Circelli’s ambitious work of fiction explores some interesting subject matter. The bulk of the novel focuses on the experiences of Francesca and MicolCircelli’s ambitious work of fiction explores some interesting subject matter. The bulk of the novel focuses on the experiences of Francesca and Micola Benvenuto, the daughters of poor, uneducated southern Italian parents who immigrated to Montreal after World War II.
Francesca, the elder sister, is feisty and determined, greatly influenced by her hard-left-leaning cousin Ottavio, who’s committed to the revolution that promises to empower the working class. In the 1970s, he leaves Montreal to contribute to the “Movement” in Italy, joining the Red Brigade, a terrorist organization responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the Italian president. Francesca eventually follows Ottavio to Rome and also participates in the work of the radical group, though in a lesser role than her cousin. She will pay a steep price for that involvement.
Micola, the younger Benvenuto sister, an ethereal beauty, is dreamy and musically gifted. She’s also compliant and obedient . . . until she suddenly isn’t. When encouraged by her charismatic friend, Paolo Richards, who recognizes Micola’s extraordinary talent, the sheltered young woman agrees to sing at a Montreal nightclub. This leads to her being offered a weekly gig at an even more prestigious venue where both Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell have performed. Along the way, Micola falls madly and recklessly in love with a multi-talented, womanizing Jewish musician.
While the Benvenuto girls are permitted to attend informal political gatherings at cousin Ottavio’s house, their traditional, controlling, and often violent father otherwise keeps them on a very tight leash. Their womanly purity is not to be corrupted; socializing with the opposite sex, unless chaperoned, is verboten. Lies and alibis are therefore necessary for the sisters to get themselves out of the house on the evenings that Micola sings. Of course there’s hell to pay when Mr. Benvenuto learns what his daughters have been up to. Tragedy strikes the family.
The account of the sisters’ lives is bookended by the story of another character: Chiara, a youngish woman in her thirties who has recently left graduate school and is at loose ends. Of course, there are still bills to pay. Chiara needs a job (and distraction). She is happily (and conveniently) hired by none other than Paolo Richards. This old friend of the Benvenuto sisters is now living in Toronto and the owner of a flower shop. After years of academic immersion in the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, Chiara finds being in the company of plants immensely restful. She has recently fled a romantic relationship with Daniel Cohen, a young Jewish man, offering him no explanation for her departure and refusing to communicate at all. It seems that the intensity of her emotions for him terrify her. Habitually asocial, psychologically detached from others, and temperamentally predisposed to feeling nothing much at all, Chiara is suddenly set upon by intrusive emotions and strange visions, which may be repressed memories. Images of a fall, broken glass, and blood plague her. Naming her experience the “Thing,” Chiara begins psychoanalysis in order to grapple with the material bubbling up from her subconscious. In time, Paolo, the flower shop owner, will present her with a suitcase of notebooks and letters that will help her make sense of her inner turmoil.
As mentioned, this is an ambitious novel. I appreciated the insights it offered into the culture and experiences of southern Italian immigrants to Canada. Prior to reading the book, I knew next to nothing about Italy’s turbulent post-war period, so I also valued Circelli’s exploration of that country’s “Years of Lead” and her depiction of some of the terrorist activities of the Red Brigade. Reading about the music scene in 1960s and ’70s Montreal was a further bonus.
Having said all this, I must add that there are major issues with the novel that I am unable to overlook. First of all, the narrative is often melodramatic. Occasionally overblown, even maudlin, prose and Circelli’s amateurish characterization amplify the problem. Paulo and Micola in particular are absurdly, even laughably, romanticized. (e.g., After being spirited off from an insane asylum by an angelic nurse, tragically beautiful Micola spends years sitting in a grotto on the Amalfi coast: mute, weeping, and communing with the sea.) Add to all of this a few too many coincidences (most of them courtesy of the magical Paulo), the misrepresentation of the concept of epigenetic trauma (inheriting one’s parents’ past experiences), and a too-tidy, wish-fulfilling conclusion, and you have a novel whose initial potential has been irreparably thwarted.
For these reasons, a rating of 2.5/5 has been rounded down to a 2....more
The protagonist of Kuitenbrouwer’s 2023 Giller Prize nominated novel flees her marriage and teenaged sons in Toronto for her Rating: 3.5, rounded down
The protagonist of Kuitenbrouwer’s 2023 Giller Prize nominated novel flees her marriage and teenaged sons in Toronto for her elderly parents’ eastern Ontario home. It’s the place where she and her sisters grew up, an old stone dwelling built by her ancestors, full of history, stories, and memories. Kathryn is a writer who hasn’t been able to move forward with her current project: a piece of auto fiction about her dead brother. She’s long been told that Wulf, the sibling who came before her, was stillborn, but she is determined to find out more about him. When her parents hear about their daughter’s planned book, they wonder how she could possibly write about a person who never actually lived. Indirectly, it turns out.
