Canadian

Heartbreak Homes – Jo Treggiari

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The “Heartbreak Homes” referenced in the title of Nova Scotia – based YA author Jo Treggiari’s (She is also co-owner of the fabulous Block Shop Books in Lunenburg), latest novel is an upscale housing development that went belly up leaving only the model home finished. This is where the story starts, at a blow-out party hosted by Malcom “Mal” Bradley, whose father was the developer of Heartwood Homes. The “Heartbreak” comes from the fact that the project went bankrupt and many people lost their money and their livelihood.

The story’s three narrators all attend the party. Frankie goes with her best friend Jessa, who has recently started hanging out with the cool kids and has a crush on Mal. Martin goes because he is desperate to reconnect with his old friends, friends he lost because his father had invested his (and others’) money in the project and lost it all, necessitating a move across town and a change of schools for Martin. Cara is there with her gang of three other girls to steal. They are homeless and desperate for food and items they might be able to sell in order to make their lives slightly less awful.

These three characters are there when a horrible crime takes place. In fact, it is Martin and Frankie who discover the body of a classmate and from there the novel’s locked-room structure (everyone’s a suspect) keeps you turning the pages lickety-split. This is a story that, like One of Us Is Lying, tests the allegiances of these characters as they try to figure out who the culprit might be. All three of these kids are sympathetic, likeable, and believable. I was particularly taken with Cara; her circumstances are awful and she does her best to look after the other girls she ‘lives’ with.

All I ever wanted was a home. For the ground to settle under my feet long enough for me to put down roots. Instead, for the last fourteen days, we’d been colder, wetter, and hungrier than ever.

Strangely, the book’s title also relates to the heartbreak found in all three of the these characters’ homes – or lack thereof. Frankie lives with her grandparents, who do not seem to understand her or even, at times, really like her. Martin’s father drinks too much and home is no longer a safe and warm place. Cara doesn’t have a home at all, has been – along with her friends – in and out of foster homes or without a safe place to call home for as long as she can remember.

While Heartbreak Homes is definitely a mystery, complete with the requisite red herrings and plot twists, it is also an interesting commentary on homelessness, family, responsibility and loyalty. I loved spending time with these characters and if the mystery itself unraveled just a little too neatly, it hardly matters. This is a great book.

The Swap – Robyn Harding

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This is another one of those books with an intriguing premise, a strong start and then, I dunno, about half way through it all starts to fall apart, but because you’ve already invested a chunk of time, you sort of feel obligated to see it through.

Canadian author Robyn Harding’s domestic thriller The Swap is the story of three women whose lives intersect in Hawking, a small town on an island off the West Coast (I pictured Salt Spring Island). Lo is a seventeen-year-old high school student; Freya is a beautiful Instagram influencer married to a disgraced but drop-dead-gorgeous NHL hockey player, and Jamie and her husband have recently moved to Hawking to escape a personal tragedy.

For Lo, life couldn’t be more boring. She hates school; she hates her classmates; she hates her life.

My life was exceptionally boring. I had no friends, no hobbies, no extracurricular activities. I did, however, have a lot of chores.

Lo lives with her unconventional family on a hobby farm. When she’s not looking after the animals or helping her mother pickle and can food from the garden, she’s walking through the woods or along the beach taking photographs, the one thing she feels she’s pretty good at. When Freya shows up at Lo’s high school with a flyer advertising pottery classes, Lo feels something akin to excitement.

Even through the crowd in the hallway, I could tell she was somebody. There was no way I could have known then that she would come into my life and change it, change me, but I felt a magnetic pull toward her, like I had to meet her. It was destiny.

Lo signs up for Freya’s pottery class and thus begins a dysfunctional friendship between the two. Freya starts confiding in Lo, and Lo feels that the two have an impenetrable bond, that is, until Jamie enters the picture. Jamie lacks confidence and, like Lo, she basks in Freya’s attention. What neither of these two seem to realize is how toxic and manipulative Freya is. It’s only after Freya orchestrates the swap of the title (I won’t bother spoiling you here, although the book cover and blurb gives it away), that these relationships really start to crumble.

