Review of WINDFLOWER by Gabrielle Roy

3.5 Stars

I was introduced to Gabrielle Roy in high school when I read Rue Deschambault in French class; later in a Canadian literature class in university I read The Tin Flute and Where Rests the Water Hen.  Recently, I was browsing through my bookshelves and came across Windflower which I realized I had not read.  I decided to do so.

This short novel focuses on Elsa Kumachuk, an Inuit woman living in northern Quebec in the middle of the 20^th century.  She is raped by an American serviceman stationed in the area and gives birth to a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy whom she names Jimmy.  Because of her son’s dual heritage, Elsa is torn between raising her son according to traditional Inuit ways and the ways of the whites.

The novel was published in 1970, and it is a bit dated.  Elsa and her people are called Eskimos rather than Inuit and what is called Fort Chimo is now known as Kuujjuaq.  In its portrayal of motherhood and a society in transition however, the book is timeless.

The Inuit "with their indulgent natures" have a very easygoing parenting style, letting the child explore the world, as evidenced when Jimmy starts to walk.  Having adopted the parenting style she sees at the home of Madame Beaulieu, Elsa buys a playpen to restrict Jimmy’s movements.  Elsa’s family is aghast:  “Never before had such an interference with liberty been seen in an Eskimo family.  . . . it was not right to restrict a little child who had just discovered the delight of being able to take himself wherever he wanted to go on his own two feet.”  Elsa dresses her son only in blue and gives him a bath at the exact same time every day:  “From the white men, it seemed to her, she had learned much that was excellent – for instance to get up early, to rush all day scarcely ever dawdling any more, to take up tasks by the clock and not by the inclination of the moment.”

Later, Elsa decides to entirely remove herself and Jimmy from the community with its “endless increase of constraints.”  She moves across the river to live with her uncle who has self-isolated and lives a traditional Inuit life; in fact, he considers anyone who lives in Fort Chimo as “’a slave living in captivity.’”  Unfortunately, though both Jimmy and Elsa are happier living simply, the laws of the white man curtail their freedom.

The idea of being held captive by materialism is emphasized.  The pastor warns Elsa that “one could not have everything one wanted in this life and freedom too” because he fears that she has “’embarked on that endless road of never quite enough possessions.’”  When she gets the luxury of electricity, it means she feels compelled to work “far into the evening.”  Eventually she agrees with the pastor:  “the less one owned the better.  Her princely hut and the luxury in which she had lived now seemed to her shackles.” 

From the beginning, the reader knows that the book will not have a happy ending.  Elsa’s love for her child is unquestionable but, like her mother, Elsa is caught “between the cruel blades of the times:  what to change, what to keep?”  Despite its pervasive sadness, this is a worthwhile read.

Summer Reading Suggestions

Here's my latest article for my hometown newspaper - some suggestions for summer reading: 

https://madvalleycurrent.com/2020/06/23/ten-books-for-summer-reading/

10 Books for Summer Reading

Some summer days are warm and sunny and others are cool and rainy, but all summer days are perfect for reading.  Here are some suggestions for books to take to your favourite reading spot. 

 A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is a perfect read for our times when terms like ‘social distancing’ and ‘self-isolation’ are part of everyone’s vocabulary.  Count Alexander Rostov is given a life sentence of house arrest:  he will be killed if he ever leaves the confines of Moscow’s Metropol Hotel.  The novel spans 32 years during which Rostov makes his whole world out of the hotel and the people in it.  At the end, you’ll wish you could meet this gentleman.

To people whose books of choice are mysteries, I’d recommend How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona, an American-Canadian writer who appropriately sets the story “in a small fishing town a stone’s throw from Canada.”  Leo Lucchi takes his sons for a walk in the woods where, shortly after calling the police about finding a young boy, Vera Gusev goes missing.  Do Leo and the boys know something about Vera’s disappearance or is her husband responsible?  For the reader, there’s a mystery to solve and a question to answer:  What would you do in a similar situation? 

Readers who prefer romances might consider Broken Man on a Halifax Pier by Lesley Choyce.  This is a love story about two middle-aged people, each of whom comes with baggage.  Though not entirely light-hearted, there is humour.   From the beginning, you’ll be humming Stan Rogers’ “Barrett’s Privateers” and tasting the salt of the Atlantic. 