During the main character’s stay in eastern Ontario, there are intense spring rains that cause unprecedented, even apocalyptic, regional flooding. Cooped up indoors with her parents, she probes them for information about Wulf. They aren’t just displeased about this; they are committed to obstruction and regularly press their daughter to return to Toronto where her duty lies. Refusing to go back to her moribund marriage, Kathryn does agree to make herself useful. She helps her mum sort through multitudinous cast-off objects, including boxes of photos and documents, which have accumulated over the generations in both the cellar and an old pig shed. As she and her mother work, Kathryn hears stories about her ancestors. One kept a diary. Another, a Scottish bride always pining for the sea, was said to be a selkie. The woman had webbed fingers, just as Kathryn does. Of greatest interest to the protagonist, however, are details about her great-great-grandfather, Russell Boyt. During the American Civil War, he had signed on as a soldier substitute for a wealthy American prosthesis maker, believing the money earned for performing military duty for another man would gain him financial independence from his harsh and disapproving father. A medical student who was mentally ill before setting foot on the battlefield, Boyt evidently grew more unhinged from exposure to the carnage. He also became physically disabled: a leg had to be amputated. Diagnosed with Soldier’s Heart—now known as PTSD—he murdered a freed slave woman while in the throes of psychosis.
By researching and imaginatively immersing herself in Boyt’s story, Kathryn believes she can get at the truth—“by indirections find directions out”. While she doesn’t create the auto fiction about her brother she intended to, in writing a biographical novel about Russell Boyt, she intuitively uncovers a family secret and comes to understand why she has been haunted by her dead sibling all these years. Whether the entire novel is auto fiction based on the life of the actual author, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, is not clear.
Wait Softly Brother has been constructed to shift back and forth between the main character’s story in the present and her ancestor Russell Boyt’s experiences in the mid-to-late 1860s. There are also a few chapters from the point of view of a young orphan connected with Boyt.
Kuitenbrouwer’s is an interesting and unusual novel, but I often found the writing strange, clumsy, and even amateurish. One might forgive the awkward execution of the sections written from Boyt’s point of view. These chapters are, after all, parts of a first draft which the protagonist works on late at night while at her parents’ home. However, even in rough draft, Boyt’s diction should not sound so jarringly modern. The prose in which he tells his story is too loose, casual, or inappropriate for the 1860s. For example, one character uses the word “genocide”—a term that would not be coined until the mid 1940s by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. As for chapters concerning the protagonist, Kathryn: they ought to have provided more detail about her marital troubles. For the sake of credibility, it also wouldn’t have hurt for Kuitenbrouwer to have toned down the main character’s almost total self-absorption. Instead, Kathryn arrives unannounced at her parents’ home, unrealistically expecting to be understood and indefinitely accommodated by people in their mid-eighties. I couldn’t buy that a middle-aged woman would be so little concerned about her mother’s illness and sudden cognitive impairment. It also didn’t ring true that an adult would walk off in an adolescent huff and slam doors when her parents didn’t or wouldn’t deliver the details she was after. Adult children can sometimes find themselves regressing to former roles when in the company of their family of origin, but I found Kathryn’s behaviour over the top. Her dedication to “finding” herself is paramount, and she seems constitutionally incapable of understanding that others may not be as invested in her voyage of self-discovery as she is. She really is quite tiresome.
I liked the book well enough to complete it, but not enough to wholeheartedly recommend it. Had there been more nuanced characterization and more careful prose, Wait Softly Brother might have been an exceptional novel rather than merely an interesting one....more
“There is no doubt that Cabbagetown was a tough place to grow up. People there always said that if you managed to survive your youth, you would grow u“There is no doubt that Cabbagetown was a tough place to grow up. People there always said that if you managed to survive your youth, you would grow up to become either a priest or an axe murderer.”
Cabbagetown, a neighbourhood in central Toronto, has now been gentrified, but it was once the city’s—and maybe even Canada’s—largest slum. Named for the cabbage which was grown by Irish immigrants in their tiny front gardens, the area once consisted of dilapidated row houses—little more than shacks really—along narrow, potholed streets. In the post-war years, it was packed to the gills with immigrants from all over Europe, many of them Eastern-European refugees, but mostly Italians and Irish.
Terry Burke, seven of his eight siblings, and his parents came to live there in 1959, having emigrated from Ireland when Terry was twelve. Before the move to Canada, the Burkes had resided in a slum south of the Liffey. Terry’s father, “Da”, had no end of trouble finding work in Dublin. The family lived from hand to mouth on what he could bring home as a day labourer on the docks. Da had served during World War II and contracted malaria in the East. Once home, he experienced serious flares of the condition and often ended up in hospital. Terry’s mother, “Mamie”, was almost perpetually pregnant. She’d bear a total of eleven children, two of whom would die very young. Worn down by childcare and the strain of trying to make ends meet, she had a heart attack in her thirties. Rosaleen, the eldest child and a gifted student, had to leave school early to assist with running the household.