My problem with The Swap is that none of the characters are likeable or sympathetic except, strangely, Max, Freya’s husband. And sure, there are lots of twists and turns, but I didn’t believe in a single one of them. Yes, it was easy to see how Lo might be manipulated; she’s had a relatively sheltered life. The story just didn’t work for me, although it was certainly easy enough to turn the pages.

Five Little Indians – Michelle Good

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It’s tough to review a book written by an Indigenous author about an important subject (residential schools and their traumatic legacy) and not sound like an asshole when you don’t love it. I had the same problem with The Nickel Boys. Five Little Indians, by Canadian lawyer and first time novelist Michelle Good, won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Amazon First Novel prize and the book was well-reviewed.

And I am not going to crap all over it because there were some things I did like about the book, which follows five people who were sent to residential school as children and then were either released or escaped into 1960s Vancouver. The novel doesn’t spend much time at the school itself, but we learn enough to see how Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie suffer at the hands of the priest and the nuns, particularly Sister Mary. And suffer, they did.

The majority of the book follows these five characters after they’ve left the school, their lives intersecting as they try to make sense of a world they know next to nothing about. They are without skills, without family and really, without an education. The only thing they really have is trauma and that follows them throughout their lives.

Each of these five characters has a different experience once they are away from the school. Maisie, for example, seems to have it all together when another survivor, Lucy, arrives at her door. Maisie had gone home after she was released. “I lasted a month. No matter how hard I tried, this place, their house, was no longer home, and these people, though kind and loving, were like strangers pretending to be family.” She deals with her trauma by having sex in an alley with “The Old Man”, someone who berates her as he’s having sex with her, calling her the names the priest had called her as he raped her. “These were Father’s words. They took the rhythm of his thrusts. And I couldn’t breathe without this. I didn’t exist without this.”

Lucy fares a little bit better, going to school to become a nurse until she discovers that she is pregnant with the child of another survivor, Kenny, a boy she loved at the Mission school. They love each other, but Kenny has his own demons and try as he might, he just can’t stay with Lucy.

I did love each of these characters; that wasn’t my issue with the book. I just felt as though I was being told their story rather than shown it. This might have been remedied by sticking more closely with one character and having the others drift into their orbit. I felt like there was so much more that I wanted to know about each of them, but their tales felt somehow superficial – even though their individual trauma certainly wasn’t.

I finished reading Five Little Indians on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation which “honours the children who never returned home and Survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.” Personally, I think we have a long way to go to make things right.

Every Summer After – Carley Fortune

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Persephone “Percy” Fraser is thirteen when her parents decide they want a getaway from their busy lives as U of T professors. Instead of buying a cottage in Muskoka like many of their friends, Percy’s father chooses the less developed Barry’s Bay “a sleepy, working-class village that transformed into a bustling tourist town in the summer.” Barry’s Bay, her father tells Percy is “real cottage country.”

Right next door live the Florek boys, 13-year-old, Sam, and his fifteen-year-old brother, Charlie.

It took eight hours for the Florek boys to find me. […] They were clearly related – both lanky and tanned – but their differences were just as plain. Whereas the older boy was smiling wide, scrubbed clean and clearly knew his way around a bottle of styling gel, the younger one was staring at his feet. a wavy tangle of hair falling haphazardly over his eyes.

This is the beginning of Carley Fortune’s novel Every Summer After, which begins seventeen years after that first summer meeting, and then unspools with a series of flashbacks depicting Percy and Sam’s friendship over the course of six summers, and culminates in something so horrible that they haven’t spoken in twelve years. When Charlie calls Percy to tell her that their mother has died, Percy does the only thing she can do: she returns to Barry’s Bay, even though it means that she must see Sam again.

I hate to poo-poo on a novel that seems to be universally adored, especially a debut and by a Canadian to boot. And besides, I didn’t hate this novel – there were lots of things about the book I loved. So let’s start there.