If you like historical fiction, Days without End by Sebastian Barry is a must-read.  The famine in Ireland motivates Thomas McNulty to immigrate to the U.S. where he meets John Cole.  The two become saloon entertainers before fighting in the Indian Wars and the Civil War.  They also adopt a Sioux orphan whom they name Winona.  The novel is action-packed but is also a story about friendship and love.  Recently, a sequel was released:  A Thousand Moons.  Winona is the focus of this follow-up.  She lives on a hardscrabble farm with her makeshift family which includes Thomas, John, an army buddy, and two freed slaves.  Winona’s life changes dramatically when she is attacked.

If family sagas appeal to you, you can’t go wrong with The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.  It focuses on two siblings who cannot forget their childhoods in the grandiose mansion from which they are evicted by their evil stepmother.  The once-wealthy brother and sister are thrown into poverty and have only each other.  Their bond saves them but impedes their moving forward.  Another family saga worth reading is The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames.  An unnamed family member tells the story of two sisters before and after they emigrate from Italy to the U.S.  A rift develops between the two sisters who were once inseparable, and the family member sets out to unravel the reasons for their estrangement. 

Those who like books with thematic depth should try Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips.  It begins with the abduction of two young girls on Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula.  In 12 interconnected stories, we learn how this abduction impacts the lives of other women and how so much attention is given to finding the girls, as opposed to the virtually non-existent search for an Indigenous girl who went missing four years earlier.   It brings to mind the plight of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women.  Another serious book is The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.  It is a timely read because it addresses the mistreatment blacks receive from police and the criminal justice system.  Two boys are sentenced to a juvenile reformatory where they are subjected to brutal punishments.  The book is based on documented occurrences in a real Florida reform school. 

                                                                                               

One final recommendation:  Love by Roddy Doyle.  Just released (June 23), it can be summarized as a pub crawl by two middle-aged Irishmen.  Two friends reunite after 40 years and revisit old haunts and discuss their lives.  It’s a challenging read because of meandering dialogue with unconventional formatting, but it’s full of humour and (some rather drunken) meditations on love. 

Whether in the backyard, at the cottage, on the beach, or in a boat in the middle of a lake, may you have many hours of enjoyable reading. 

Complete reviews of all these books can be found on my blog:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/.

Review of LOVE by Roddy Doyle (New Release)

4 Stars

Two middle-aged Irishmen go into a pub and into another pub and . . .  

Davy, who has lived in England for virtually his entire adult life, has returned to Dublin to visit his elderly father and contacted Joe, a friend from his youth.  The two revisit old haunts and discuss their lives.  During their pub crawl, Joe reveals he has left his wife Trish for Jessica, a woman with whom he was infatuated almost 40 years earlier.  It is obvious that Davy also has something significant happening in his life as he keeps checking his cellphone for messages, but it is only at the end that he tells Joe what that is. 

The narrative is virtually all dialogue; think of Waiting for Godot or Night Boat to Tangier - also penned by Irish writers.  There is no doubt that Doyle has an ear for dialogue because the conversation of two inebriated Irishmen is spot-on.  It could be said that the dialogue flows like the beer they keep ordering and drinking.  They swear a lot and often use Irish slang; for example, I learned that the jacks means “toilet” and yoke means “thing”.  Davy and Joe alternate between serious discussions and hilarious banter and, the more they drink, the more their conversation becomes circular and incoherent.

Actually, reading the book often feels like being the sober non-drinker listening to the conversation of people becoming more and more intoxicated.  At times it becomes tiresome.  Causing some confusion is the lack of conventional punctuation.  Quotation marks are not used; only em dashes are used, and they indicate both dialogue and interrupted dialogue.  Perhaps it’s only because I read a galley, but both men often speak in the same line.  Dialogue tags are not always used, so I often had to re-check who was saying what. 

The topic which occupies most of their time is Joe’s decision to leave his wife, whom he claims he loves, for a woman he knew briefly when he was a young man.  He grasps for analogies to explain his decision both to Davy and to himself.  In his explanations, he contradicts himself so it is not always clear what parts of his story are true and which have been embellished for effect.  Certainly, when Joe speaks of his first meetings with Jessica, Davy’s memories differ.  For instance, Joe claims that Davy was also smitten with Jessica, but Davy says he liked another girl named Alice:  “And I remember, Alice didn’t like [Jessica].  I remember, it had helped me to like Alice, to reach for her hand.” 

