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#82 Winter 2016

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Aloha Wanderwell: The Border-Smashing, Record-Setting Life of the World’s Youngest Explorer
by Christian Fink-Jensen & Randolph Eustace-Walden
Goose Lane Editions

Step right up and see the “world’s most widely travelled girl,” Aloha Wanderwell aka Idris Hall of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Hers is a riveting life that took off for the great open road–where she could find one–in 1922, when she was still a teenager.

Despite not having a driver’s license, she aswered an ad for a travelling secretary on an expedition–a race and a giant advert for the Ford Model-T really–to traverse the nations of the world by automobile, as many countries as possible. It sure beat life in the convent school.

Fink-Jensen and Eustace-Walden expertly parse Aloha’s journals, films and photos as well as press coverage and some previously classified government documents to bring readers along on the adventures of an audacious and fierce young woman of the early 20th century.

 

The Times of African Nova Scotians Volume Two: A Celebration of Our History, Heritage and Culture
Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute

Literary powerhouses Charles Saunders, George Elliott Clarke and Sylvia Hamilton are senior contributors to this collection, a testament to its significance not only to the African Nova Scotian community, but to all Nova Scotians wanting a truer, more complete sense of the history and heritage of the province and its diverse peoples.

The collection details histories of more than 50 Black communities throughout Nova Scotia, with upfront prominence given to Africville. The work also casts a spotlight on activists and community leaders who have given of themselves to make life better for African Nova Scotians in any community, at any time.

The slim volume contributes much to a too-often overlooked (by the mainstream anyway) part of Nova Scotian history and society.

 

New Brunswick Was His Country: The Life of William Francis Ganong
by Ronald Rees
Nimbus Publishing

This is history through the scientific eyes of a prominent New Brunswick botanist and cartographer with a penchant for detail and a gift for narrative. Ronald Rees, who has made his name as a gifted researcher and author of books examining histories of settlement as well as science and industry, has wisely chosen to make his writing as accessible as his subject’s was. That subject, William Francis Ganong, wrote prolifically of botany, zoology, physiography, cartography and Indigenous languages, creating a fascinating and immense body of work.

Rees writes with reverence for the vast quantity and high quality of Ganong’s work in 19th and 20th-century New Brunswick, and appreciation of the humanity of the man behind it. The work is brought to greater life with historical photographs and some of Ganong’s own maps and drawings. New Brunswick Was His Country is an essential addition to Atlantic Canada’s historical canon, and a must-read for nature lovers as well.

 

The Vigilant Eye: Policing in Canada From 1867 to 9/11
by Greg Marquis
Fernwood Publishing

Social and crime historian Greg Marquis is on a roll, with two new books that are bound to capture the public imagination. While Truth and Honour, his critical examination of the trial of Dennis Oland for the murder of his beer-baron father, will grab the most headlines (including in this publication), The Vigilant Eye offers a longer history of law and order (to reluctantly reference the great Dick Wolf), and one that both enlightens and provokes.

The famous blue wall is infamously insurmountable, but as a social historian Marquis offers a critical account of varied models of law enforcement and how they’ve been applied at different times in Canadian history. His keen eye and thorough research give readers a sense that law enforcement ain’t quite what it was meant to be, that we’ve lost something in the (d)evolution from community policing to simplistic crime fighting, opening the door to militarization and deadly force.

Marquis’ intensive research may just serve as a clarion call to citizens for vigilant attention to the work of those who serve and protect.

 

Letters from Beauly: Pat Hennessy and the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland, 1940-1945
by Melynda Jarratt
Goose Lane Editions

Pat Hennessy of Bathurst, New Brunswick wrote hundreds of letters back home during the Second World War. He was one of thousands of Canadian woodsmen who logged the Scottish Highlands as part of the war effort, but none could have been more prolific, and we the modern readers must be grateful for documentarians like Hennessy.

His remarkable correspondence, along with hundreds of archival documents and photographs gathered by Melynda Jarratt, provide a unique and honest look into the lives of the men who fought fascism with their muscle and sweat.

Along with her previous books on war brides and war children, this work is part of a significant contribution by Jarratt to our understanding of not only the lives lost, but the lives lived, during the Second World War.

 

Prince Edward Island Then and Now
Photographs by D. Scott MacDonald and from the collection of Vic Runtz
Acorn Press

Vic Runtz first saw his treasured Island during the Second World War, when he was with the navy. He fell in love there, with an Islander and with the Island itself, and spent a carrer there as an editorial cartoonist for The Guardian newspaper. During those years, he took countless photographs, including many detailed aerials from the newspaper delivery plane (piloted by the “Flying Farmer” himself, Elton Woodside).

Retired accountant D. Scott MacDonald was so taken by Runtz’s collection, he decided to recreate the photographs today and compare them to Runtz’s Prince Edward Island of 1947. Not having access to a newspaper delivery plane, he hired a pilot. In the process of finding the locations, he filled in a lot of important blanks regarding Runtz’s pictures with his own thorough research.

The result is a fascinating comparison of a changing yet timeless landscape.