I loved:

The Canadian setting. I am not familiar with Barry’s Bay (apparently a real life place on Kamaniskeg Lake), but Fortune did a terrific job of evoking a real sense of time and place. Anyone who has ever spent time at a summer house (on a body of water or just away from everyday life) will understand that feeling of time stretching. It’s all water and sand and sunburned noses, and barbecues and endless days.

The childhood friendship between Percy and Sam. Although her mother is reluctant, at first, to let her daughter hang out with Sam, the two are quickly inseparable, bonding over movies and sharing their hopes and dreams. Teenaged Sam and Percy are delightful, and so is their friendship – made official with the ubiquitous friendship bracelets of the time.

The novel’s structure. I am a sucker for novels that jump back and forth between past and present. We know that something horrible happened and we know we’ll eventually find out the reason for the estrangement, but I love a novel that strings us along. For me, the parts of the book that were set in the past were more successful, though.

Which brings me to the bits that weren’t quite as successful for me.

Percy and Sam in the present. It’s Charlie that calls Percy to let her know about his mom and, of course, Percy doesn’t hesitate; of course she will return to Barry’s Bay. When she gets there, though, despite the wedge between her and Sam, he’s pretty much the first person she runs into on her walkabout the town, and for me, that reunion lacked any tension. Honestly, I was expecting angst out the wazoo, but instead

…he takes three giant strides toward me and wraps his arms around me so tight it’s like his large body is a cocoon around mine. He smells like sun and soap and something new that I don’t recognize.

I think we all expect that the couple will end up together, but I sort of also hope that they’re going to have to work at it a little harder than these two do. Their adult conversations (and they’re 30 now; Sam’s a doctor!) are very reminiscent of the conversations they had at 16-17.

And what did Percy do to cause the rift in the first place? Careful readers will figure it out pretty quickly and yes, people make mistakes. It’s just that – they didn’t speak in 12 years. That’s a long time for things to be resolved as quickly and easily as they are.

That’s my only gripe about the book, really. (And some of the writing is kind of Erotica 101-esque.) I would definitely read something else by this author and I would definitely recommend this book if you want a quick, sweet and sometimes steamy beach read.

Cascade – Craig Davidson

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The first Craig Davidson book I ever read was actually a book by his alter ego Nick Cutter. The Troop is the gruesome story (and there are parts of this book that are so gross, I had to read the pages through slitted eyes) of a troop of Boy Scouts who, on their annual overnight camping expedition, come face-to-face with bioengineered evil. It was only after I got my hands on The Saturday Night Ghost Club that I realized Craig Davidson and Nick Cutter were one and the same. Since then I have also read Davidson’s Giller-nominated novel Cataract City and I just finished reading his collection of short stories, Cascade. I guess at this point I am going to have to say that I am a fan.

Short story collections aren’t something I read a lot of, and I am not sure why that is because I do love short stories. They’re like these perfect little miniature worlds. There are six stories in this collection and I enjoyed every single one of them.

Davidson writes about family – both biological and found – and about the places that root us (for him it is Cataract City aka Niagara Falls.) None of these stories is tidy – or even necessarily linear – and even better, none of them have tied-up-with-a-bow endings. Ambiguity is a friend of mine. And apparently Mr. Davidson’s.

In “The Ghost Lights”, a car crash leaves a mother and her infant son stranded in s snow storm. The mother has grappled with the whole idea of subverting her own identity after her son’s birth, but now she is “filled with a mindless need to protect.”

“One Pure Thing” returns an basketball player to the court after a stint in jail. In “The Vanishing Twin”, fraternal twins Charlie and Hen looks out for each other in a Juvenile Custody Facility. A social worker looks after a little boy, while waiting for the birth of her own child in “Friday Night Goon Squad.” Each of these stories scratches at the surface of the choices we make, the sacrifices and compromises. Davidson’s writing is assured and nostalgic and I found myself sinking into each of the worlds created by these stories after only a line or two.

Highly recommended.

Fight Night – Miriam Toews

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I have mixed feelings about Canadian writer Miriam Toews’ eighth novel Fight Night, which was a 2021 Giller prize finalist. On the one hand, it irked me and on the other hand, I could appreciate its charms.