Things were, of course, supposed to improve in Canada. Certainly, there were more employment opportunities, but the pay was poor and the family was already in considerable debt. It took them two years to pay for the move to Canada alone. Social services for immigrants were nonexistent.
Burke’s memoir brings his family and the 1960s Toronto neighbourhood they lived in to life. Written in clear, unpretentious prose, the book details the many financial and social challenges the family and a few of Terry’s boyhood friends faced. One friend, Jimmy, faced a particularly hard lot. His father abandoned them, his mother was quite severely mentally ill, and the boy was sent to Pine Ridge, a notoriously abusive boys’ reform school east of Toronto, which ended up breaking him.
Burke is a fine storyteller and I found the tales of his childhood—including scrapes, brushes with the law, and his Catholic schooling—absorbing and affecting. Of central importance to his narrative is the very strained relationship he had with his father. Da could not abide lies of any variety, especially to Mamie. He’d pummel Terry within an inch of his life for even minor infractions. Mamie or another family member almost always had to intervene to put a stop to the violent corporal punishment meted out to Terry. It is unclear why Da took so vehemently against the boy. The author stresses that many of the nuns and priests who schooled him—particularly in Ireland—were abusive. (He experienced night terrors because of them and wonders if any of these educators ever experienced remorse or acknowledged in the confession box the degree to which they’d terrorized their charges.) It seems possible that Da’s behaviour reflected his own severe Catholic-school upbringing.
The tragedy that struck the Burkes in 1962, when Terry was around fifteen, only made matters worse between father and son. The boy was kicked out of the house at sixteen and ended up “lost” on the Cabbagetown streets for months—a harrowing experience.
Though Lost in Cabbagetown contains its share of hardship and sadness, it is not essentially a misery memoir. The author’s touch is relatively light and there is considerable warmth to be found in the book. Endurance, love, and loyalty, too. I do wish, however, that I’d been able to learn a little more about the early lives of the author’s parents.
I am grateful to Dundurn Press and Net Galley for providing me with an advanced review copy, which I compared with a final e-book edition from my local public library. Looking at the latter, I wish the book had received more meticulous proofreading. There were a number of careless and distracting typos....more
Eight months after the death of their mother who is spoken of in hagiographic terms, three siblings in their early forties, their spouses aRating: 2.5
Eight months after the death of their mother who is spoken of in hagiographic terms, three siblings in their early forties, their spouses and young children gather at the upstate New York home of the middle son, Henry, and his wife, Alice. It’s Christmas, the first without their beloved Helen, who brought the group together and invariably smoothed out tensions. And tensions there are aplenty—internal, marital, and familial.
The youngest of the siblings, Kate, the one with the deepest attachment to Helen wants to move with her husband and three kids from Virginia to Florida into the home she and her brothers grew up in. Helen left no will, so for the time being the house is being rented. The siblings are to decide what to do about the place at this holiday gathering. A few years back, Kate and her husband could easily have bought out her siblings. Josh had a huge inheritance. Unfortunately, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer; he made some lousy investments in tech stocks and lost almost everything. Kate’s brothers and their wives don’t know about her family’s financial vicissitudes yet, but a couple of them have anticipated her request. Kate hopes she might somehow convince them all to give her the house. The main obstacle is Tess, her prickly sister-in-law, a workaholic New York City litigation lawyer.
Steger Strong skillfully takes the reader into minds of the six adults in this family, providing insights into their values, worries, and insecurities. The women’s concerns get far more airplay than the men’s. Another strand of the plot concerns a 23-year-old single mother, Quinn, and her six or seven-year-old child, the precocious Maddie. Quinn, a former heroin addict, had her child taken from her for a time by Child Welfare Services. Quinn was sent to rehab and then lived in a halfway house until she got her act together. Alice is the social worker assigned to Quinn and Maddie’s case. It’s a particularly tough one for her. Alice desperately wanted a child of her own, underwent extended fertility treatment, and had numerous miscarriages nevertheless.
The plot of the novel takes a fairly dramatic turn when Maddie goes missing during this holiday period. I’ll not say much about this, except to note that this is where I think the novel falters. Many pages are dedicated to Quinn, Alice, and Alice’s brothers-in-law traipsing through the woods, fearing that the child may have died of exposure. Meanwhile back at the house, Kate and Tess work on dinner, supervise the children, and draw closer over several glasses of wine.
I can tolerate play-by-play present-tense narration of characters’ inner states—and I think Steger Strong does this beautifully in the first two thirds of the novel. But I draw the line when this technique is applied to document actions—the minute by minute progression of children’s activities, their squabbles, and the minutiae of meal-time behaviour, for example. There’s far too much of it in the last third.
I also found the conclusion of the novel cloying. What had been a convincing depiction of characters’ internal and external conflicts devolved into the kind of domestic fiction I don’t enjoy: women preparing meals and intervening when their little “duckies” quarrel or become impatient. Some may find the novel’s finale heartwarming, and, to be clear, I am not averse to reading about people who experience a sense of unity with others or at least look past their differences, but the final scenes here were overdone. In particular, the last bit where everyone lies down to look at an art installation (recreating a previous experience orchestrated by the saintly Helen) just felt contrived.
