Category: reading challenges

The Horseman’s Graves, Jacqueline Baker’s engrossing novel set in the Sand Hills near the Saskatchewan-Alberta border breaks like dawn, and carries on through the entire lives of two different, yet ultimately tied families, the Schoffs and the Krausses, until the sun sets. Sculpted by the landscape and drawn by their common experiences, the immigrants that populate the area farm, have families, and fill their days with work, their Sundays with church, and their idle time with talk.

The Schoffs, second generation and still bearing the grudge held on between the two families, have lived next to the Krausses since settling in the area. The only Krauss left on the land, Leo, is scorned by the community as much for being a Krauss as for his odd, rude and sometimes shocking behaviour. Stolanus Schoff and his wife Helen, suffer their own ostracism after their only son endures a terrible wagon accident when small, growing up hideously scarred and suffering from seizures. Leading deceptively simple and separate lives, the two families carry on: Leo marries, the boy grows, crops come in, Stolanus prospers, Leo’s wife Cecelia bares five children in quick succession. And yet, like so many lives that look simple from the outside, bad luck, a curse even, tears through every inch of it, defining the actions of each person, charting a course that can’t be changed.

Until one long, dark night, the stuff of ghost stories, or even just old stories, the kind that Lathias, the Schoff’s Métis farmhand, tells to the boy on the long days they spend wandering the countryside or riding out to the river, when Leo’s stepdaughter, Elisabeth, goes missing and the days can no longer continue in that long stretch of just living, and everything changes. And if there are moral judgments upon change, upon the actions of the characters, the narrative doesn’t make them, instead lays back and lets the wind carry the words over the fields on a midsummer day before the harvest, quietly letting the reader make up his or her own mind about the story.

Now that I’ve read The Horseman’s Graves, the last of the three books from this infamous article in Maclean’s last summer, the article makes even less sense to me, so it’s a good thing I’m not a leading literary columnist for that magazine. Comparing and contrasting Effigy, The Outlander, and The Horseman’s Graves feels strange and out of step. And while each of the authors, all three women, have somewhat familiar settings, the stories are so different, the voices so distinct, that it does them a disservice to come out and crown The Outlander as the winner in a race not one knew they were entering.

Rich characterization, strong female protagonists, unavoidable (and in the case of Mary Boulton, crashed headlong into) tragedy and Western settings are about all that they have in common. Sure, York’s novel finds its basis in Mormonism, but it stretches out so far beyond that, that the religion comes to be something akin to the land they work, a foundation. And sure, the church is present in Baker’s story too, but it’s not oppressive, anything but, even if I’m clinging to a particularly beautiful passage when Leo Krauss forces his second wife Mary to her knees and they prey, shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen. The idea of the graveyard hold the community together in The Horseman’s Graves; I didn’t find this overwhelming or even maudlin, nothing more than a simple fact, an aspect of community, a lasting remnant of the lives that fill up the past of the story the author’s trying to tell.

York’s epic story, Adamson’s epic novel, Baker’s epic tale, all three are really good books, books worth reading and talking about, worth sharing and passing along, and perhaps not for lumping together and taking apart, bit by bit, the long hours each spent bent over their own words in their heads, working their fingers out as much as the stories themselves, only to come to the conclusion that one of them is worth more of someone’s time than another. Seems strange to me, an article written with an agenda versus a true need to simply state an interesting observation. It’s funny, if I were to take a look at each of the novels and dissect them, say for a large national magazine, I would have probably started with the idea that each novel’s taken a little bit of history, whether it’s an actual character who lived and breathed before the pages or an event, and used it to build a fascinating world within their books, adding a layer to stories that already exist, and telling them in a way that makes the world richer, and doing all of this with strong, rich, and intriguing voices.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Baker’s book on my kitchen table, a fitting place for a story about and defined by the idea of family.

READING CHALLENGES: I read The Horseman’s Graves for Saskatchewan in The Canadian Book Challenge.

The family drama of Donna Milner’s sweet, forgiving After River sweeps you away in its everyday life on a dairy farm in the beautiful East Kootenays. The story of the Wards, who come to accept a draft dodger named River into their lives, into their homes, until the book’s fateful event tears them apart, rambles over thirty-five years through terrain well-told throughout Canadian literary history. Family novels told by Canadian women are a popular kind, and Milner has set herself up in line with no shortage of excellent company. The novel, with its strains of Crow Lake and Unless, feels familiar and unknown at the same time. A compelling tale that overcomes its stereotypical beginnings to crash into an uplifting end, After River came as a bit of surprise.