Nine-year-old Swiv (although she certainly doesn’t seem like any nine-year-old that I’ve ever encountered), lives with her pregnant mother (the fetus has already been named Gord) and her grandmother, Elvira. Precocious doesn’t begin to describe Swiv. She’s been expelled from school and demonstrates no interest in going back. Instead her grandmother homeschools her; her lessons include things like suduko, Boggle, “How to dig a winter grave”, and letter writing. (The novel is actually Swiv’s letter to her absent father.)

Swiv’s mother is an actress who seems to always be in trouble with a stage manager or director. Elvira is the stabilizing influence and even she seems half crazy.

Grandma says fragments are the only truth. Fragments of what? I asked her. Exactly! she said. She asked me what my dream was last night. I told her I dreamt that I had to write a goodbye letter using the words one and blue. Na oba! Grandma said. That’ll be your assignment for today, Swivchen. She has a secret language.

Swiv recounts her families’ idiosyncrasies with a matter-of-factness that seems beyond her years. She is responsible for bathing her grandmother, and putting on her compression socks, for picking up the pills and conchigliette her grandmother drops on the floor yelling “Bombs away!” and, when the two of them travel to Fresno to see Elvira’s nephews, being her travel companion.

Elvira’s open-heartedness is contagious. She sees the dual nature of life, that it is both hilarious and devastating. “Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet?” she asks Swiv. “Well, I mean in a nutshell. It was a tragedy. Do you know Shakespeare’s tragedies? People like to separate his plays into tragedies and comedies. Well, jeepers creepers! Aren’t they all one and the same.”

Toews mines her personal history here – as she has on past occasions – and it makes for fascinating reading, for sure, but maybe this is just a case of the right book/wrong time or maybe I was distracted while reading it. Fight Night worked for me in some ways. Swiv’s voice is singular. The way she relays the things she hears, her mimicry, charming. But the novel is written without quotation marks, and the paragraphs are often long with multiple speakers and I found it hard-slogging sometimes. Some things that happened at the end just seemed sort of over-the-top ridiculous and undermined that novel’s potential emotional impact. Or maybe tragicomedy is what Toews was after all along.

Life certainly can be ridiculous.

If I Knew Then – Jann Arden

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Jann Arden is a Canadian singer-songwriter, actress, writer, animal rights activist, vegan and all around kick-ass human being. I have been a fan of hers for at least thirty years, which is why when she made a cameo in the 60th birthday video my daughter, Mallory, made for me I was speechless. She sang a little of “Good Mother”, offered a book recommendation (The Overstory by Richard Powers) and was charming as all get out.

Her non-fiction book If I Knew Then is a memoir about aging and is written with Jann’s trademark honesty and humour. She calls a spade a spade and I appreciate that about her.

One morning a few months after I turned fifty, I remember stopping dead in the middle of my usual routine

[…]

Suddenly it was as though I was staring at the most beautiful map of the world. I saw all the places I had been, all the things I had done, all the strength and service my arms and legs and shoulders and feet had given me for so many years, even though I had put this body through such bullshit and abuse and neglect and shame and loathing. All of that crap.

Jann tells stories about her complicated relationship with her father (who died in 2015), her devotion to her mother (who died of Alzheimer’s disease, which Jann recounts in her book Feeding My Mother) and the personal mistakes she made on her way to becoming, as she puts it, a “crone.”

The Crone is remarkably wise and unapologetic. She is fierce and forward-thinking – someone who is at the pinnacle of her own belonging. Okay, I’m not entering the time of the Crone. I am a Crone. I am at the beginning of a new chapter in my life – a whole new book, really. And it’s one that’s going to read and unfold exactly the way I want it to.

If I Knew Then has lots to offer a woman of any age. Although Jann is talking about herself in her 50s, maybe a younger woman could use some of her hard-won wisdom. For instance, if only I had appreciated my body a little more when I was 30. I didn’t think I was skinny enough or fit enough back then, pre-kids, but now when I see pictures of myself from that era, I am whoa! I also had a complicated relationship with my alcoholic father and I adored my mother. I don’t think I ever appreciated how difficult it was to be a parent though until I was a parent myself. My parents were never young to me; they were always just my parents. Both are gone now, too, and there are so many things I wish I could ask them. And apologies I’d like to make.