I’m unlikely to look for the author’s other novels....more
Set in 1950s England, Taylor’s novel revolves around Kate Heron, a well-to-do widow in her early forties who has quickly remarried after the death of Set in 1950s England, Taylor’s novel revolves around Kate Heron, a well-to-do widow in her early forties who has quickly remarried after the death of her children’s father. Her new husband, Dermot, is ten years her junior. He’s a ne’er-do-well who’s managed to coast through life on looks and charm. Edwina, his mother, has swept in periodically to rescue him financially. Now he’s got Kate to keep him . . . though he finds it humiliating to have to ask her for money. Dermot’s charisma is wearing thin, while his phoney Irish brogue is just wearing. He’s drifted along purposelessly, never settling down to any sort of gainful employment. His latest scheme is growing mushrooms in a shed full of manure on Kate’s property. Yes, Taylor retains her sense of humour in depicting his character.
Kate and Dermot live with Kate’s 22-year-old, restless son, Tom—a bit of a Dermot himself—who’s employed by his irascible self-made grandfather at the factory business the old man spent his life building. There’s also Kate’s 16-year-old daughter Louisa (“Lou”) who’s home for school holidays; Ethel, an elderly spinster aunt, former teacher, and hanger-on; and their cook, Mrs. Meacock, an avid scrapbooker. They all live a comfortable life in a Thames Valley London-commuter-belt village. The ease of their existence is courtesy of Kate’s deceased husband, Alan, who appears to have been a successful businessman. If anyone still grieves for Alan, it’s not in evidence. (It’s unclear how long ago he actually died or from what.)
There’s lots of speculation as to why Kate married Dermot—and plenty of community disapproval. Her mothering role now mostly ended, she likely felt empty and at loose ends, conjectures the young curate, Father Blizzard. It’s due to sex, writes Aunt Ethel to her old suffragette friend, Gertrude. Ethel gives the marriage five years, by which time the “physical side” will have certainly subsided. No, it’s all down to jealousy, Louisa opines to the curate: Tom had been off having fun with one girlfriend after another, paying little attention to Kate, so she went for a combo boyfriend/son figure who’d take her out and about and make her feel young again. Taylor leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that Dermot satisfies Kate’s womanly desires, perhaps in a way her first husband did not. Having married her, Dermot’s given her a boost—but also made her anxious about her age. The grey hairs coming in are worrisome.
This being Taylor, In a Summer Season is an ensemble piece: the reader is privy to the stories, small challenges, and mundane miseries of a supporting cast of characters. Louisa has found religion via her infatuation with the young Anglican clergyman who’s too high-church for most in the village and plans to leave—to join the Catholics, heaven forbid! Tom falls for Araminta (“Minty”), the pretty flibbertigibbet daughter of Charles and Dorothea Thornton, his parents’ old friends. (Dorothea died around the same time as Alan, and her bereaved husband and daughter who’d left the Thames Valley to go abroad for a time have now returned.) Aunt Ethel, spends her days providing her friend down in Cornwall with written reports on the petty drama of Kate and Dermot’s relationship. When not preparing her less-than-savoury American-inspired meals, Mrs. Meacock dreams of overseas adventures and culinary responsibilities elsewhere.
While Taylor’s writing is reliably fluent, this novel is, on the whole, a rather bland one, very light on incident. Kate is a dull and occasionally exasperatingly stupid woman; unsympathetic Dermot the drifter’s plight is less than compelling; Tom and Minty’s love neither convinces nor interests. I found Lou and Ethel mildly engaging, but not enough to actually save the book. I really didn’t care what happened to any of these people. This is not a good thing in a character-driven novel.
The significant event upon which the novel turns is Charles and Minty’s coming back to the village . Mature, kind, and gentlemanly Charles is, of course, a stark contrast to Dermot. His ditzy daughter in her endlessly ridiculous garments is training to be a model. She becomes Tom’s obsession. A “tragedy”—can one even call it that when none of these characters evokes sympathy or even interest?—occurs in the eleventh hour, hastily clearing away inconvenient characters so that all may resolve tidily.
A few years ago, I took part in a reading group that worked its way through Taylor’s novels. While I admire the author’s perceptive, sometimes sardonic writing and do like two or three of her novels, reading several in a row was too much of a muchness. I left the group before reading In a Summer Season. The long break from Taylor allowed me to finally take on the only novel of hers I hadn’t read. Unfortunately, I can’t summon up much enthusiasm for it. Rating: 2.5, rounded up...more
A compelling and fascinating mixture of biography, memoir, and history, Wodin's book tells of her search to understand her mentally ill mother, EvgeniA compelling and fascinating mixture of biography, memoir, and history, Wodin's book tells of her search to understand her mentally ill mother, Evgenia Yakovleva Ivashchenko, a Ukrainian forced labourer in Germany, whose life was "shredded" by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes. Over six decades after her mother's suicide by drowning in Germany's Regnitz River, Wodin, now in her 70s, plugged Evgenia's name into a Russian internet search engine, something she'd done multiple times before with little to show for it. This time, though, something extraordinary happened. She came upon an Azov Greek forum for those with family links to Mariupol. The online group was run by by an engineer originally from the southern Ukrainian city who now lived in Russia. Konstantin, an indefatigable and passionate investigator, aided Wodin in going back some generations in her mother's family history, allowing her to construct a maternal family tree.
