Category Archives: Jenny Boychuk

Winning novel’s captures war’s high cost

Lucky: A novel
By Kathryn Para
Published by Mother Tongue Publishing
213 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Kathryn Para’s debut novel and winner of The Great BC Novel Contest, Lucky: a novel, explores how we distance ourselves physically and mentally as a way to try to adapt to unthinkable tragedy and suffering.

Anika Lund is a photojournalist working on assignment in the war-torn Middle East when she meets Viva from Syria, a woman in search of her husband’s kidnapper, whom she believes to be in Fallujah, Iraq. Ani’s job is to take photos—of dying children, of broken buildings and dust—that will explain the state of the Middle East to westerners in a way words cannot.

Given the machine gun and the destruction of Murad’s house, Murad, perhaps, is the man she seeks, the one with ties to Zayid’s terrorist franchise that ripples through the Middle East. But on the ground, cradling his head, he looks less like a terrorist than an ordinary man. She takes another photograph of him, and the acid in her stomach lifts, swirls and threatens. Trembling comes next, followed by cold sweat. She lowers the camera and stows it in her bag. Maybe this trip will have been worth the effort. Maybe this time she has taken the photograph that will stop the war.

Ani joins Viva in hopes of finding the photographs that will change everything. Eventually, they are joined by a cocky journalist named Alex, with whom Ani has fallen in love. Together, and well-aware of the dangers that await, they devise an intricate plan to reach their destination. But when Viva’s search for her husband’s kidnapper grows fiercer, something terrible happens in Fallujah.

The novel alternates between the past in the Middle East, and the present in Vancouver, B.C.  Each thread is written in the present tense, which allows the reader to witness the urgency of Ani’s time abroad as she relives it. Para has done something structurally fascinating: like a camera lens, the story fluctuates between zooming the reader uncomfortably far into Ani’s mind post-trauma in Vancouver, and zooming back out to create distance as Ani, Viva and Alex fight for their lives in Fallujah. The pieces of the story that take place in Vancouver are written in first-person point-of-view, from Ani’s perspective, while the parts set in the Middle East are written in a limited third-person point of view, also from Ani’s perspective.

Back in Vancouver, Ani struggles to live with what has happened. Her therapist prescribes a concoction of different anti-depressants and tranquilizers, which Ani mixes with alcohol in an  attempt to escape reality. Then, at a party, Ani’s publisher introduces her to another journalist, Levi, who she thinks might be able to help Ani with her book, to persuade her to open the box of photos she can’t bring herself to look at. Levi is mystified by Ani’s brokenness and, though it isn’t long before the two become locked together physically, she won’t let him into her mind to see what she saw.  By the time a reader reaches the end of the novel, it is not difficult to see why.

Levi finds me later under a tree in the park. I explain that the willow roped me, twisted me around and hog-tied me like a calf, hid me under the dead leaves. My sweet Levi. My swagger man in his tight jeans, my cool-word man with his Mac computer, my investigator man with his laid-back methods. He waits for people to open themselves up. He’s a tricky man.

While the ambitious structure is successful, Ani’s internal first-person voice is much more engaging and interesting. The contrast between voices is obvious but not jarring, and mirrors the premise so well that Para can easily get away with it.

Lucky explores notions of reality and memory and how we skew them in order to try to move forward—or even just exist. The novel succeeds portraying both the deterioration of a civilization and the singular self—and shows how we continue to do the enemy’s work long after we’ve escaped them.

Jenny Boychuk is a BFA graduate about to launch post-grad studies in writing.

Novel posits bleak future

Debut novel Swarm

By Lauren Carter
Published by Brindle & Glass

288 pages, $19.95

 

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Capitalism has fallen. The government hardly exists except as whispers in condemned buildings. There are no jobs and everyone is poor. There is violence, rebellion. People have to quickly adapt to an older way of life—when living and surviving meant the same thing.

Lauren Carter’s first novel, Swarm, is narrated by Sandy, who lives in a previously abandoned house on a rural and isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and dying friend, Thomson. Sandy and Marvin fish, hunt, farm and keep bees in order to survive.

         “Things would never be what they were—brightly lit supermarkets with asparagus from Peru and frozen pasta in microwave-safe plastic bowls—”

         “What are our battles? I could have asked, but didn’t. I thought I already knew. Survival, putting food on the table.”