As the title clearly indicates, the theme of the novel is love and its many forms we experience in our lives.  There’s obviously lust which seemed to be Joe and Davy’s focus when they were young men.  Via flashbacks, we witness their love for the women who became their wives; those relationships start with romance and passion but over time have shifted to companionship.  The two men discuss their love for their children, and Davy ponders his love for his father.  The book emphasizes the difficulty in expressing feelings:  “There is a reason why men don’t talk about their feelings.  It’s not just that it’s difficult, or embarrassing.  It’s almost impossible.  The words aren’t really there.”

Of course, it’s the love demonstrated in their friendship that takes centre stage.  The two men have not been very close for almost four decades, and throughout the evening, Davy finds himself feeling differently about Joe:  at times, he is contemptuous of Joe’s choices and so deliberately provokes him.  More than once, he thinks that he will never bother to meet with him again.  He alternates between being interested and being bored.  Joe often seems to resent Davy, but in the end is unquestionably supportive. 

Naturally, because this is a Roddy Doyle novel, there is humour.  The first meeting between Davy and Faye is hilarious because Faye is very outspoken.  Because the two friends are nearing their sixties, they discuss aging.  Joe offers “Advice for the agein’ man.  Never waste an erection, never trust a fart, never pass a jacks.”

This book will not be for everyone, certainly not for anyone who wants a novel with plot.  Despite my occasional frustration with the meandering dialogue with its unconventional formatting, I found myself intrigued with their meditations on love.  I wanted to know how their evening would end, and I’m glad I persevered because the ending is perfect, both emotionally and thematically. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

Review of YOU DON'T KNOW ME by Sara Foster (New Release)

3 Stars

While on vacation in Thailand, Noah Carruso meets Alice Pryce.  A mutual attraction leads to a passionate affair.  Unfortunately, Noah must return home to Australia because he will have to testify at an inquest into the disappearance of Lizzie Burdett 12 years earlier.  Lizzie was the girlfriend of Noah’s older brother Tom who has long been suspected of knowing something about Lizzie’s fate because of an argument the night of her disappearance, an argument that Noah witnessed.  Noah eventually tells Alice about Lizzie, and Alice reveals a secret about her family, but neither tells the entire truth for fear of destroying their relationship.

The book is marketed as a thriller, but it is much more of a romance.  Though there is a mystery and there are certainly elements of a family drama, it is the romance that takes precedence.  I am not a romance fan so I found myself, especially at the beginning, losing interest.  Love-at-first-sight relationships are especially irksome to me. 

Chapters alternate between Alice and Noah, but they do not emerge as fully developed characters because they think so much about each other.  It is difficult to connect with characters who are so infatuated.  Both are consumed by guilt and shame (and Noah also by anger) so they are not the most engaging of people.

The pace at the beginning is almost glacial.  Only once the inquest begins does the pace pick up.  Then there’s a scene where everything seems to happen at once, including an overly dramatic confession.  That confession is not convincing.  The identity of the guilty was not a surprise to this reader so it is unbelievable that so many people were misled for so long.  Narcissism is a motivation for murder?  An 18-year-old would behave as Lizzie did that night? 

Parts of the novel are repetitive.  Tom bullied Noah when they were boys and every encounter between the two of them in the present just shows more of Tom’s aggressiveness (so any efforts to suggest a possible reconciliation are unconvincing).  The meetings between Alice and Noah always involve much more sex than real communication (so the true depth of their relationship is questionable). 

This is not a bad book; it is just not the intense thriller I expected.  There is little that is particularly memorable, so I’d recommend it for a light summer holiday/beach read.  

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher.

Review of SAVING RUBY KING by Catherine Adel West (New Release)

4 Stars

Alice King is murdered, leaving her daughter Ruby to live with Lebanon, her violent father.  Ruby’s best friend, Layla Potter, is determined to protect Ruby from Lebanon.  Layla would like the help of her father Jackson, pastor of their church, but he always defends Lebanon whom he has known since childhood.  Undeterred, Layla persists in her mission to save Ruby from herself and from Lebanon, but ends up discovering dangerous secrets which may tear apart her own family.

The novel is set in Chicago’s South Side in both the present and the 1960s.  Besides the dual timelines, there are multiple perspectives; Ruby, Layla, Lebanon, and Jackson are among the first-person narrators.  The most interesting viewpoint is provided by Calvary Hope Christian Church which is given a consciousness and a voice. 

