Atlantic Books

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In Under Amelia’s Wing, having finally convinced her mother that a career as a pilot is a viable option for a young woman, Ginny has now taken the next step in pursuing her dream. Leaving her home and family far behind in the small town of Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, Ginny arrives at Indiana’s Purdue University to get her degree in mechanical engineering and ultimately her pilot’s license.   

Ginny soon makes some loyal and dear friends, but must also contend with a professor who adamantly opposes her acceptance in the program, firmly believing that a woman doesn’t belong in engineering.  Facing his antagonism as well as the scorn of many of her classmates, Ginny struggles to prove herself.   

She gratefully accepts the support of her new friends at Purdue, as well as the encouragement of Amelia Earhart, her friend and mentor who is also a career counsellor and advisor at the university.   

But after Ginny endures numerous hardships, the unthinkable happens: Amelia’s plane is lost. Ginny is devastated and must find a new batch of courage to continue on the path she has chosen. 

This second story about Ginny Ross is rich with historical detail, authentically rendered relationships and an endearing protagonist. It is a compelling exploration of what numerous women who chose non-traditional roles endured while also depicting many of the more typical aspects of university life.  While Ginny’s relationship with Amelia Earhart is not the focus of the story, it adds an interesting element to the plot as Ginny and her roommate Mabel, along with the other girls, eagerly follow Amelia’s journey around the world.   

Ginny’s friendship with Mabel is well developed and the strain on their friendship when Mabel’s beloved Uncle Malcolm turns out to be the professor who is determined to get rid of Ginny is convincing and adds an extra layer of tension.  

This is a successful standalone novel that will also leave readers anxious for the next volume.

–by Lisa Doucet

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David Mossman’s ultimate “who’s your father?” story of life on Hirtle Beach, The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen: Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach is a Maritime tale of family success and love. And while this is his fourth book about Mossman’s own life and family, unlike some of his other titles, Gladee’s Canteen is a little more light-hearted and fun.

A retired geology professor, Mossman combines his love for family with his love for geology by exploring the life on Hirtle Beach and the surrounding Kingsburg area. His narrative interlaces historical facts about the area with anecdotal evidence, including storytelling from Hirtle family members and his own first-person accounts.

The success of sisters Gladee and Flossie and their determination to show their father that yes, women can be entrepreneurs is a riveting experience of learning not only family history, but geology and environmentalism. The passion for making sure that their story isn’t forgotten is clear in Mossman’s attention to detail. From the minutia of pricing information at the Canteen to the intimate relations of who does what, like Old John being the King of peeling potatoes and apples even in his later years, there seems to be nothing left out.

There were two things I had wished for while reading the book. 1) That I could’ve witnessed the operation of the Canteen in person. 2) And a family tree to keep up with who was related to who and in what way because as a true Maritime story of “who’s your father?” relations, bloodlines can get complicated.

History lovers should be sure to pick this one up off the shelves. Gladee’s Canteen is in the bookstores, now.

Published by: Pottersfield Press

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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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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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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

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Ian Colford’s short novel Perfect World will be too short for some readers and too long for others. It’s beautifully written but the subject matter is so horrific that it is a hard book to finish. Tom Brackett, abandoned by his schizophrenic mother and alcoholic father at age thirteen, is left in the care of a demented grandmother, yet somehow manages to survive, apparently intact. He has a generous and positive nature, gets a good job as a mechanic, and eventually acquires a loving wife, two kids, a house and a dog.

Tom’s world is ideal, until he slowly succumbs to paranoia, depression and anger that finally explodes into a full-blown episode of psychotic collapse. In the grip of his demons, he commits an act of unspeakable violence against a member of his family, a crime that causes him to lose everything he loves.

There is little in the way of dialogue in this rather dire tale. Tom is not much of a talker, and nobody in his family ever seems to have anything useful to say to him, so it is the author’s voice we hear, describing the teeter-totter of Tom’s mental state as he struggles to control his rage, to ignore the whispering voices that intrude upon his reality.

Walking alone on a beach or a back road seems to be the only way Tom is able to bring balance, or equilibrium back into his life, but even nature turns her back on him at a critical moment, so that the evergreens in his yard look like “bent-backed refugees from some borderland wracked by armed conflict.” The conflict is, of course, all in Tom’s head, a head that he can’t see into or understand.

Human communication, or lack of it, seems to be the major impediment to Tom’s mental well being. He not only can’t talk to people, he can’t look them in the eye, can’t see behind the misery of their lives. His institutionalized mother serves as a mirror for him, her slow deterioration and death acting as a prefiguring of his own probable end. When on a rare occasion he does look into her eyes, it is “like looking through a doorway into an empty room.”

The closest Tom comes to finding consolation, and to being heard by the reader, is when he speaks at his mother’s funeral. One old neighbour and three staff from the mental institution she lived in show up and he addresses them briefly, expressing the wish that he had known her better. For a fleeting moment, he catches a glimpse of “a life that could have been,” the perfect world that is beyond his grasp.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. Colford’s is a bleak and dark vision of a life doomed by heredity, geography, bad luck, and poor access to medical and social services. Tom’s journey through the world of severe mental illness is entirely devoid of humour or consolation. However it is a reflection of some people’s reality. Everyone knows someone who has gone down that road.

Michelle Butler Hallett has quite accurately called Perfect World “a haunting study in empathy,” which is probably as good an explanation for why the novel deserves an audience as any. Haunting it certainly is, to the point where it made this reader actually lose sleep. But the empathy is there also. The pivotal moment when you realize that Tom is coming unstuck is jarring: he wakes up with a headache that he attributes to his young son’s “deceitful manner … whiny tone and … sneaky furtiveness.” Somehow, Colford takes that warped observation about a perfectly normal little boy and forces you to see that it is simply not Tom’s fault. He achieves this partly through his characterization of Tom’s wife, who cannot tolerate the sin but still loves the sinner. Again, though, it is the author’s voice that is the dominant one here, and it is Colford’s compassion and his ability to identify with his mentally ill protagonist that carried the reader into a similar comprehension of the man’s dilemma.

It is this empathy that provides a minute glimmer of hope at the end. Despite his horrible crime, you close the book wishing Tom some measure of love in the future.

Perfect World
by Ian Colford
Broadview Press