When Sandy, never able to have children, finds the footprints of a small girl in her garden, it sparks a search and a yearning for something much larger than the child herself. The neighbour’s baby sleeps, sickly, in a blue recycling box—but Sandy still wants nothing more than a daughter of her own. She is preoccupied with what makes up a life, but is unable to differentiate between her fantasies and her reality.

Sandy addresses her story to the elusive child, whom she has named Melissa, as the book alternates from her past in the city to her present island life. It seems fitting that, in a time of so much isolation, Carter has her protagonist tell the story to someone who may not even exist.

         “No matter what, I had to find you. You had to be real.”

The ambitious structure is effective in keeping up the pace of the novel, as well as in helping the reader understand how everything fell apart, and how all of those small collapses influence the characters’ present lives. This novel is terrifying because of how realistically Carter has built this dystopian world; it could very easily become our world in the near future. We are already seeing a lack of jobs and resources as the divide between rich and poor continues to grow larger in real life. Carter’s descriptions of this isolated island are easy to imagine—and it’s no doubt that the clear-eyed specificity comes from her upbringing in rural Blind River, Ontario.

I immediately identified with Sandy’s character, and I found myself asking the same questions she’s faced with: What do we risk for our ideals? How do you build a home from things you’ve never imagined or have never cared to? I found myself thinking about how I deal with my own unexpected realities. Though the naivety of Sandy’s character often annoyed me, it’s hard to judge her. When every day is a struggle to survive, it’s difficult to imagine that other stakes exist, but Carter corrects of this notion. Swarm is proof that, regardless of what our current world looks like, humans will always yearn for the same things: love, security, compassion, and companionship.

Carter’s debut reads like an elegy for an entire population, an entire planet. This somber world, paired with a wash of beauty in the prose, makes for a reading experience I can only compare to the blue hour of the day—something half-way between light and darkness.

         “It was too late. Despite whatever I’d once wanted in a life, I had made my reality.”

 

Jenny Boychuk is British Columbia writer and reviewer

 

 

 

 

Love’s Jazz can be painful

Love, & All That Jazz
By Laurie Lewis
Published by The Porcupine’s Quill

222 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

 How long are we supposed to wait for the ones we love? What happens when the years you’ve been apart equal how long you were together?  And when that number doubles?

 

Laurie Lewis’ memoir reminds us that, while we may use time to measure many things, it is not always an accurate way to measure love—if love can even be measured at all.  Lewis published her first book, Little Comrades (also a memoir), at the age of 81. Love, & All That Jazz acts as a sequel. She talks about discovering her love of writing late in life on her website:

“When you’ve lived a long time, as I have, it’s possible that you’ve had not just one life but several.”

 

            Lewis begins her  new memoir in 1950s New York City. She is in her early twenties and married to Sol, a “smart, honorable, kind” man, with whom she lives a content life; that is, until the day she walks past Gary Lewis, a jazz musician and future photographer for Pepsi-Cola, on the second floor of her apartment building. Neither can ignore the immediate attraction they feel for each other.

 

            It is summer when Lewis begins to see Gary, who is also married, in secret. They meet at bus stops, go for breakfast, and, eventually, Lewis finds herself in his apartment. A few weeks before Christmas, she leaves a note for Sol and sets off to begin her new life with Gary. Living in a tiny, cold studio apartment in Manhattan with hardly any furniture and little money, they are both happier than they could have imagined. Within the next year, they are married and their daughter Amanda is born.

 

            But while the first years are happy, things soon begin to turn and Lewis, who is heartbreakingly innocent and naïve, tries to support her husband through his drug addictions, alcoholism and mental illness. He cheats on her. He lies. He abuses. But still, her love sees him through every recovery, every relapse. Even when he stands before her as a stranger, she manages to see the man she fell in love with on the staircase. 

 

            Her compassion is evident even many years later, as she recounts how those years passed:

 

“Gary’s periods of serious illness run together in my mind. How hard to write about this, to sort out the memories, to make decisions about how much honesty, where, and when. I see things now so differently.”

 

            Lewis aptly describes the ‘50s and ‘60s NYC art scene with vibrancy and detail; she takes her readers into a time when Andy Warhol was “a talented and relatively unknown illustrator,” Ginsburg and Kerouac were reading in local bars, and Ray Charles was playing in California clubs.