Jann’s book gives you permission to acknowledge your mistakes, and to move beyond them. She stresses the point that it is our failures that make us better human beings, that failing is, in fact, “a necessity.” Sometimes we need to be reminded that true learning comes from not getting it right the first or fourteenth time around and that “Good things come out of bad things.”

Fans of Jann Arden will certainly enjoy If I Knew Then, but even if you’re not familiar with her, this book is an enjoyable, personal (but universal) examination of a life lived, wrinkles and all.

When We Were Vikings – Andrew David MacDonald

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Zelda MacLeish, the protagonist of Andrew David MacDonald’s debut When We Were Vikings, was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, “an umbrella term describing the range of effects that can occur in an individual prenatally exposed to alcohol. These effects may include physical, mental, behavioral, and/or learning disabilities with lifelong implications.” (https://nofas.org/) Some of the common developmental disabilities found in people with FAS include “decreased IQ and deficits in motor skills, attention, executive function (working memory, problem solving, planning, and response inhibition), language, visual perception, adaptive functioning (skills necessary for everyday living).” (https://nofas.org/)

Now 21, Zelda lives with her older brother Gert. The siblings live a life dictated by schedules and rules that have been put in place to make Zelda feel secure. Gert is attending college on a scholarship and he does his best to look after his sister, but the truth is that he is only a couple years older and life isn’t easy.

Zelda is fascinated by Vikings. For her 21st birthday, Gert hires a stripper dressed as a Viking. Zelda remarks “Even if you were not an expert on Vikings and had not read Kepple’s Guide to Vikings, you would say, that is a Viking.” But Zelda is an expert and she notices several things about the stripper which are not historically accurate including the fact that his sword isn’t made of metal, his outfit is plastic, and his blonde hair isn’t natural. Zelda follows the Viking code, dividing the people she meets into members of her tribe: Gert, AK47 (also known as Annie, Gert’s ex-girlfriend), Marxsy (Zelda’s boyfriend), Dr. Laird (her therapist) and villains (most of the people Gert associates with).

Once Dr. Laird asked me why I liked Vikings. I told him three reasons:

One, they are brave,

Two, they are strong and people have to think twice before trying to hurt them.

Three, Viking heroes stand up for people who can’t defend themselves.

I told Dr. Laird that I wanted to be all of those things. People look at me and do not think that I am brave or strong and that I am the one who needs protection. My legend will show people that, even if you are not gargantuan, you can still be strong and brave and help others in your tribe.

Zelda will have her chance to prove that she is a Viking when Gert’s extra-curricular activities land him in hot water. She is so much more than meets the eye and I loved every single second of my time with her. One of the things I most love in a book is a strong voice…and Zelda’s is just perfection.

When We Were Vikings is funny, and heart-breaking (often at the same time). This is a novel about found family, but also about the unbreakable bond between siblings. Gert is a deeply flawed human being, but he loves Zelda. This is definitely a coming-of-age story, and watching Zelda navigate the tricky waters of her life is a marvelous journey to take.

Highly recommended.

The Blue Castle – L.M. Montgomery

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I haven’t read a Lucy Maud Montgomery book for probably 50 years – and, sadly, that’s not an exaggeration. Of course, like many Canadian women, I read and fell in love with Anne of Green Gables when I was a kid, but I haven’t ever revisited Anne’s island. The Blue Castle is the only novel Montgomery wrote which is not set in her beloved Prince Edward Island, and it’s only one of two adult novels she wrote.

Valancy Stirling lives with her widowed mother and Cousin Stickles in Deerwood, Ontario. Her life is joyless, and her mother, cousin and extended family are overbearing and critical. Every day is like the day before, and there is no hope that anything will ever change. What stings most of all is that “she had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid. No man had ever desired her.”

There is one bright spot in Valancy’s life and that is her “Blue Castle”.

Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle.