 

Heroes of the Sea: Stories from the Atlantic Blue
by Robert C. Parsons
Flanker Press

Ann Harvey, “a delicate girl” of about 16, her father, a fisherman, her 12-year-old brother and their dog save 130 passengers immigrating to Canada from Ireland, when their ship, the brig Dispatch, hits a rock off the foggy south coast of Newfoundland. Let us dive slightly deeper into this tale, one of more than 50 from bestselling author Robert C. Parsons. For each is as astounding as the last.

Harvey and her family lived at the eastern entrance to Ilse aux Morts, where wreckage had drifted ashore. They used their 12-foot boat, rowing back and forth from their shore to a rock at the wreck site where survivors clung for dear life. They took everyone they could to their home, back and forth for six days until the arrival of the official rescue ship.

These true tales of oceanic heroism are short, just a few pages each, yet packed with more action than an Ernest Buckler novel. At every turn of the page, just when the fair reader thinks peace is restored, another twist. For example, that “delicate” Ann Harvey, 10 years after the wreck of the Dispatch, saved another 25 lives when another ship ran aground. Back and forth on the rowboat with her now-aged fisherman father.

 

All Hands Lost: The Sinking of the Nova Scotian Gypsum Freighter Novadoc
by Blain Henshaw
Pottersfield Press

As coastal people, we are enthralled by shipwrecks. Living in this part of the country, we all know people who have been called by the sea, for commerce, for war, for the hunt or, at best, merely for travel. But as a region that has always depended on the sea, we are all-too-aware of its dangers, and more than sympathetic to those women and men who perish at its mercilessness.

And so, we have a wealth of books on shipwrecks. Some are fictional cautionary tales, others deal with the aftermath. What sets Blain Henshaw’s first book apart is that it, while being both of the above, also dares to question the inevitability of one tragedy that was officially deemed an “act of God.”

Meticulous in its use of primary research (through the eyes and memories of relatives of the 24 crew members who went down with the SS Novadoc), All Hands Lost makes us feel the loss, the intense sorrow for the relatives, but also challenges received wisdom, critically examining the seaworthiness of an aging vessel sailing into a raging nor’east storm in the Bay of Fundy.

 

New London: The Lost Dream: The Quaker Settlement on P.E.I.’s North Shore 1773-1795
by John Cousins
Island Studies Press

This is a beguiling account of the little known attempt, for two decades in the late 18th century, by a wealthy English Quaker named Robert Clark and his followers, to create a commercial outport, a gateway into the new world, on the north shore of what is now PEI.

The story is researched and engagingly told by historian, folklorist and descendent of two of those hundred settlers, John Cousins, an expert on the Island’s history.

Cousins’ story is not only astute and informative, it also sheds light on the fact that the road to the modern world is littered with failed attempts at urbanization, and folks of great ambition and capabilities who were either unlucky or made the wrong choices.

 

Sweat Equity: Cooperative House-Building in Newfoundland, 1920-1974
by C. A. Sharpe and A. J. Shawyer
ISER Books

As Sweat Equity: Cooperative House-Building in Newfoundland shows, affordable housing is no new issue.

Sharpe and Shawyer take a comprehensive look at a government program that helped build 500 new houses for those who otherwise couldn’t have afforded one. They took loans to buy materials and invested 2,000 hours of their own labour in lieu of a down payment.

The program began in 1952 and was active for two decades, but traces its roots back to the 20s. As the authors point out, Newfoundland is rarely (if ever) mentioned in accounts of the cooperative housing movement. Nova Scotia usually gets credit for kickstarting the movement in the late 1930s.

This account benefits from interviews with surviving members of the cooperatives, showing the emotional power of the bureaucratic program.

 

Adrift on an Ice Pan
by Sir Wilfred Grenfell, with a Foreword by Edward Roberts
Flanker Press

In the early 20th century, Sir Wilfred Grenfell became a household name when Adrift on an Ice Pan, his account of a harrowing two-day near-death experience, sold 60,000 copies in North America.

Grenfeld was an English medical missionary in Newfoundland and Labrador who opened small hospitals along the southern coast of Labrador.

The event that made him famous happened when a patient had blood poisoning and faced possible death. Grenfeld travelled by komatik sled with eight dogs, fell into the water and lost his sled, dry clothes, food and firewood.

And he was on an ice pan blowing toward the open ocean wearing shorts, socks, shirt and vest.

To survive, he killed three dogs and used their furs to fight frigidity until he was rescued two days later, barely alive. His account is riveting, a slice of history and incredible adventure following folly.

 

The Church Lads’ Brigade in Newfoundland: A People’s Story (1892-2017) 125th Anniversary Book
by Geoff Peddle
Flanker Press

The year 2017 marks 125 years of service in Newfoundland for the Church Lads’ Brigade. There have been a staggering 20,000 members in Newfoundland alone, 12,000 of whom are still living. That’s 20,000 stories to tell of camaraderie, sport and games, camping, parades and the development of self-esteem, teamwork, good health and good character. To celebrate the organization’s tremendous impact over more than a century, the Right Reverend Geoff Peddle–the organization’s regimental chaplain–recounts the history and ongoing story of the oldest and largest Anglican youth organization in Canada.