 

            “There was Ray with his piano, the musicians grouped at the side rather formally, and the Raelettes in front of the band, the stage only slightly raised. Ray was perspiring and Gary thought he needed something to wipe his brow, so he passed him a silk handkerchief. … The Raelettes swaying, vocal backup, all the love and energy in the room. Gary’s photographs of them were more soulful than the ones for Pepsi-Cola World, certainly. This was his spiritual home.”

 

            Eventually, strong-willed and independent Lewis steps outside of her relationship and builds a life for herself and Amanda in Ontario. She becomes a single working mother in a time when daycare doesn’t exist, and the space she gives her marriage will last far longer than the seven years she and Gary were together. Lewis questions what it means to build a life, and what happens when you are living a kind of life you didn’t intend to. Are there people we are meant to be with no matter what? And why do we keep coming back to them?

 

Lewis’ prose is an easy kind of beauty, and the story reads as if she sat down and typed it out within a single afternoon. She is humble, honest and likeable, which makes it difficult not to care about her story and her life. Even the ending lends itself to the book’s humanness and honesty; it is strangely satisfying:  “But I have to get to the end of this book. Have to finish it now, because I’m sick of writing about the past. I’d like to wake up tomorrow and exist in the day that is, whatever it is.”

 

I think the best books are ones that manage to both end and begin on the last page.

 

Jenny Boychuk lives, reads and writes in Sorrento, B.C. 

 

 

Author’s prose elegant but avoids risk

The Eliot Girls
By Krista Bridge
Douglas and McIntyre, 336 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

There are books you pick up and, after reading a few chapters, they begin to feel achingly familiar.

Krista Bridge has created the fictional-based-on-fact George Eliot Academy, an all-girls private school in Toronto. The school sits regally atop a hill, surrounded by iron gates; the wood floors are always polished, the soft orange glow of hanging lights reflecting off of them. The walls are lined with historic and influential women leaders. Ruth Brindle has taught in the Junior School since Eliot was founded by its strict, feminist principal, Larissa McAllister. Ruth dreamed of the day her daughter, Audrey, would be accepted into Eliot; but, after many tries at the entrance exams, it isn’t until Audrey is about to begin Grade 10 that she is finally admitted.

Ruth delights in seeing Audrey in her uniform for the first time, but Audrey is not so excitable—she is shy and uncertain of this image her mother has wished for her.

“Now, she required something more than imagination to help her effect this transfiguration, and here in the dimness, it was easier to impose on her image a quality that was not otherwise there.  The sensation was romantic, a fleeting escape, and she lingered before the mirror, letting her gaze drift in and out. Then she glanced down and remembered herself.”

As the story progresses, we learn that the integrity and morals Eliot was built upon act as mere scaffolding, and what the school holds inside is much more sinister and dark than Audrey could have imagined. It does not take long for a particular clique of pretty, mean girls to manipulate Audrey into doing their dirty work—though this still doesn’t make her accepted, it still doesn’t protect her from peer-pressure and bullying. It only buys her a little more time to be left alone in the shadow of her well-liked, beautiful mother.

“Female cattiness was a knowledge into which women were born, like the formation of language, the thousands of words saturating infant brains, lodging there with growing meaning until they are ready to emerge, allusive and unquestioning labels on an already known world. The surprise lay in how much it thrilled her, how its heat enfolded her: the unifying sensation of scorn, the closeness of it almost indistinguishable from love. Even more intimate, perhaps, than love.”

Ruth’s integrity is also tested by the handsome and intelligent Henry Winter, Eliot’s new English teacher. She finds herself questioning her marriage, and what exactly it is she had wanted in a life.

“She knew how it was supposed to go. You think of the fact that you shouldn’t be doing this. You think of what can go wrong. You think of the minutes, the seconds that remain for you to change your mind.”

In the end, both Audrey and Ruth are given the chance to own up to their mistakes. One will; one will not.

Bridge is successful in fleshing out the politics of private schools and rendering the image of the teenage girl trying to fit in. It is an accurate comment on the real-life issues our society is facing with bullying, how backwards teenage logic is: it doesn’t matter if you’re talented, if you’re friendly, if you’re pretty—no one is safe. The novel explores what it means to fit in and how we stretch ourselves to fit the lives we think we ought to have, how mothers mold their children into the people they think they ought to be, and how they try to mold themselves from the ideals of their own mothers.