A trip to the doctor changes everything for Valancy. Suddenly she stops allowing her family to bully her and their reaction to her spirited responses is quite comical. She packs her bags and moves out to Old Abel Gay’s, the local handyman and town drunk, whose daughter, Cissy, a former classmate of Valancy’s, is dying. No one can quote believe it. They think she’s gone quite mad. But Abel is kind to her and Valancy finds a friend in Cissy. Suddenly the whole world opens up to Valancy, and truthfully, almost 100 years after The Blue Castle was published, her journey to independence is a delight.

If, like me, you haven’t read Montgomery in forever, I highly recommend this one. It’s charming, it’s funny, it’s sweet and, in many ways, Valancy is a modern heroine. I loved my time with her.

Cataract City – Craig Davidson

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Although I can’t say the subject matter of Canadian writer Craig Davidson’s Giller-nominated novel Cataract City was necessarily my thing (boys lost in the woods, greyhound racing, dog fights, bare knuckled fist fighting, etc), I found myself sinking whole heartedly into this story of two best friends: Owen Stucky and Duncan Digs. I think it’s because Davidson (who also writes horror novels under the name Nick Cutter, the only one of which I’ve read is The Troop) is such an excellent writer and his stories are so filled with nostalgia and melancholy and hope that it’s impossible not to really care about his characters even though their shenanigans might not be the usual fare for a woman in her late middle age.

Craig and Duncan live in Cataract City (aka Niagara Falls), a city which they seem to love and loathe in equal measure. When the novel opens, Duncan is just getting out of the Kingston Penitentiary after serving 2912 nights in prison. Of those nights, Duncan tells us, “two were the longest: the first and the last.” When he gets back to his parents’ house, he pries up a loose floorboard in his bedroom closet and from the cavity under the floor, takes out an old cigar box, filled with the treasures of his youth. The mementos spark his memories and the novel begins its meandering narrative, told in the voices of both Duncan and his childhood friend, Owen.

As described by the boys, Cataract City is a place where dreams go to die. Owen says “If you grew up in Cataract City and earned a university degree, chances are you left town. If you grew up in Cataract City and managed to finish high school, chances are you took a job at the dry docks, Redpath Sugar, the General Motors plant in St. Catherines or the Bisk.” Both the boys’ fathers work at the Bisk, the Nabisco plant, and their “dads carried the smell of their lines home with them.”

The city of your birth was the softest trap imaginable. So soft you didn’t even feel how badly you were snared – how could it be a trap when you knew its every spring and tooth?

Duncan and Owen meet when they are ten; even though they “both lived on Rickard Street and went to the same school” they had never spoken to each other. When another boy tackles Owen one day in the playground, Duncan comes to his rescue and the two boys bond over their shared love of wrestling. It’s wrestling that gets the boys into their first scrape.

Cataract City bounces back and forth between then and now, changing narrators effortlessly. Although the boys take different roads in life (Owen becomes a cop after a knee injury squashes his chances to play professional basketball and Duncan, well, he ends up in jail), the two never stop caring for each other. The melancholic nostalgic seeps into Davidson’s story and it’s hard not to be reminded of days gone by when even the characters long to

be kids again, just for a while. Revoke for just one day our breaking bodies and tortured minds. I would haven given anything to spend one more day as we once had, even if it was one of those piss-away afternoons reading comic books in Owen’s basement while the rain clicked in the downspout like marbles.

I loved the journey these two take, some of it literal, some figurative. I loved the insights into friendship and family and love and memory. I loved all the references to Canadian things (The Beachcombers and Rowdy Roddy Piper). I loved the struggle to figure out what it all means in the end.

An instant in time, measurable in seconds, that acts as the hinge for everything you’ve ever done. Everything feeds into that moment: your backlog of experience and behaviours determine how you enter that moment and how you’ll walk away from it afterwards. Every way you’ve ever been hurt, every grievance nursed, every secret fear, those moments where you’ve stood up or stepped down and all the love in your body – it all matters when you reach the Point. It is all brought to bear.

The only other Davidson novel I’ve read is The Saturday Night Ghost Club and I really loved it. I will make a concerted effort to read his other work, for sure. Highly recommended.