Wodin would learn of her roots in the nobility, the intelligentsia, and the merchant class and how these details factored into two members of her family, her grandfather and her mother's older sister, Lidia, being exiled as enemies of the people. She'd also find an opera singer uncle (a card-carrying Communist Party member), his eccentric physician daughter whose life had been dedicated to his care, and another cousin's murderous son, a bizarre man who'd smothered his own mother. This and other information Wodin stumbled upon was at times deeply unsettling, enough to make her question what she'd gotten herself into.
Wodin's is a richly detailed, gripping book, which is necessarily speculative at times. Wodin observes that the experiences of forced slave labourers from the East, "untermenschen" (non-Aryan, racially inferior people)--many of them Ukrainian and regarded as only slightly superior to Jews--are often marginalia to the Holocaust. This exceptional work made me aware of lives I'd never before considered. It deserves to be widely read.
I am grateful to Michigan State University Press and to Net Galley for providing me with a digital copy for review purposes....more
This is a competent enough but somewhat lacklustre debut about the impact of the tragic death of one twin on the less shiny sister left behind. It's aThis is a competent enough but somewhat lacklustre debut about the impact of the tragic death of one twin on the less shiny sister left behind. It's also a study of a controlling and volatile mother's destructive hold on her children, The book was solid enough to complete, but I think it could have been pared down a good bit. There are lots of extraneous details and excess dialogue that I felt added little to the book. An okay read, nothing more....more
The transformative power of friendship, storytelling, and writing are the themes of this insightful and rewarding coming-of-age novel for older girls.The transformative power of friendship, storytelling, and writing are the themes of this insightful and rewarding coming-of-age novel for older girls. It’s 1972, and twelve-year-old Joan has just moved to California from Connecticut. Her dad has started a new job in San Francisco, while Joan, her brother, and her mother attempt to settle in at their new home. It’s a challenge for all of them. Joan’s dad is an irritable, driven, and generally angry guy, more committed to his job than his family. He may have been eager to move from one coast to the other, but no one else apparently was. There’s a lot of tension in this family, and Joan’s parents argue a lot, ostensibly over money. Author Pat Murphy doesn’t overdo the dysfunction, however. Both parents show concern for Joan, and though dad is a less sympathetic character than mum, there’s nuance in the portrayal of each.
Joan tries to assist her mother with unpacking boxes and getting the new house in order, but when she breaks a glass tumbler, her mum sends her out to explore the neighbourhood. There’s a wild area at the back of the property, including an old orchard, a wooded space, and a creek. Joan goes down an old dirt road and encounters something else: a very unusual “wild girl” Not quite a feral child, Sarah, refers to herself as “The Queen of All the Foxes” or “Fox”, for short—not in the informal North American sense of an attractive young girl, but in a kind of imaginative identification with a light, clever creature of nature.
Joan and Fox hit it off right from the start. Fox paints Joan’s face with the same clay markings that she wears. For Fox, “war paint” sends the signal that she’s not to be messed with. She sees this as necessary because neighbourhood kids taunt her and vandalize her “outdoor living room” with its armchair and shelves for crockery positioned in the lower branches of nearby trees. Reticent, obedient Joan, who has learned over time to blend in (mostly so she won’t set off her angry dad), is emboldened by the clay face markings. She also takes the name of a wild creature, a mutable one: “Newt”.
Fox has family troubles of her own. Some years back, her mum abandoned her and her dad, Gus, a pierced and tattooed sci-fi writer. Not long after, father and daughter moved to the ramshackle old house left to them by Gus’s uncle. Gus is an easygoing philosophical guy, who offers Joan another type of parental support. He introduces her to the idea of keeping a journal. Writing things down, he tells her, helps a person figure out how she feels.
When the girls start school in the fall, Joan sees just how far on the periphery Fox is. Joan is a good student and she takes Fox under her wing, helping to integrate her a little more into school life. The two write a fantasy story together, based on their own biographies. Their work is noticed by a Berkeley creative writing teacher, and a summer course with this eccentric young woman helps the two understand how observing and thinking like a writer can help them negotiate the challenges in their own lives. Noticing, questioning, and recognizing the subtext in the things people argue about prove to be very helpful skills.