Bridge’s sentences are elegant and well strung, as though each description is trimmed with fine lace—almost acting as a mask to the ugly occurrences within the school. The third person point of view is effective in acting as a study, an examination as it switches between Ruth and Audrey, and the transitions are seamless.

I wish Bridge had taken more risks with the book. It is a story we’ve seen before, many times, and there is potential for it to be something other than the well-known story of teenage acceptance. So the reader must look past the beauty, past the smiling teenage girls who spend their lunch hours rating their classmates’ looks out of ten on small scraps of paper—for even the prose is keeping up appearances.

Jenny Boychuk is an avid reader and recent BFA graduate. 

Leduc’s risks work brilliantly

The Miracles of Ordinary Men
By Amanda Leduc
ECW Press, 321 pages, $18.95
 
Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Amanda Leduc’s debut novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men, follows the lives of Delilah Greene, a young receptionist, and Sam, a thirty-something school teacher. The novel is written in parts and switches back and forth between the two characters; each of their stories unfolds separately over the course of ten chapters—until, inevitably, they meet each other.

Or perhaps it’s not the heartbreak that scares her, but the possibility. The possibility of a heart more than whole, or a life that reaches so far beyond what’s expected that you can’t see where it ends and forever begins.

***

“I wanted a small life,” Sam said, his voice low. The chance to touch a few lives, to love them deeply and carefully and well. To make mistakes and claw back from them a broken, humbled man, fusing back together.

Lilah left home as soon as she could to travel the world, leaving behind her dysfunctional mother and much younger brother, Timothy, who misses her terribly while she’s away. A decade or so later, Timothy is living on the streets of Vancouver and Lilah spends her afternoons looking for him. When she finds him, she tries to convince him to come home with her, to come see their dying mother who constantly worries about him. Timothy insists that Lilah doesn’t understand him, though the siblings’ love for each other is never in doubt. One afternoon, Lilah’s boss, Israel Riviera, asks her to dinner. This marks the beginning of an abusive relationship in which Lilah is confronted with her guilt, and seeks penance in every crack of Israel’s whip.

Meanwhile, Sam wakes one morning to find he has wings, which continue to develop over the course of a week. Few people can see the wings: a few priests, his cat, and one of his students. When he goes to a doctor, she tells him she can only see deep scars in his back. Then his mother dies unexpectedly. Sam, desperate for answers, reaches out to Father Jim, and alcoholic and the priest of his church when he was growing up. After the funeral, they spend their days questioning God, faith and the fine line between what makes a miracle and what makes a curse.

“You’ll know.” Father Jim reached across and took Sam’s plate and stacked it on top of his own. “And as to what you’ll do—well, that’s different, according to each and every man. Some of us are called to action and others to observe.”

Though the two stories read quite separately in the beginning, they come together masterfully in the end. Leduc’s choice of structure is risky, and it works.

Perhaps the novel’s greatest strength lies in which questions it seeks to answer and which it does not. What is the link between pain and the divine? Guilt and God? What are we meant to see, and what form does God take (if any)? Leduc never answers questions bigger than her characters—a humble and essential quality of the story.

Leduc has reimagined the homeless Vancouver street kid, the parent dying of cancer, the receptionist waiting for something bigger to happen. She has created characters we’ve met many times, but have never seen like this.

The poet Jack Gilbert wrote a poem in which there is the line, “Stripping everything down until being was visible.” This is exactly what Leduc has accomplished in this heartbreaking novel. And God, did she do it well.

Jenny Boychuk is a Victoria writer and reviewer.

Third-person narrative distances reader

Caught
By Lisa Moore
House of Anansi, 304 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Lisa Moore roots her readers firmly in 1978 Canada in her new novel–problem is, reading this book often felt like being stuck, then trying to run through mud.

Perhaps this is fitting for the beginning of the book as the protagonist, David Slaney, escapes from prison on the east coast, where he’s been held for four years after trying to smuggle marijuana from Colombia to Newfoundland via boat. Slaney runs through the muck and woods in search of a logging road, where he has been told a driver will come for him. He will either escape, or be caught. But he has to go. “There are mistakes that stand in the centre of an empty field and cry out for love.”