As Natalie Ward tells the story of how her life changed after River, the unbelievably handsome and utterly compelling young American came into it, she cannot do so without giving the reader the whole picture. River just didn’t come into Natalie’s life, he came into her whole family, and his presence changed everything. Like the water of his nickname, he slipped into their land and made himself as essential as the air or the cows themselves. For Natalie, and her eldest brother Boyer, River represents that instant when your childhood leaves forever, a burgeoning adulthood that comes with the cost of happiness, and how rich the price of forgiveness remains when conflict goes unresolved.

The setting swept me away as much as the story: a farm set on rich, fertile land, a town trapped in its own small mind and an even smaller belief structure, all trapped (or set free depending on how you look at it) by the mountains that tower above. A highly personal story, it’s impossible not to feel empathetic with the events of Natalie’s life, nor is it easy to watch her make the mistakes she’s bound to make, or feel the weight of the guilt she carries away the moment she leaves the farm.

The prose isn’t perfect, and there are first-novel moments all over the book, tired descriptions and worn out metaphors, but none of that matters by the end, when Natalie’s life comes full circle, and the book comes to its pitch perfect end. Isn’t it always the case that we end up so far from where we begin, only to come home in so many ways, whether literal or metaphorical, despite how strong the pull of life drags you in another direction.

READING CHALLENGES: I had chosen Stanley Park as my book for British Columbia, but I’m swapping in this book instead. I’ll probably still read it, but I feel like this story and setting are just so evocative that I could see the mist rising up from the mountains in the dewy mornings and feel every inch of Natalie’s pain, which means it’s the right choice for The Canadian Book Challenge. It’s such a Canadian novel, this After River.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: As I read a terribly practical but not entirely gorgeous ARC, I’m showing off the glorious cover. I know it might not be for everyone, but it perfectly suits the story, and the colours are just so lovely.

As with so many of my ARCS, here we go again…would anyone like me to pass this one along?

As of about 8 AM this morning, I was reading the following books: July’s People, War and Peace, What Was Lost, Under the Volcano, The Outlander and I Married the Klondike. The first title in this list of the ridiculously scattered reading I finished was Laura Beatrice Berton’s I Married the Klondike, a memoir written by Pierre Berton’s mother about her time in the North. Not unlike Out of Africa in tone, but with a softer, sweeter core, Berton’s story rolls along with a merry voice that shows the author not only clearly enjoyed her life, but also the setting in which she lived vigorously for many years.

As a schoolteacher living at home in Toronto, Miss Thompson (the author’s maiden name) left at twenty-nine to teach kindergarten in the Yukon. During her years in Dawson City, she fell in love, raised a family, and stayed until her husband ultimately lost his job during the Depression. Leaving behind “the Outside” world for a hard, but happy, life full of old prospectors, prostitutes, upper class society mavens, politics and adventure, it’s a completely charming story of a different kind of life lived.

If I have one small criticism, it’s that the book reads perhaps a bit too much like a small town newspaper account of the author’s time in the Klondike. There are few interpersonal details, which I guess isn’t really the point she’s trying to make, but rather record a history that was definitely only known to the few hearty pioneers who settled Dawson City. And I would imagine that the distance I felt in the narrative might too be evidence of Berton’s own upbringing — written long before the A Million Little Pieces style of memoirs, it’s no doubt she didn’t simply refuse to talk about the more personal aspects of her story, but having them within the narrative may not have ever even crossed her mind.

I know, however, that books aren’t read in a vacuum, and I’d have to say that the same kind of quasi-racism that troubled me in Dinsen’s book, kept nagging at me here too, when Berton wrote things about the “half-breeds” and “going wild like the Indians”, the book made me kind of uncomfortable. It’s interesting then to note that, in all honesty, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy the book as much as I did.

The history of the Klondike is a subject I find fascinating. Ever since I wrote a series of articles about it for History Television, it’s been something I float back to on occasion, and it was interesting to read the history from a woman’s point of view — to get the perspective of one not intending to strike it rich, but of an adventurous woman who sets out to take a challenging post for one year and ends up spending her entire life. As Berton notes, “I imagine that in everyone’s life there eventually comes a moment when a simple question, or a chance meeting, or a knock on the door, changes the entire course of one’s future.”

Lastly, wouldn’t it be fun to take part in the Berton House Writer’s Retreat?

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read a copy of the book that had a library binding and so decided not to take a picture. Instead, I found the original jacket image from M&S (which wasn’t hard, ahem, Amazon!), but if you’re looking to read the book now, Harbour Publishing has the book back in print.

READING CHALLENGE: I’m going to try and balance out my Canadian reading and participate in The Canadian Book Challenge this year (In case you’re wondering, I’ve picked #1 The White Stripes Way). I’m counting this book as my Yukon entry, even before I decide what I’m going to read for the remaining rest of the provinces and territories!