I think this is a fine piece of work. Obviously geared towards girls from about ten to thirteen, like the best children’s literature, it resonates for older readers, too. I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for years. I’m glad I finally got to it....more
After a summer tragedy that none of them wishes to speak of, the Sinclair family has moved away from their lovely home by the sea to a sober grey bricAfter a summer tragedy that none of them wishes to speak of, the Sinclair family has moved away from their lovely home by the sea to a sober grey brick house situated in a remote, densely forested part of the Blue Hills. There are three children. Clem, at 17, is the eldest. He spends his days in the garden speaking to a mysterious new friend, Amy, who wears a strange old-fashioned school uniform and who declines to come into the house. Clem can’t seem to settle in at the new place; boxes of his things sit unpacked in his room. There are strange gaps in his memory, and he can’t recall what caused his mother to break down and be hospitalized. He thinks it must’ve been her stressful work as a teacher. He would like to apologize for not listening to her when she may have needed him to. She has now lain in bed for months, mute and inaccessible, tended to by a kind local woman, Mrs. Mack.
Clem’s sisters aren’t doing any better than he is. Jessie, 10, cannot get used to the new house, but more worrying than that is the behaviour of her older sister. Vida, 14, seems very disturbed: she’s volatile, even abusive, and Jess spends most hours of the day attempting to placate her. Like their father and Mrs. Mack, Jess is troubled by the older girl’s intense interest in folklore—ill-willed fairy folk and changelings, spells and incantations. Vida has become very superstitious and insists on performing tasks in an exacting, ordered manner to ward off bad luck; however, it’s Vida’s determination to make contact with the dead that is most alarming. She compels Jess to attend a séance with her in the nearby village, and Vida believes the next step is for the two of them to lay hands on a special planchette designed to receive written messages from those who have passed on. Jess is frightened of dabbling in the occult—even more so, when she begins to catch glimpses of a ghostly girl. Jess worries that the ghost’s intentions are malevolent, that the spirit girl wants to take her sister away. It takes a while to find out what is fuelling Vida’s desire to speak with the dead and why she believes her actions caused her mother’s breakdown.
Clarke’s is an absorbing novel, skillfully and sensitively written, and at times it’s also quite suspenseful. One reads first to understand what the tragedy is that no one in the family can speak about directly, but also to find out who Clem’s mysterious friend is, the identity and intent of the ghost, why Vida is consumed with guilt, and finally to see if the children’s mother and the family as a whole will recover.
I was impressed with this novel, as I have been with many from Clarke. I was saddened to learn that she died in 2020. I hope that her quality fiction for young people will live on....more
3.5 An enjoyable, accessible, and relatively brief work of literary fiction set in the Punjab that concerns itself with marriage, sexual passion and po3.5 An enjoyable, accessible, and relatively brief work of literary fiction set in the Punjab that concerns itself with marriage, sexual passion and possessiveness, sibling rivalry, self-agency, and the historically constricted lives of women. As engaging as it is, the novel feels a little thin and it contains soap-opera-ish elements; it requires the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
One of the novel’s two stories, set in the late ’90s, has a young British man of South-Asian descent visiting his uncle and aunt in the Punjab, apparently to sweat out his heroin addiction. Well aware of his aunt’s displeasure at having him in her home, he asks his uncle if he might stay on the abandoned ancestral farm, which he ends up partially renovating with the help of friends he makes in the village.
The other story, set in 1929, concerns the young man’s great-grandmother, Mehar, who as a teenage bride, lives on the farm with two other young women, their domineering mother-in-law, and her three sons. The girls don’t know which of the three brothers each is married to, as the husbands visit them on separate nights in total darkness in a room set aside to accommodate the “procreative aspect” of their marriages. Heirs and future labourers will be needed to keep the farm going. It is the women’s responsibility to produce those heirs; enjoyment of the duty apparently isn’t supposed to be part of the deal. On nights when none of the girls is otherwise engaged, the three sleep together in a storeroom where their mother-in-law’s willow-ware patterned dishes are shelved, the china room of the novel’s title. During the day, the wives slave away and interact little with the men. The reader is required to accept that Mehar mistakes the youngest brother for her husband. (view spoiler)[She subsequently meets him regularly during the day for sex, and the two make a plan to escape the farm. By this time, of course, she knows who’s who. (hide spoiler)] I accepted this Shakespearean device of mistaken identity, but did I believe a woman, even a young one, could be so oblivious about the body of her husband? Frankly, no.
Re: the 1990s narrative—I also didn’t buy that parents would send a teenage heroin addict in the immediate throes of opioid withdrawal to another continent to stay with relatives he’d not seen in years, one of whom is extremely angered by the young man’s presence.
Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher. I enjoyed the book, but I wish aspects had been more developed. Having just heard the author speak with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company, I appreciated the book a great deal more than I had right upon completion of it. I would be delighted to see it make the Booker shortlist.