Slaney hasn’t escaped to live a quiet life in hiding. He needs to get to his friend and accomplice, Hearn, in Vancouver. He wants to try again, to go back to Colombia. The marijuana will make them millionaires. But it’s not just the money that’s at stake: 25-year-old Slaney wants to get Jennifer, the love of his life, and her daughter back. He wants to be free.

Readers follow Slaney across Canada, down to South America, then back again—with many stops and starts along the way. I often felt like there were many false endings, while the starts felt glazed over. It seemed as though Moore was planning the route as she was writing. She would leave Slaney in a place for a while, in which nothing would happen, and then in the next chapter we were on the road again. As I read, I felt as though I was always missing the middle of things. There is also a great emotional distance from the reader and Slaney, as the story is written in third person. I wanted to be rooting for this character and, even though he’s an anti-hero; I didn’t want him to get caught. But I felt a little too distant from him to care.

But the novel is worth reading for writing like this:

He whispered to himself. He spoke a stream of profanity and he said a prayer to the Virgin Mary, in whom he half believed. Mosquitoes touched him all over. They settled on his skin and put their fine things into him and they were lulled and bloated and thought themselves sexy and near death.

Moore’s characters are fascinating and full of flaws you can’t help but love as soon as you’re introduced to them.

‘Nice to meet you, sir,’ Slaney said.

I was in Korea, the old man said. I saw an arm on the ground. Just the arm. Not attached to nothing. Just lying there in the leaves.

Pops is decorated, the girl said. He got a few medals in there he could show you sometime.

We were marching, he said. I just saw this arm. It was lying on the dirt. Wet leaves stuck on it. That was one thing I saw. I saw a lot of things. You’ve done some travelling, have you?

Yes sir, Slaney said.

Caught is a story about loss, love, risk and betrayal. It tries to redefine innocence and it makes the reader question what is inevitable and what isn’t, and how a person chooses to move forward in order to get what he wants. Moore’s prose is meditative, but the story is about a chase. Whether the two can work together, I’m still unsure.

Jenny Boychuk is a reader and writer who lives in Victoria.

Russell Books expands into vintage

Russell Books Vintage Grand Opening
with readings from Esi Edugyan, Steven Price and Marita Dachsel
May 14, 2013

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

In a time when many independent bookstores are closing their doors, Victoria’s Russell Books has expanded yet again with the addition of Russell’s Vintage.

Russell’s Vintage (located beneath Russell Books in what was formerly Fort Street Café) held its grand opening recently, featuring readings by local authors Steven Price, Esi Edugyan and Marita Dachsel.

The space filled up quickly as people drank wine and browsed the shelves for vintage gardening guides, cookbooks, magazines, volumes of the Guinness Book of Records, poetry, children’s literature and nearly ancient copies and first editions of their favourite classics. The atmosphere was warm and friendly, and it seemed everyone met someone they knew.

Every seat was filled with many people left standing as event organizer and Russell Books employee Vanessa Herman kicked off the night. She announced that Russell’s Vintage will begin holding a monthly reading series. Next, manager Andrea Minter talked about her family and the history of Russell Books, which was founded by her grandfather in Montreal in 1961. The store (now relocated in Victoria) is Canada’s largest used and new bookstore.

“Books are my life and we are so excited for this,” Minter said.

The space is perfect for a reading, with a small stage at the front of the room, set against a backdrop of antique books. The readings proved fitting for the occasion as each of the authors read about history or the making of it.

Marita Dachsel launched her new collection of poetry Glossolalia, which is essentially a series of monologues written from the point of view of each of Joseph Smith’s 34 polygamous wives. (Joseph Smith was the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)

“You always hear about people launching books,” said Dachsel. “But you hardly ever hear of people launching bookstores.”

After an intermission and the cutting of a fabulous cake (an unreal replication of each of the authors’ books stacked on top of each other), Steven Price talked about his and wife Esi Edugyan’s history and love of Russell Books.  Apparently, the couple visits so regularly that the staff is set on adopting their baby daughter.)

“We don’t get out much,” joked Price. “But when we do, we go to three places. Russell Books is one of them.”