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Hannah Smart: In Over Her Head by Melody Fitzpatrick is the third book in the very entertaining Hannah Smart series. This time, fourteen-year-old Hannah is heading for the high seas on a treasure hunt that is being filmed as a reality TV show, with Hannah as the star. But scheming Piper Steele, whose father is the autocratic captain of the ship, is doing everything she can to steal the spotlight, as well as the attention of Hannah’s favourite boy, A. J.

Hannah must try to overcome her fear of water, her seasickness, a hungry shark and Piper’s mean-spirited sabotage, all while smiling for the camera. To make matters worse, A. J., who is infatuated with Piper, is convinced she can do no wrong. With the help of Henry, a cute Australian boy, Hannah struggles to navigate the treacherous waters of reality TV, and gradually realizes what lies behind Piper’s hostility. She gains a measure of understanding and tolerance that will no doubt serve her well in her next madcap adventure. Rumour has it she’s going to Paris to film a reality cooking show.

Hannah is a funny, slightly goofball heroine with good intentions who has a talent for doing and saying the wrong thing. Her endearing clumsiness will keep readers laughing and cheering her on.

Hannah Smart: In Over Her Head
by Melody Fitzpatrick
Dundurn

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Sara has been counting down the days until her twelfth birthday when she will finally be able to go home to visit her mother and brothers. Since her father’s death one year ago, Sara has been living with and working for the Moshers, the keepers of the Cook Island lighthouse. But Sara’s plans are thwarted when Mr. Mosher becomes ill and Mrs. Mosher must rush him to the mainland for help. Now Sara must stay on the island and look after the lighthouse all on her own. And when a storm hits, she must summon all her strength and courage to do what must done.

This lively tale provides a realistic depiction of both the loneliness and isolation that the lighthouse keepers faced, and the hard physical labour that even children as young as Sara endured just to survive. But Barkhouse never lets readers forget that Sara is still just a child, and she misses her mother and siblings as well as her beloved father. Readers will feel the depth of her sorrow when she realizes that she can’t go home as planned for her birthday but will be inspired by her spunk and spirit. Cilia’s watercolour and ink illustrations exquisitely depict the era and the remote and rugged setting.

Keeper of the Light
by Janet Barkhouse, illustrated by Thérèse Cilia
Formac Publishing

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Find your next read! Here are all the books we’re excited about from 2016:

Little Dogs: New and Selected
By Michael Crummey
House of Anansi Press

Twenty years after the publication of his debut poetry collection, Michael Crummey’s Little Dogs: New and Selected Poems brings new work together with selections from his first four books of poetry.

The poems range from delirious adolescence to mature love, and carry intergenerational reflections on masculine relationships–father to son to grandson. They deal with the presence and the absence of others, the scars and wisdom of long love.

The imagery is consistently and beautifully Newfoundland: the sensory intensity of fishing for cod, for example. Crummey’s writing has long been treasured and these collected works are reason to celebrate.

Mary, Mary
by Lesley Crewe
Nimbus Publishing

Mary, Mary is a funny and charming story of a dysfunctional Cape Breton family, and the irony of the “white sheep” who stands out like a sore thumb.

Mary is everything her family is not: gentle, kind, patient, loyal, polite, good at her job. All around her is volatility, stubbornness, crankiness and too much pride. But Mary’s innate “goodness” drives her into a regretful pattern of working for money, taking care of her unstable family and wondering if something better could ever be possible.

What makes this novel a real joy is the authenticity of the characters. Their flaws and strengths are as real as Cape Breton itself.

All the Things We Leave Behind
by Riel Nason
Goose Lane Editions

In the late 1970s, 17-year-old Violet’s brother disappears. Her parents go looking for clues and she stays home to sell antiques to tourists at their roadside stand.

She is left to reflect on her brother’s absence, to reminisce about his seemingly random bouts of sadnesses–what readers recognize as depression. These memories of her brother’s presence, and the reality of his absence, are haunting, as is the mysterious presence of a white deer, which only Violet has seen.

All the Things looks deeply into depression, loss and mourning, and how we remember complicated relationships after we lose someone.

Four-Letter Words
by Chad Pelley
Breakwater Books

Chad Pelley has described himself as being dedicated to writing “literary page turners.” Interesting then that some of his best work comes in the more character-focused art of the short story, accumulating a bevy of prizes in this form. His first collection of stories focuses on the most intense expression of human emotions, such that desire becomes obsession, love becomes longing and many of the characters misstep their way to regret. It is this unversal feeling, which Pelley evokes so expertly, that makes Four-Letter Words sing.

Two-Man Tent
by Robert Chafe
Breakwater Books

We’ve waited a long time for celebrated playwright Robert Chafe’s debut collection of short stories, which are linked by a long-distance relationship and its related emails, texts and online chat sessions. It’s 21st-century dialogue the way only a brilliant–GG-winning–playwright could deliver it.

These stories, reminiscent of Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad in their willingness to challenge convention, fully engage and absorb, so as to quickly allay any fears about form.