I loved Dianne Warren’s poignant first novel, Cool Water, which focused on an interconnected cast of characters, each with his own particulRating: 2.5
I loved Dianne Warren’s poignant first novel, Cool Water, which focused on an interconnected cast of characters, each with his own particular joys and private sorrows, living in a small prairie town. It won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2010 and was certainly deserving. Warren’s sophomore novel, Liberty Street, was a more focused work, following a single, oddball character through several years of life. I wasn’t crazy about that book, but I like her new one, The Diamond House, even less. It, too, focuses on a female character, Estella Diamond, born 1924, but it covers a longer period: eighty-five-plus years.
Since The Diamond House is a short novel, the reader gets only the external highlights—if you can call them that—of a very ordinary life that revolves almost entirely around the main character’s family of origin. As a child, Estella is ambitious, telling her father she’d one day like to take charge of his successful brick-making factory, but her four older brothers will later band together to deprive of her of that opportunity. As a precocious five-year-old, she’s driven by curiosity to pry the lid off a homely, heavy tea pot—kept as a memento of a mysterious long-dead aunt—only to discover that it contains a trove of letters between her father, Oliver, and his lively and unconventional first wife, Salina, who died only a few months into the marriage.
Beatrice, Oliver’s second wife and his children’s mother, is a dull, domestic replacement, and Estella finds herself wishing she’d had Salina for a mother. Under Beatrice’s influence, Oliver and his offspring are shadows of what they could have been. Estella’s development is particularly limited. She assumes (as so many women of her generation did) the family care-taking role—first, nursing her soldier brother Jack when he returns to Canada after World War II, and, later, attending to her aging parents. She also takes care of a young man who is injured by a reckless driver. He becomes a lifelong friend. Academically talented, Estella gains employment as a high school math teacher, but family demands prevent her from accomplishing much of anything for herself. She’s unable to pursue a university degree as planned or advance professionally within the educational system. Her once open-minded father won’t even consider having her work as an accountant in the factory. Before the end of the novel, however, she’ll perform acts of generosity that will make the lives of others better.
While Warren provides a convincing sketch of Estella as a girl and a sensitive portrait of her as an old woman, the middle section of the novel which focuses on her productive years does not make for compelling reading. Estella tries to shine in middle age: she leaves teaching, briefly gains a boyfriend, flies along the highway in a sporty white Ford Mustang, and wears a daring, Mondrian-inspired two-piece swimsuit. Inevitably, even in these small acts, she’s thwarted. She can’t escape the role she’s been cast in. To impress a girl, her nephew takes Estella’s sports car out for a spin, leaving it wrapped around a tree. Her boyfriend turns out to be an opportunist, interested only in her sizeable inheritance. As she herself observes, all along she was destined to become the Old Maid of the children’s card game. As for the rest of the Diamond clan, not one of them really comes to life on the page. The reader really has no one to root for.
In killing off Oliver’s first wife, the feisty Salina, the author pretty much guarantees the sinking of her story. The narrative with its somewhat anemic characters plods listlessly and superficially along, offering one lacklustre event after another—from the annual extended-family holiday at a northern lake to Oliver and Beatrice’s wedding anniversary, their funerals, and the eventual closure of the brick factory. What Warren’s goal was with this novel is not clear to me: To document the missed opportunities and wasted potential of the women of an earlier generation? To show that our real families are the ones we form out of friends and not the ones we’re born into? Maybe. Warren’s writing is competent, her story, such as it is, is steadily and methodically built brick by brick by brick. Solid enough, yes, but a bit tedious, somewhat cliché, and ultimately not very satisfying....more
A dull, blandly written, overly long, and overrated novel in which characters “talk . . . endlessly to each other, gnawing on the bones of . . . [theiA dull, blandly written, overly long, and overrated novel in which characters “talk . . . endlessly to each other, gnawing on the bones of . . . [their] collective history.”...more
This is a lively and entertaining but imperfect young adult novel set in a 1960s Newfoundland outport near the Bay of Islands in the westerRating: 3.5
This is a lively and entertaining but imperfect young adult novel set in a 1960s Newfoundland outport near the Bay of Islands in the western part of the province. At the time the story opens, Cox’s Cove, population 400, is accessible only by ferry. This hamlet, where houses lack electricity and plumbing, is entirely cut off from the rest of the island during the winter. Every June for the last eight years, Kate Derby, one of three teenage cousins at the center of the story, arrives by ferry. She stays until September. As a child, Kate was sickly, and it was thought that the sea air would do her good. Now 15, she’s arrived for yet another season of wind and sunshine, skinny-dipping and berry picking with cousins Melinda and Rebecca. The girls are said to have been born within seven months of each other.
This is a summer of change for all of them. Melinda—the feisty, talkative narrator—is the cleverest girl at her tiny school. Her mother wants her to train as a nurse, like her intimidating aunt, Grace (Rebecca’s mother), but Melinda has her heart set on marrying Matt Lewis, who, at 22, is seven years older than she. He’s already given her a ring and has started building a home for the two, which he works at over the summer when he’s not away at his fishing camp. In Cook’s Cove, a 21-year-old woman is an “old maid”. It’s typical for girls to be married and having babies by the age of 16. (In 1960, the legal marriageable age for girls in Newfoundland was 12.)