What most impressed me is the characterization.  All characters are multi-dimensional with complex histories.  Lebanon, for example, is definitely one of the bad guys, but once we learn about his upbringing, we cannot but have some understanding and sympathy for him.  There are also good characters whose actions show them to be flawed.  These complicated, very human characters leave readers questioning how they would behave if given the same background and placed in similar circumstances. 

The book examines inter-generational trauma.  The trauma suffered by Lebanon’s mother affects her relationship with her son so his becoming a violent husband and father is not surprising.  Lebanon even admits, “whatever haunts [my mother], haunts me.”  He also believes that Ruby will be much like him:  “[Ruby] has that same look in her eyes for me, the same one I have for [my mother].  And I know that girl can do something about it.  And the hate Ruby has for me is the same flavor I have for [my mother].”

The novel also focuses on how people are often complicit in domestic violence by doing nothing.  Most people in the church knew that Alice was beaten by Lebanon, but everyone looks the other way.  Lebanon’s mother tells him, “’[Alice] went to church and pretended things was fine and you stood by and acted like you was a good person, a holy person and people in church pretended right along with y’all.’”  Layla admits the same thing:  “The people at church glossed their eyes over bruises and swallowed the poorly explained reasons of why these things always seemed to happen to Alice.  ‘It ain’t any of my business,’ was a common refrain.  But now, they shake their heads and cry their tears, wondering how this could’ve happened.” 

Layla decides not to live in denial because unless someone acts, nothing changes:  “The easiest thing to do is nothing and we were all guilty of it.   My parents.  People in church.  Our community.  We sang our songs and prayed our prayers and talked in pleasantries, but very few of us really knew the business of the other.  Though gossip would flow, secrecy also flourished.  All the evil we find and leave be, we can’t be surprised when it visits, shows up all sharp teeth and vileness.”  The consequences of doing nothing are repeated:  “We mind our own business.  What goes on in your house.  Stays in your house.  But.  It.  Doesn’t.  It doesn’t stay.  It bleeds into the next home and the next block, the next family.”

The impact of secrets is also explored.  Jackson has a terrible secret which he desperately hopes is never discovered.  In order to keep that secret, he must lie and thereby ends up distancing himself from his family.  That secret also means he must remain loyal to someone other than those he should support.  Jackson realizes that “more things than love bind people together, secrets and lies make just as hearty a bond as love.”  Ruby admits that she has lied to keep the secret of Lebanon’s violence:  “I did what I was taught.  I lied about my pain.  To cover Lebanon’s abuse.  To maintain my family’s image.”  As a result, she receives no help and remains “collateral damage of shame and shadow.”

This is not a light-hearted book.   It touches on many serious topics:  domestic violence, sexual abuse, racial discrimination, murder.  There are some melodramatic scenes and some intrusive passages about the history and geography of Chicago but, overall, the book is a compelling, emotionally intense read.  Saving Ruby King is an exceptional debut novel. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

Review of THE GIRL WHO READS ON THE MÉTRO by Christine Féret-Fleury

2.5 Stars

This quick-read novella argues that a book can change a person’s life.

Juliette, though she lives in the exciting city of Paris, has a dull office job.  Her passion is reading books and watching people reading books on the Paris subway.  One day she finds a strange bookshop called Books Unlimited where she meets the owner Soliman and his daughter Zaide.  Soliman recruits Juliette as a book passeur whose task it is to observe people in order to give them the gift of a perfect book for that moment in their lives.  Juliette soon discovers that the life she may change the most is her own.

I chose to read this book because it’s a book about books.  I love books about books; unfortunately, I found this one just odd.  All the characters are quirky but flat.  The protagonist is strange.  For a person who is supposedly obsessed with books, Juliette spends very little time reading.  The title of this novel should be The Girl who Watches People Read on the Métro.  Instead of reading, she occupies herself with imagining what is in the books people are reading. 

The theme is that books can transform lives:  “all the world’s diseases – and all the remedies – were concealed between the covers of books.  That in books you found betrayal, solitude, murder, madness rage – everything that could grab you by the throat and ruin your life, not to mention others’ lives, and that sometimes crying over printed pages could save a person’s life.  That finding your soul mate in the middle of an African novel or a Korean tale helped you realize the extent to which human beings suffer from the same ills, the extent to which we are alike, and that it is perhaps possible to talk to one another – to smile, caress one another, exchange signs of recognition, and signs – to try to harm others less from day to day.”