The Most Heartless Town in Canada
by Elaine McCluskey
Anvil Press

Atlantic Canadians already appreciate the theme of this novel: judging a place with little comprehension of it and its people. McCluskey is the perfect witness to this theme, as she has long written sympathatically about society’s forgotten castaways, brought them to life on the page and showed them in their darkest and brightest glory. Extending this type of characterization to an entire town, one all-too-casually written off by chic big-city drive-by tourist types, comes naturally to a writer with her abilities.

McCluskey plays the tensions of big-city superiority complexes and small-town pride and resilience beautifully, and with great humour.

The Last Half of the Year
by Paul Rowe
Killick Press

When literary luminaries like Kathleen Winter start praising, you have to like a book’s chances for success. When that book comes from the keyboard of a writer whose debut novel was shortlisted for the Winterset Award and the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage and History Award, one expects a captivating story well told.

Paul Rowe, an actor and writer from St. John’s, delivers just that with The Last Half of the Year, which won the Winterset Award. What will strike readers is the craft with which Rowe weaves the themes of the story – the idyllic rural childhood, the dark humour of a father and son’s shadowed impacts on one another, the harshness of leaving home, the reckless folly of youth – with the topical turbulence of the 1970s and varied sentiments on the war.

The Angel’s Jig
by Daniel Poliquin, translation by Wayne Grady
Goose Lane Editions

What a delight when a work of fiction teaches a history lesson or, more descriptively, pulls back the wool from our eyes about the chastity of our past.

The Angel’s Jig is a tale of the adventures of one particularly engaging elderly man who has been auctioned several times, and may be again before his time is through. Despite his situation, he finds colour in the tales he tells and comfort in the people who surround him at each stop.

Written by one of the best French writers in Canada (Poliquin has won or been shortlisted for many of the major literary prizes here), this translation is a joy to read and opens eyes about this dubious practice of the past.

The Porridge Is Up!: Stories from my Childhood
by Dale McIsaac with illustrations by Jessica Shepherd
Acorn Press

The title of this collection of stories from McIsaac’s childhood comes from a favourite expression of his father, a Prince Edward Island farmer. “The porridge is up!” he’d holler from the bottom of his stairs up to the four girls and six boys–in three double bunk beds–meaning get up, eat and get to work.

McIsaac celebrates the up and downs of growing up in a small and tight-knit community.

The 15 stories in this collection were, like all of Robert Munsch’s many children’s books, pre-tested aloud on a young audience, McIsaac’s junior high school students. They are slices of life but that the teller’s skill make extraordinary.

I Am a Truck
by Michelle Winters
Invisible Publishing

I Am a Truck is a mystery of considerable depth. And it is also very funny.

It is the first novel of Saint John New Brunswick’s Michelle Winters, who has previously been nominated for a Journey Prize for her short fiction.

In Truck, Agathe Lapointe’s husband disappears, along with his beloved pickup truck, on their 20th wedding anniversary. What follows is as much about the mystery of his disappearance as it is about the protagonist’s response–becoming more involved with new friends, rock and roll and people who know more than they let on–and the love story between two distinctly Acadian characters.

What we are left with is a rare combination of suspense, humour and insight into the nature of love.

Bet On Me: Leading and Succeeding in Business and in Life
by Annette Verschuren
Harper Collins

Annette Verschuren is an astute business mind, having led Home Depot Canada’s expansion from 19 to 179 stores. Here, we get both memoir and insights into how professionals can more fully embrace and leverage the strengths they already have to achieve breakthrough results.

The book is full of practical insights from someone with a track record of business success. The most fascinating chapter is the one in which Verschuren talks about all the sexism women face in the workplace, but also suggests that being a woman in a senior role can be made into a competitive advantage, and she explains how she did just that.

Nebooktook: In the Woods
by Mike Parker
Pottersfield Press

Nova Scotia’s most beloved outdoor enthusiast, Mike Parker, is back to pay homage to the province’s wealth of natural resources–but not the kind you merely cut or haul or harvest. In Nebooktook, a Mi’kmaw word meaning “in the woods,” Parker focuses on a much more intrinsic, even spiritual value, associated with the wilderness.

Parker takes many tacks in making this point, looking at ecology, history, philosophy, art and ideology.

As in his other works, Parker accompanies his words with hundreds of archival images that provide insightful glimpses into the way we were.

Waiting for Still Water
by Susan White
Acorn Press

After a crisis at work, BC Child Protection caseworker Rachel Garnham is forced to take a “break,” as her supervisor calls it. She returns to her childhood foster home.

The farm at Walton Lake in New Brunswick is run by tenderhearted Amelia. It quickly becomes clear to Rachel that, over the course of her four-year absence, the woman’s memory has begun to fail.

As everyone struggles around her, Rachel begins to worry that Amelia’s condition will have consequences for the new foster girls at the farm. Her patchwork family comes together in the face of adversity, coping with loss and grief.

Where the Rivers Meet
by Danny Gillis
MacIntyre Purcell Publishing

Where the Rivers Meet ratchets the tension to its most taut in its mythical northern Cape Breton setting. At the heart of it is a boy who finds a Mi’kmaq relic. Its discovery–that of gold on Mi’kmaq land–brings longstanding religious, racial and land-based conflicts to a boil.