Price read from his poetry collection Omens in the Year of the Ox, and from Into That Darkness, his novel about a massive earthquake hitting Victoria.

After more wine, cake and door prizes (orchids, t-shirts, winery tours, books), Esi Edugyan ended the evening with a reading from her novel, Half-Blood Blues, much of which is set in pre-war Berlin.

I expect Russell’s Vintage will see many more nights like this one.

 

Jenny Boychuk is a local writer and reader.

 

Poet’s first book brave and fierce

1996
By Sara Peters
House of Anansi, 65 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Sometimes you need a poet who will lead you into the dark woods without promising to bring you back to safety again. Sometimes you need a poet who will show you the decomposing bear at the edge of the river—and the kids placing red gumdrops along its spine.

Sara Peters is this poet, and this exceptionally brave and fierce first collection left me shaken. Every poem is surprising, though Peters never uses the same trick twice. Often I found myself holding my breath for multiple poems at a time before she turned the knife in my gut. Peters was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Boston University and was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University from 2010 to 2012.

The first poem, “Babysitters,” sets an appropriately eerie and mysterious tone for the collection. At the end of the poem, I realized the rest of the book would consist of things parents would never talk about in front of their children.

A foreshadowing:

. . . But when she thinks herself
alone, you hear back seat of the car, then
with a trench knife, in the orchard. Secrets thud
like June bugs against screens,
and all you have to do is let them in.

The collection consists of six sections with five poems each, which provides a pleasing sort of symmetrical reading experience. Peters’ controlled lines work best when they slowly release distilled moments and the rhythms provide an almost incantatory effect:

She didn’t mean to braid the horses’ manes and tails
hundreds of times with so much élan—French, four-stranded—

but up was the only unoccupied direction,
so how else to get there? And always

these questions: Who set those fires?
Who broke those mirrors? Is that your blood?

Peters’ poems often have narratives and through them she tells stories of teenage nostalgia, physical attraction, heartbreak, family, religion, nature and the body wearing down. She is skilled with a knife and handles heavy topics with impressive emotional restraint.

From “Bionic”:

My brother’s twenty-two and therefore believes he’s bionic.
He’s home from school,
he’s supposed to look after our mother for the week.
She’s senile and probably dying.
He’s cruel but his cruelty’s probably temporary.

He’s dressed her in a T-shirt that says
I kill everything I fuck // I fuck everything I kill.
She stares into a bowl of cornflake milk;
I carefully cover my breakfast in ketchup.

My brother is funny and blunt.
Whenever I say something sentimental,
or talk—for example—about the ocean,
he says, You know what?
You should write a poem about that.

While there were points where I thought Peters tried to tackle too much within a poem, I won’t soon forget the haunting details and alarming imagery. This is a collection of secrets, a photo album of things not meant to be photographed—and we should be grateful for the chance to look.

 

Jenny Boychuk has just completed her BFA and is thinking about her future.

Intimate memoir captures 1950s

Pinboy: a memoir
By George Bowering
Published by Cormorant Books, 276 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

To say George Bowering had fun with this portrayal of his 15-year-old self is an understatement.

What first seems to be a typical coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in B.C.’s rural Okanagan in the fifties soon turns into something much more entertaining, refreshing and unexpected.

Like many his age, young Bowering loves comic books, westerns and baseball. He writes sports journalism for local newspapers and works part-time as a “pinboy” at the local bowling alley. He helps women carry their groceries and takes it upon himself to help those less fortunate. He eats jam sandwiches and Campbell’s vegetable soup for lunch and has supper at 5 p.m. He’s also got some serious testosterone screaming through his body.

But amid these teenage normalities is something both honest and mysterious. Bowering is in love with three different women: his classmate and steady girlfriend named Wendy, a poor girl from across the tracks named Jeanette—and one of his high school teachers, Miss Verge. Bowering takes us through orchards, lakes, fields and an apartment above the local grocery store with these women. He even risks his life for one of them.

Bowering shows the reader these women through the mind of a teenage boy and, regardless of your gender, the female body suddenly begins to feel foreign. One of the great strengths of this memoir is Bowering’s patience in allowing the reader to experience these women for the first time as he did: He enables the reader to question who they are and who they will be, to question their anatomies.