There is another book set in Paris with a similar theme which I would recommend over this one.  The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George has as its protagonist a pharmacie littéraire who recommends books “to treat all the emotions for which no other remedy exists” (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2015/07/review-of-little-paris-bookshop-by-nina.html). 

 And I have mentioned in the past a non-fiction book, The Novel Cure:  An A-Z of Literary Remedies written by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, which prescribes specific fiction for life’s ailments.

If I were a passeur, I doubt that I’d be gifting this book to anyone because it is not especially inspiring.  The best part of the book is the suggested reading list at the end. 

Schatje's Shelves: One of Canada's Top 25 Book Blogs

This blog has been chosen as one of the top 25 Canadian book blogs.  See the complete list at https://blog.feedspot.com/canadian_book_bloggers/

Review of THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIETOWN by Connie Schultz (New Release)

3.5 Stars

At the end of the 1950s, Ellie Fetters wants to be a nurse and Brick McGinty plans to attend college on a basketball scholarship.  When Ellie becomes pregnant, those hopes and plans are revised.  Ellie and Brick marry and eventually have two children, Samantha and Reilly.  Covering most of the second half of the 20^th century, the book focuses on the marriage’s ups and downs and its effects on the children, especially Sam.

Character development is the strongest element in the novel.  We learn about Ellie and Brick’s backgrounds so we understand the reasons behind the decisions they make, though we may not agree with them.  For example, Ellie is raised by her paternal grandparents because her parents abandoned her.  The choices she makes for her family are determined by these childhood experiences.  Likewise, Sam witnesses the difficulties in her parents’ marriage, most the result of Brick’s behaviour, so she vows to avoid her mother’s disappointments. 

All of the characters are flawed; no one emerges as totally good or totally villainous.  A man’s choices are reprehensible but the shattering of his dreams arouses our compassion.  A woman may be a home wrecker but her difficult life after her father abandoned the family cannot but get our sympathy. 

As the title suggests, the focus is on women and how their roles evolved over 50 years.  For generations, there was a great divide between what women wanted and what was expected and offered to them.  In the 1940s and 1950s for example, Brick’s mother gives birth to twelve children and lives with a violent man, but there is no birth control and never a suggestion that she can leave the abusive relationship though everyone knows about it.  Ellie knows that as an unmarried, pregnant woman, she will be shunned; though she wants to be a nurse, she isn’t even allowed to graduate high school because she is pregnant.  Beginning in the 1960s, the women's movement and developments in contraception instigated changes in attitudes towards sex and made sexual equality a goal, so Sam has more sexual freedom and can focus on a career instead of marriage if she chooses to do so.  Ellie speaks of enjoying sex but being made to feel “’there was something wrong with me.  I don’t want Sam to feel that way.  I want her to know it’s normal.’”

The theme of the novel is that people change because they seldom get the life they planned.  Early on, Ellie thinks, “Everybody starts out as one kind of person and ends up being somebody else.  Life does that to you, just as a river has its way with a stone.  Even when you don’t notice it, life is rearranging you.”  Later, Sam talks to a friend about the things that happen in a person’s life:  “’They’re like tornados that pick you up in one place and drop you off somewhere else.  And there’s no turning back, no undoing it.’”  Another woman tells her adopted son that dreams are always modified by reality:  “’nobody gets the life they planned.  We get what God plans, and we spend the rest of our lives trying not to hold it against him.’”  Ellie tells Sam much the same thing:  “’We want to think there are rules in life.  That as long as we follow them, everything will be all right.  And then God blows up your plans.  Blows them to smithereens.  And you’re left picking up the pieces and putting your life back together as best as you can.’” 

Another theme is the need for friendship amongst women.  Ellie muses, “Marriage was often a lonely business, she was learning.  Every wife needed her women friends to keep her strong.”  Later, a woman tells Ellie that women need women friends:  “’We’re with each other from the beginning to the very end, and everything in between.  We understand each other.  It’s instinctual.’”  And Ellie does conclude that “In her own life, it was women who sustained her.  All those coffee hours, the camaraderie of canasta, the support she got at church.  She still prayed to God and talked to Jesus, but Mary knew her heart.”

The book could use some shortening; there were times when it seemed overly long.  The author does realistically portray life for the working class in a blue collar town, but she also seems concerned to add repeated references to historical events like the assassination of JFK, the Kent State shootings, and the Vietnam War, though these events have no direct impact on the plot. 