As tense as the situation is the rapid-fire language play by Gillis, who channels beat poets and Mark Twain to present a frank portrayal of childhood wonder and boyhood competition within a pack mentality. Each character within these linguistic onslaughts is fully realized and realistic.

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As the rains come down, Stanton and the residents of Black River know that it is only a matter of time before the river rises and the town will be flooded. But TransNational Power, the company that owns the local dam, refuses to open the gates to help avoid the pending disaster. Many of the townspeople blame local manager Willis Frame, Stanton’s father, even though both Stanton and his father share their frustration with TransNational. But when Stanton’s girlfriend gets involved with an environmental activist group that believes in going to extreme lengths in their defense of the environment, he finds himself caught in the middle of a complex situation.

Rayner’s topical contemporary drama is fast-paced and compelling. Stanton feels guilty for not being as driven as Jessica to take action to protect the environment but questions some of the actions that the radical activists are willing to take. Is violence ever acceptable, even if all else has failed? The way in which the activists so easily whip the group into a frenzy and the frightening speed in which a group of ordinary citizens become a violent mob is realistically–and chillingly–depicted. The book highlights the fact that there are often no easy answers and no clear-cut heroes and villains.

Black Water Rising
by Robert Rayner
Nimbus Publishing

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As Abigail savours the joys of springtime in her new home in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, she knows she has much to be thankful for. She is grateful that they have food to eat and a place to sleep, and most of all that they are safe at last, after all the horrors of the American Revolution. And soon there will be a new baby in their family, for any day now Aunt Dinah will be having a baby. But although she is grateful for all of these things, in her heart Abigail longs for one more thing: a new dress to wear to celebrate the baby’s arrival. While she knows that a new dress is just not possible right now, sometimes wishes have a way of coming true when you least expect it.

As in her previous two novels for young readers, Gloria Ann Wesley creates a stirring portrait of life for the Birchtown colonists, highlighting their daily struggles to make ends meet as well as the strong sense of community that Abigail’s family and her neighbours shared. The richly detailed illustrations are highly evocative and further create a strong sense of time and place. They are filled with light and beautifully capture a myriad of facial expressions.

Abigail’s Wish
by Gloria Ann Wesley, illustrated by Richard Rudnicki
Nimbus Publishing

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Dyslexia and other learning disabilities can be hard for anyone to navigate. But for people who are still developing their learning and social skills, the challenges can seem insurmountable. And learning disabilities are relatively common — according to the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, 4.9 percent of kids between the ages of six and fifteen have one.

As awareness of these challenges increases, accommodations that level the playing field are being made. Nova Scotia-based publisher Formac Publishing is addressing the need with their new early reader series, called The Secret Games of Maximus Todd.

The series, written by L. M. Nicodemo and illustrated by Graham Ross, incorporates a number of dyslexia-friendly features, like cream-coloured paper stock, which is easier for kids with dyslexia to read. They’ve also used a special font called OpenDyslexic, which features letters that are thicker at the bottom, making them easier to process without flipping or interchanging them. And there’s special attention paid to the layout as well — images and generous amounts of white space is used to break up the text, making the words easier to absorb.

In each of the books (Hyper to the Max, Frantic Friend Countdown, Big Game Jitters, and Flu Shot Fidgets), Max experiences The Super Fidgets, which Max describes in Hyper to The Max as a “ruckus” in his head. He’s “fidgety, jittery. Bouncing off the walls.”  Here’s how he explains it:

“On weekends or during summer holidays, it was no big deal. But when it happened on a school day — that was a real disaster. After all, what kid could stay out of trouble if he was as jumpy as popcorn in a microwave?”

Max fights The Super Fidgets by making up games that keep him distracted from whatever worry or situation has him feeling fidgety. In Big Game Jitters, he has to do 10 jumping jacks every time something flies overhead. And in Flu Shot Fidgets, he has to make an animal noise each time he hears someone mention an animal in conversation. And the incentive to win is always high. If he doesn’t do the jumping jacks, for example, he’s committed (to himself) that he will announce to all of the other players that the neighbourhood bully is the best soccer player in the group.

Although Nicodemo simply set out to write a believable, engaging character, as a reader with an anxiety disorder, I notice characteristics of anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. Other readers may recognize their own “quirks” in Max as well.

These kinds of books are important for all children. Studies show that books with diverse characters help children relate to and feel empathy for people who are different from them. And all children need to read characters they can relate to, and that reflect a variety of perspectives and experiences. Because when children see themselves in a positive fictional character, it not only helps them process the world they live in, but it also raises their self-esteem.

And of course, we can’t ignore the impact on literacy. Create more engaging characters and remove barriers by accommodating different learning abilities, like this series does, and ultimately more kids will enjoy reading. We’ll have happier, more literate children.

And who knows, they might even learn a thing or two about managing their own Super Fidgets.