As members of the respected, once-wealthy Derby family (which used to own a fleet of schooners), the three cousins are expected to do something more with their lives than the other girls from the Cove. Rebecca is a head-turner, a beautiful girl, who to this point has shown no interest in boys. She’s studious and artistic. Aunt Grace’s plan for her daughter is teachers’ college in St. Johns, the provincial capital. Kate, from Cornerbrook (the biggest town on the western side of the island), is also bright and bookish, entirely inattentive to her appearance, and set on attending university. She knows she’ll have to get a scholarship because her parents, who disapprove of higher education for girls, will certainly not foot the bill.
The story is set in motion by the arrival of a stranger, Mr. Franklin Harris, a wealthy banker, who’s come up from Boston on his yacht. He attends the Cove’s annual garden party, a kind of fun fair with stalls for selling baked goods and handicrafts. Funds raised go to the local Anglican church. Mr. Harris sees the deft sketches that Rebecca does of the locals for fifty cents a piece and speaks to her mother about his big bank’s association with an art college and its charitable support of the college’s program for budding young artists. He’d like to see Rebecca attend. It would all be fully financed, and Melinda could go along as well. Aunt Grace is mysteriously vehemently opposed. The three cousins cannot understand why: attending art school would be a dream come true for Rebecca.
Thinking they can get the ball rolling for Rebecca, they manage to locate the girl's birth certificate, which she needs in order to cross the border. (Aunt Grace has hidden it.) It turns out that Rebecca is a whole year older than she’s been made out to be. Grace has kept secrets, which Melinda manages to get to the bottom of before anyone else. Does she tell her cousin, Rebecca, these secrets, risk the reputation of the family and cause real hurt to some of its members, but possibly set Rebecca free from a limited life in this coastal community—or does Melinda keep the secrets? I won’t say what she decides to do, but it was not what I expected.
Sheppard’s novel provides a slice of life in a small Newfoundland outport. While such a place is not without its charm, there is certainly hardship here. Sheppard does not shy away from showing the alcoholism, domestic abuse, and child neglect--although she doesn't call them by those names. The sea, of course, claims the lives of many men, who fish for three seasons of the year and often work in lumbering during the winter. For women, there are multiple pregnancies and long, back-breaking shifts in the fish plant. During the winter, there’s often not enough to eat; people go hungry. There’s endless gossip, and, of course, secrets. (At one point in the book, Aunt Grace--as the local nurse--has the opportunity to expose to the authorities the domestic abuse that has taken the life of a young pregnant woman and her unborn child. She chooses not to. What happens in the Cove stays in the Cove. The code of silence is strong, and women are complicit.) Melinda learns more than her aunt’s secret in this story. She also finds out about her mother’s and her grandmother’s lives. Strangely or not, Melinda still wants to continue here. As the story ends, however, she wishes that any daughter she has will use the newly completed road as a route out, away from this place and into the wider world....more
Ida B. Applewood has been home-schooled for the last five years. She tried kindergarten but was so unhappy with the rules and regimentation that her pIda B. Applewood has been home-schooled for the last five years. She tried kindergarten but was so unhappy with the rules and regimentation that her parents, apple farmers, decided it would be best if they educated her at home. She’s been blissfully happy ever since. However, now that she’s nine, a big and terrible change has come. “Mama” has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and the treatments she must undergo will not allow her to attend to Ida B.’s instruction. Furthermore, without Ida B.’s mother’s help, “Daddy” will have to do all the farm work himself. The girl has to attend school. What’s more, she has to cope with the fact that in order to pay for her mother’s medical treatment, her father has to sell some of the family’s beloved orchard.
Ida B. is not so self-centered that she is not distressed by her mother’s illness and her father’s sadness, but she feels she must harden her heart and sharpen its edges against the blows she has been dealt. It’s the only way to cope with returning to school.
Once at school, she rejects the warmth of her teacher and the friendliness of the students in her class. She discovers, as well, that it is the family of one of her classmates who has purchased the Applewood land. They’re building a house on the property, and they have cut down the lovely apple trees that were Ida B.’s friends.
It takes effort for Ida B. to maintain her hard-heartedness, and the author is very good at depicting the confusion of emotions in her young protagonist as the girl attempts to cope with significant life changes.
At first, I didn’t like this novel at all. Ida B. is more than a bit precious. She names and talks to trees and brooks, who answer her back, and she’s obviously intended to be a darling, nature-loving eccentric. I don’t see any reason why the author couldn’t have left out these annoyingly twee verbal and behavioral tics. It would have made for a far better novel.
So, in the end, I’ve got mixed feelings about this book for girls 8 to 12 years of age. The strengths of the novel include its sensitive rendering of a child’s emotional turmoil, but, unfortunately, they’re coupled with some of the most irritating and sentimental characteristics of American children’s literature....more
Sorry, that person's shelf is private.
CanadianReader
>
Books:
families
(43)
Loading...