There were things in the book that irked me.  For example, Ellie complains to Brick, “’I just don’t understand why you’re allowed to pick up your diploma and I can’t even clean out my own locker. . . . I didn’t expect to be able to go to graduation, but I’ve done all the work.  I thought I’d be able to take the final tests and still get my diploma.’”  When she says this, no one in their families knows about the pregnancy so how does the school administration know?  Brick never plans where they will live for the first three months of their marriage and he and Ellie discuss this problem only on the last night of their honeymoon?  And does everyone have an adventurous, unconventional aunt who will come to the rescue?

This book reminded me to be grateful to be living in a time when social mores have changed and women’s options are more in keeping with their dreams and desires.

Note:    I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.  

Review of THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett

4 Stars

This family saga focuses on Danny Conroy and his sister Maeve.  As children, the two live in the grandiose mansion his father Cyril bought fully furnished as a gift for his wife Elna.  When Danny is 3 and Maeve is 10, Elna disappears.  Cyril then marries Andrea, a young widow with 2 daughters.  She proves to be the wicked stepmother of the tale, especially when Cyril dies and she banishes her stepchildren from the house.  Once evicted, Maeve and Danny often park on the street with a view of their former home and discuss their past in the house.

Danny is the first person narrator; as a middle-aged adult, he looks back at his childhood and early adulthood.  His narrative jumps around in time.  As he describes events, he also reflects on those events so childhood memories are subjected to mature analysis. 

For the longest time, the two siblings resist letting go of their painful memories of events in the house:  “like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captive of our migratory patterns” and “made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”  For years and years, “the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country.”  Celeste, Danny’s wife, has little patience with their obsessive nostalgia; she tells Danny, “’It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel.  You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get.  Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?’”  Only later do they realize that keeping the house as a shrine of their resentment means they are not moving on with their lives:  “we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.” 

The novel questions whether the past can ever be accurately remembered.  At one point, Danny asks Maeve, “’Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?’”  Maeve claims to see the past clearly but Danny argues, “’we overlay the present onto the past.  We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.’”  When it comes to Andrea, Danny wonders, “’why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?’”  Their memories are selective and tinged by a lack of understanding; only later in their lives do they come to understand the behaviour of their parents and come to terms with the neglect and abandonment they experienced.  As an adult, Danny can think about his taciturn father and admit, “I had never thought about him as a child.  I had never asked him about the war.  I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him.”  He wishes he had “thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder.” 

The sibling bond is another theme in the book.  After Elna leaves and after Cyril dies, Maeve looks after her brother.  She becomes his surrogate parent, and he seldom questions her decisions about his life.  For instance, he wants to be a real estate developer like his father, but Maeve tells him he must go to medical school to liquidate the educational trust set aside for him and his two stepsisters so there will be nothing left for the girls. 

Danny loves his sister, more even than he loves his wife.  Maeve is his closest friend and confidant, so it is understandable that Maeve and Celeste do not like each other.  Danny comments, “I had picked the woman who had committed herself to smoothing my path and supporting my life.  The problem was that Maeve thought she was taking care of that herself.” 

I found this book to be totally absorbing.  There is a line in it I will long remember.  Cyril gives his wife a mansion as a gift, not realizing that it represents all that she does not want, so he is described as “a man who had never met his own wife.”

Review of A THOUSAND MOONS by Sebastian Barry

4 Stars

I read Days Without End and enjoyed it very much, so was anxious to read this sequel.  Though not as masterful as the award-winning Days Without End, it is still a very satisfying read.

The narrator is Winona, the Lakota orphan girl who was rescued and adopted by Thomas McNulty and John Cole.  She lives with them in West Tennessee on a hardscrabble farm owned by Lige Magan, an old army buddy, and two freed slaves, Rosalee Bouguereau and her brother Tennyson.  Winona is beaten and raped, and though she has no clear memory of the event, she suspects that the perpetrator was Jas Joski, a store clerk who thinks of Winona as his fiancée.  A subsequent attack on Tennyson has Winona dressing as a young man and riding to a Confederate renegade camp to seek justice, “To do something to right things immediately.”  That trip changes Winona’s life even more.