The Secret Games of Maximus Todd (series)
L. M. Nicodemo, Illustrated by Graham Ross
Formac Publishing

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On a day filled with sunshine and cool, salty breezes, a small boy and his father embark on a special excursion together. They make their way to a nearby lighthouse for a picnic. Walking down to the ocean, they lay out their picnic blanket and feast on sandwiches and cake as they watch the whales leaping and listen to the waves crashing. While Patrick finds numerous things to love the most about this magical day, his father has only one.

This sweet and simple tale is a heartfelt celebration of the bond between a father and his young son. Patrick’s boundless enthusiasm and his seemingly endless litany of things that he loves about this day are an apt depiction of a typical little boy’s energy but it is his father’s whispered words of love that make this book one that will touch the hearts of adults. The soft and gentle illustrations suit the subdued tone of the story despite being somewhat flat. Neverheless, it is a story that will be savoured for its portrait of fatherly love.

A Picnic at the Lighthouse
by Rebecca North, illustrated by Nancy Keating
Tuckamore Books

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The best stories in Russell Wangersky’s collection The Path of Most Resistance bring a world or a community to life. “Darden Place” quietly dramatizes what happens when a group of young new homeowners takes over a changing neighbourood. The story quietly sets out what their indifferent cruelty towards the older holdouts looks and feels like, and ends with the final, surprising, revenge it leads to. In “Bide Awhile” a vicious marital argument has sudden, unexpected ramifications, and the holiday resort where it takes place gradually gains a quality of tangible, absolute, disquieting menace.

Here, place is character and character is place; each is embedded in and colours the other. Wangersky’s characters reveal themselves through their impatience with or surrender to the world around them, their rebellions and their failures to act, rather than introspection. At their peak, these stories have the strengths of the author’s finest work–the deeply unsettling spareness of Walt, the visceral insight of Burning Down the House.

Wangersky has a keen sense for human aggression, and a fine eye for the line people feel they can’t cross–and what happens when they are pushed over it. His most pointed stories are about men being used by women who are more at ease with power than they are; others feature men abusing each other over women in what shouldn’t be daily ways, perhaps, but are. He also knows all about human absurdity, and has a delicate, bittersweet way of presenting it: two retirees compete over who will clear a neighbour’s lawn of snow; a man gets obsessed with a spot of bathroom mould shaped like Armenia, that somehow comes to represent his relationship with his girlfriend; we follow a radio announcer, doomed to the graveyard shift, wandering around his empty newsroom until he can’t take it any more.

The collection’s effects come from slow buildup and intense observation rather than stylistic fireworks. The prose is unadorned, the kind that makes its way closer and closer towards the reader at walking pace, without ever drawing attention to itself. The stories are full of precise observations, small gifts of reality: the way damp in the air warns you of an approaching storm, a husband “sunk into his chair like a grounded ship.” It’s fine, detached, and subtle writing.

But there’s something more too, in the way Wangersky eases languidly between action and imagination. Certain brief moments of memory and fantasy, a little like Richard Ford’s thoughtful, dreaming, disconnected men, suggest a different register of interest from the mostly unspectacular events the stories are about.  Structurally, there’s great artistry in the way Wangersky is able to tell, somehow, two stories at the same time, the under-plot gradually easing the main plot out of sight.

The collection’s effects come from slow buildup and intense observation rather than stylistic fireworks.

Still, the collection as a whole feels like a drawing down rather than a spreading out. In part this may relate to its taciturn quality: rage and despair is related in the characters’ actions, but it doesn’t seep into the language. That’s fine as a stylistic principle–the first few stories feel effectively, ironically, dramatically detached. But as the collection goes on, a tension grows between the force of what’s being described and the lack of modulation with which it’s being presented.

There’s a similar problem with the endings of many of the stories: often they build up to a non-moment, a missed moment or a moment about to happen. Life’s like this, of course, more characterized by meandering open-endedness than dramatic final revelation. But in a short story, the non-endings feel like an unsatisfying tailing off. Someone once said that a short story is really nothing but an ending, and if there’s no ending, there’s no story—and these endings are too often whimpers rather than bangs.

At its best, The Path of Most Resistance is haunting, careful, almost imperceptibly full of power. Wangersky’s finest stories will linger with you a long time. Too many slide thinly past, however, in a book that ultimately sounds one note and stays in one place too long.

The Path of Most Resistance
by Russell Wangerski
House of Anansi Press

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Many years ago a young Bob Cole was invited into Foster Hewitt’s office in Maple Leaf Gardens where, from behind a big oak desk, the hockey broadcast legend offered several observations on the craft both men loved. One piece of advice proved especially valuable. A key to great play-by-play, said Hewitt, is to capture a game’s feel and flow.

Those qualities–feel and flow–would be hallmarks of Cole’s career.

And a hockey nation that has known him as the leading voice of Hockey Night in Canada for almost 30 years is grateful for it.

Now I’m Catching On: My Life On and Off The Air has plenty of feel and flow. It is not a great autobiography. It simply lacks the analytical rigour to reach that high bar. Nevertheless, it is certainly an enjoyable, breezy read.

