is a trapper who is gone for most of the year and, as tension in the home builds due to Wayne’s condition, he is gone more and more. It is Jacinta who is responsible for most of Wayne’s rearing.

This debut novel is about Wayne’s journey through life and is a treatise on gender, especially its fluidity and ambiguity. Though Wayne lives his life as a boy he is always wrestling with the feeling that there is something else there, something in him that is different from other people. Thomasina knows his secret and it is she who rushes him to the hospital when he is going through puberty because his abdomen is filled with menstrual blood. She decides that it is important for Wayne to know about himself and she breaks the silence, informing him about his uniqueness.

Wayne struggles throughout his adolescent years and finally decides to stop taking all his pills to see what his “real” body and self are like. He is met with varied responses, some accepting and some filled with hatred. He goes in for surgery to have the original surgery reversed. (When he was an infant, his vagina was sewn shut). Now he can experience the world as both male and female.

The reader lives with Wayne throughout his life until his twenties. We yearn, with him, to know more about who he truly is and how he can fit into the world. He has one dear friend from childhood, a girl named Wallis and we are with him as he yearns for her with a physical and emotional longing that is not sexual.

Kathleen Winter has written a very interesting novel about a fascinating subject. However, there is something missing in the characterizations. We never get to know what makes Treadway and Jacinta tick. They go through tremendous changes but it is as though they are left midway in their struggles and the reader is waiting for some completion, some finality in their lives. Thomasina is very well done and she is, in many ways, the star of this book. She is willing to take risks for Wayne and she is the first person to give him a girl’s name – Annabel. The novel, at 461 pages is very long and would have benefited from tighter editing.

I commend the author for taking on this topic. She does it sensitively and there are parts of the novel that flow beautifully with a ring of magical realism to it. Wayne is a beautiful spirit searching for himself. We root for him as he tries to overcome a life that is that is filled with secrets and lies.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; Original edition (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kathleen Winter
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another hermaphrodite story: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Bibliography:

• boYs: Stories (2007)
• Annabel (January 2011)