The novel is set in the early 1870s.  Post-Civil War, defeated Confederates are agitating, stirring racial violence.  Farmers who lost their slave labour are especially resentful of freed blacks.  “In Tennessee . . . there were thousands of aggrieved souls . . . Men so disgruntled by the war they couldn’t breathe the air of peace, it choked them.”  Winona is a clerk for Briscoe, a kind and liberal-minded lawyer, who says, “’The time is so dangerous that the law is barely possible.’” 

Of course, the times are especially dangerous for Rosalee and Tennyson and for Winona.  Winona points out that she has less status than Rosalee:  “she was a slave before the war and a slave is low down in the eyes of white folks of course.  So I was lower than that.”  Even in the eyes of the law, she has no rights:  “There was no crime in hitting an Indian . . . Lige Magan went to the lawyer Briscoe . . . for affirmation of that and he affirmed it.”  Later, Briscoe says, “’An Indian ain’t a citizen and the law don’t apply’” as it would for a white person.

A major theme is the persecution and genocidal destruction of Native Americans.  Several times Winona refers to her not being considered human:  “in the minds of the townspeople I was not a human creature but a savage.  Closer to a wolf than a woman. . . . I was less than the least of them.   I was less than the whores in the whorehouse, except maybe for them I was just a whore, in the making.  I was less than the black flies that followed everyone in the summer.  Less than the old shit thrown to the backs of the houses.  Just something so less you could do what you wanted to it, bruise it, hit it, shoot it, skin it.”  Winona’s entire family was slaughtered:  “We were nothing so to kill us all was just the killing of nothing so it meant nothing.  It wasn’t a crime to kill an Indian because an Indian wasn’t anything.”   She ponders the consequences of people being considered less than nothing:  “I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed?”  Winona speaks of the story of her people being “the saddest story that ever was on the earth. . . . That’s a weight of sadness has crushed many a head.  Ever seen a drunken Indian, ever seen an Indian in rags?  That’s what happens when a king is heaped with sadness.”

The book is very much a coming-of-age story.  Early on, Winona decides to take control of her life:  “There was a time for your father and mother to fight your battles . . . and there was a time to fight them for yourself and I had reached that time I reckoned.”  She realizes she must be brave, “to shuck off fear and have the courage of a thousand moons,” because “you have to meet the great force of the flood, or the tornado, or the great storm, with an equal great force.  To build up what has been torn down and to put back in their places what has been rended from their places and parted from their hooks.”  Near the end, at a pivotal moment, she resolves to “sort things out for myself” and tells her family, “’You the folks I attend to best in this world . . . but now I ask you to sit you down at that table and I will try and tell you what I am going to do.’”  She is fierce in her determination:  “I instructed them with my sternest voice they were to do nothing on my account.  They were to let me do for myself.”

The book is not flawless.  The relationship between Peg and Winona is problematic.  Peg is not sufficiently developed so one wonders why Winona loves her, and Winona seems unable to explain why she loves Peg.  Poetic phrasing does not help:  “If you could make honey hover in the air it would be Peg.  If you could take a sliver of the wildest river and make it a person it would be Peg.”  The author seems to want the reader to view their love as a parallel to Thomas and John’s (“Thou shalt hope to love like them”), but there is insufficient development of the former to make this credible. 

Another weakness is the ending.  It seems forced and rushed.  The identities of the guilty are revealed in one conversation?  Realistically, would such a conversation even take place?  And much of the suspense readers would feel about Winona’s fate is compromised by the fact that they are told at the beginning of the novel that Winona is speaking of events that transpired in the past:  “If I say that here following are the real events, you will remember that they are described at a great distance from the time of their happening.”

As usual with Barry’s fiction, the style is very lyrical.  For instance, Thomas has “the anger of the righteous angels.  He knew the absolute menace of the world.  He knew it was a place so knotted with evil that good could only hope to unknot a tiny few threads of it.”  John “was a shadow person – a place of shadows.  All as gentle as a child with me and all as fierce as a buffalo in battle.  John Cole, the keel of my boat.  Thomas the oars and the sails.”  Descriptions of nature are particularly poetic:  “A high cold sky was speckled with stray blues and greys like a bird’s egg.  But a reluctant sunlight was trying to measure the height of the sky with long thin veins.”

This is not really a standalone novel.  There are many references to events in Days Without End but much is not explained.  There is little character development as regards Thomas and John so they may seem flat and almost too good to be believable if a reader does not have fuller knowledge of them from the previous novel.  Since Days Without End is such a magnificent book, treat yourself and read it and then follow up with A Thousand Moons.