Catching On is an anecdote-driven journey, starting from Cole’s Newfoundland childhood (almost drowning in a barrel of tar) to a restless adolescence (a job as a bell boy on a cruise ship) to early adulthood (his love for flying, being a curler who twice represented Newfoundland at the Brier).

The early life absorbs the first third of Catching On–a tad excessive for readers awaiting the “good stuff” about high-profile players and classic games. But the reader is eventually rewarded with Cole’s perspective on a tide of hockey history.

The expected events are all there: the 1972 Canada-Soviet series during which he did the radio play-by-play; the 1976 Soviet-NHL “super series”; several Olympic moments; and Stanley Cup games with Orr, Gretzky, Lemieux and other hockey legends.

However, it is the intimate passages featuring the sport’s famous that comprise the book’s strength. One example sees Cole and the wonderful Montreal broadcaster Danny Gallivan sitting on the floor of a packed Canadiens hospitality suite after a play-off game, sharing a drink and thoughts on their respective futures. Another example is Cole’s evolving friendship with Vsevolod Bobrov, the forgotten and complex Soviet coach during the classic ‘72 series, the lasting image being their impromptu toast across a crowded restaurant. Other superb anecdotes revolve around the compassion of cantankerous Toronto Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard, the arrogance of American sports journalist Howard Cosell, and the seemingly limitless generosity of Wayne Gretzky.

Catching On is overwhelmingly upbeat and offers almost no negative comments about anything or anyone (Cole is even complimentary to disgraced player agent Alan Eagleson). Nevertheless, there are a few poignant, deeply personal moments. One comes as he discusses the myriad of health issues he has quietly faced–and conquered. Another is his veiled disappointment upon learning that the coveted Stanley Cup finals assignment for the first time in decades will be given to someone else.

Naturally, in the book we learn about the famous calls carved into the databank of Canadian hockey fans. “They’re going home!” (in 1974, as the bruised Soviet Red Army team suddenly leaves the ice at the Philadelphia Spectrum). Gee-ooooh Sakic! That makes it 5-2 Canada! Surely, that has got to be it!” (at the 2002 Olympics, winning gold, beating the United States). “Oh my heavens, what a goal, what a move! Lemieux! Oh baby!” (in 1991, Mario Lemieux’s incredible deek during the Stanley Cup finals).

Cole’s thoughts on his broadcasting technique are squeezed into the narrative in scattered pieces. Interesting snippets mention his meticulousness concerning the correct pronunciation of player surnames and his preferred contours of a broadcast booth. Yet Cole has been called a broadcasting genius. So it is a shortcoming of Catching On that more discussion on his craft is not offered. What does he think of the current play-by-play trends? Or of today’s top play-by-play professionals? He has certainly earned the right to offer his opinion.

In recent years, social media and sports talk radio have not been kind to Cole, the claim being that he has lost his edge, that he can no longer keep up with the play, that players are being misidentified.

These criticisms are not broached in the book. This is unfortunate. It would have been fascinating to learn Cole’s thoughts on such sneering commentary, much of it unfair. For on a good night Cole is still among the best, a skilled purveyor of emotion, unmatched in feel and flow.

Now I’m Catching On: My Life On and Off The Air 
by Bob Cole & Stephen Brunt
Viking

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Kevin Major’s Found Far and Wide, the story of Sam Kennedy of Harbour Main, Newfoundland, is at once a kind of bildungsroman and adventure novel, mixing history and fiction in an effective narrative bolstered throughout for Major’s deft handling of drama and his raw but poetic prose.

We first meet Sam in turn-of-the-century Harbour Main where, of course, fishing provides for all. It’s a small, close-knit community where fishermen are paid in credit, not cash, in return for staples at the local merchant store. Sam, awakening to the reality of a changing world, finds his borders too close. He moves to St. John’s looking for work, where he has his first sexual encounters and soon, despite no experience, is taken aboard the sealer SS Stephano. Sam finds he’s not quite cut out for the slaughter, but has keen eyesight and is used as a spotter. History comes into play as Sam’s ship is helmed by Abram Kean, whose son Westbury captains the ill-fated SS Newfoundland, which has become stuck in ice. Major’s portrayal of the 1914 sealing disaster (77 dead) is believable and chilling and could have made a powerful novel in its own right.

Throughout the novel, Major does an excellent job of avoiding sentimentality and presenting scenes with spareness and power, and these traits are set to good use when Sam enlists at the beginning of the First World War, and is sent to Egypt and then to the Dardanelles (Gallipoli, present day Turkey). In his regiment is Johnny, a sniper from St. Anthony. Johnny and Sam form a deadly team – one the sniper, the other the spotter. Here, through stories and a photograph, we meet Emma, Johnny’s fiancée, who will soon haunt Sam.

It’s during these fights with the Turks that Major provides a powerful night battle, in which a small team of Newfoundland soldiers captures an important piece of Turkish territory (followed by a staggering scene of weather gone wild). Major superbly captures the chaos and ugliness of war and Sam is forever scarred when, while assisting with evacuation from Gallipoli, Johnny is killed.

Sam keeps with him a letter from Johnny to Emma.

The novel continues its episodic nature, bringing Sam to New York City to work in the construction of the Empire State Building, but after a falling out he finds himself involved in smuggling rum (it’s prohibition in the US), which he takes to quite easily, but is soon moving into the unfamiliar territory of new social circles, of floozies and poets. Eventually he returns to work in high steel, knowing he needs to make an honest living.

It’s around this time that we begin to see the effect of PTSD on Sam, and we see a yearning for something greater in him, to find home, love, to quieten that part of him that wanders. All the while he continues to dream of Emma.

Newfoundland comes full circle when Sam hears Wilfred Grenfell in New York. After the show, Sam waits to talk to Grenfell, and his connection to Johnny, who had worked for Grenfell, lands him work in St. Anthony for Grenfell’s mission. Here Sam finally meets Emma, finally delivers the letter Johnny had entrusted him with. He has read the letter, which asks Emma to consider Sam should he (Johnny) die in the war. Emma, however, is cautious, and a slow, ultimately unsuccessful courtship begins.

Sam leaves St. Anthony and heads farther north to Cartwright to assist the Grenfell mission with the arrival of the touring Italian Air Force, led by General Balboa. While this serves to introduce the rapidly changing world and the looming presence of another war, it, along with a following section featuring Sam’s fleeting friendship with Charles Lindbergh, carry less weight and have more the feel of fantasy than the profundity of the earlier sections (regardless of how historically accurate they may be).

We do, however, see the now deepening effects of PTSD on Sam, especially in a scene where he shouts at Lindberg about the coming war, and mocks Lindberg’s faith in mankind’s common sense. Found Far and Wide is a quick read, and it’s easy to imagine an expanded novel. But as it is, we get to see important, formative Newfoundland history from the point of view of a kind of Everyman, get to see the world in a time of great upheaval and its effect on a very human Sam Kennedy.

Found Far and Wide
by Kevin Major
Breakwater Books

 

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Sometimes, it doesn’t take long for a reader to realize what’s on the page before him is not your usual literary fare, that the words set down have more than just the purpose of telling the story, that these words have pace, rhythm, are surprisingly chosen, that something deeper is going on. That feeling hits you with the first line from “In a Kingdom Beneath the Sea”:
“Today’s the day Mitchell Burnhope gets the royal shit kicked out of him.”

This story, winner of the Malahat Review‘s Far Horizon Award, opens Kerry Lee Powell’s debut collection, Willem De Kooning’s Paintbrush. And if you think that this exceptional story – a story of a stripper and a foolhardy man in love with her, a story full of humour, beauty, and violence – is the collection’s highlight, you only have to read on. In story after story, Powell surprises, playing increasingly on a theme of lost souls in search of home, often fleeing from past traumas.

But back to the language. What’s going on? An innocuous beginning and then a sharp turn. And just look at the name, Mitchell Burnhope – itch, hell, burn, hope – and you know things aren’t going to end well. It’s this poet’s talent for richness, for filling her narratives with layers both symbolic and emotional, that puts Powell’s stories above so many other collections.

A little further on another gem, the titular “Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush,” shows what can happen when a poet’s voice meets exceptional storytelling skills. In the story, which has the feel of a dream gone mad, we meet a couple in a theme park, riding the rides, more bored than dramatic, but then they are victim of an act of sudden, horrific violence. The way it unfolds lulls us the way life often does and when violence comes, it’s unreal.

Or in “Talking of Michelangelo,” which begins with the fabulous line, “I took my kung-fu instructor off speed dial today. I was leaning on him too much for advice.” Seemingly light hearted at first, but as always in Powell’s fiction more is going on. Characters are haunted by past events. And as much as they may need to skip along the surface, avoiding those shadows, they can’t. Powell shows tremendous perception in handling the complex psyches of her characters, and uncommon skill in sketching scenes that resonate long after you’ve finished the story.

From the ending of “The Prince of Chang,” one of several stories to feature characters met in bars:

“When I looked down it was a though the rest of the city was necropolis that had built itself around him, the lit staircases of the fire escapes zigging and zagging up to the sky, the polished stone facades of the skyscrapers mirroring the moon and clouds, and all of it sprawling out into suburbs and ragged clumps of darkness.”

This is an evocative collection, and though there’s trauma and violence, there is also tremendous beauty and, throughout, real humour. Nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the Giller Prize, this mature, insightful collection is worthy of all the attention.

Do such writers come out of nowhere? Powell’s name began to surface in the Atlantic Canada (she has been based in Moncton for the past six years) when she began to pick up award after award, including the aforementioned Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Award, the Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Contest (for “There Are Two Pools You May Drink From,” a meditative, powerful piece) and the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for her poetry collection Inheritance (published in 2014, nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award). Maybe, like Powell’s characters – always travelling, always wandering, searching – all a writer needs is a chance to sit a spell, gather wits, find calm and create. New Brunswick is a fine place to do that.

This is an evocative collection, and though there’s trauma and violence, there is also tremendous beauty and, throughout, real humour. Nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the Giller Prize, this mature, insightful collection is worthy of all the attention.

Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush
by Kerry Lee Powell
Harper Collins