He plays with language as he recalls, for instance, the word hurt: “Funny verb, that, now that I come to remember the first time I heard it. It was from Wendy herself, sometime over the preceding year. I don’t want you to be hurt, she said, I think. And I wondered about that: does it mean hurt feelings? But it sounded more serious than that, more intimate. But then I got to thinking about the word intimate, which always made me think of inside the brassiere.”

Another major strength of this book lies in the authenticity and playfulness of Bowering’s voice. As a reader, I felt as though I was sitting on the front porch in some small town with him. His stories felt intimate and private, although I never questioned that he was happy to tell them. This book felt like one of those wonderful, unexpected conversations that comes from a single question, and maybe you didn’t ask to know about the rest of it, but you leave feeling damn happy he went there.

Though much of the memoir is light-hearted, Bowering doesn’t hesitate to reveal some of the darker secrets of his youth.

“I still believed in God. I did not go over in my mind a list of reasons why that horse died tied up off the path up in the hills. I only figured that something crazed must to have happened. And I did not tell anyone about what I had found. If it had been a human being I would have told people.”

This most human account of a boy coming into adolescence proves to be both hilarious and heartbreaking. For every awkwardly funny and unwanted erection, there is also true yearning for the women around him. It is a privilege to have a glimpse of this part of Bowering’s life, of this boy who spends half of his time living in books and the other half playing detective in the tall grass as he watches a girl walk home from school.

Jenny Boychuk is a recent graduate of UVIC’s Department of Writing. She lives and writes in Victoria.

Heart-breaking novel captures family disintegration

The Juliet Stories
By Carrie Snyder
Published by House of Anansi, 324 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by: Jenny Boychuk

Let me tell you what you need to know.

This is the assertive voice that, while it doesn’t promise to spare heartbreak, guides readers with a controlled hand through Carrie Snyder’s novel-told-in-stories, The Juliet Stories.

It is 1984. Ten-year-old Juliet Friesen moves to Nicaragua with her two younger brothers and peace-activist parents—who have moved the family from their Indiana home in order to protest American involvement in the country’s post-Revolutionary war.

The novel is composed of two equal parts. In Part One: Amulets, the stories progress over the family’s time in Nicaragua to cover a year and a half. Juliet’s father is often away with his troops, and her mother is left to care for her family, which is in its own state of turmoil. The Friesens are free to be killed in this state of destruction, but also to live without the rules they’ve been accustomed to.

Juliet is a restless child who is preoccupied with trying to understand the world, and her view is anything but isolated. She writes letters to Ronald Reagan and change settles easily with her. She asks questions and is not satisfied with definitions—she needs to know how humans connect. She senses her mother’s increasing distance and vulnerability, how the two are at war within a woman who is supposed to, above all else, make her feel safe. While Juliet doesn’t believe anything could harm her family, she is acutely aware of the endings of things (an eerie foreshadowing): “Imagine that someday everything in the suitcase will no longer exist.” Juliet slips through the home unnoticed as she sees and hears things a child shouldn’t. She asks adult questions but cannot come to adult conclusions; she is “a whole person who is only incidentally a child.”

“The children are watching, the fields are on fire, the animals are screaming from a shed where they have been shut up and set alight, and the bayonet digs into the mother’s belly and pulls out a baby. Tossed to the dogs. The children are watching.”

Part Two: Disruption begins when the family moves back to Canada because one of Juliet’s brothers is ill. It would seem there is no longer any need to fight for peace in this country that is already so “free.” But Juliet does not feel the same freedom she felt in Nicaragua. The Friesens stop fighting for each other and, as Juliet ages, the family falls further apart—one heartbreak at a time.

The stories often feel more like chapters, especially in Part One. The point of view and voice are consistent, the transitions are smooth and one story clearly sets up the next. Part Two covers a much larger span of time and more chaos. The point of view deviates, it seems, when the family is most vulnerable. While this is a bit jarring at times, the form matches the content of the stories wonderfully.

Snyder’s prose is sharp and controlled—simply poetic.

Reading this book was like watching a family after the dinner party is over, after the forced smiles are gone and no is pretending that everything is OK. This honesty is what it means to fill human bones with flesh and blood. It moves far beyond what is black and white and into the deep grey areas of life and of living.

The first sentence of the book is this: “Somewhere between Texas and Managua, their bags go missing.” This is how I felt after finishing the book: you know that things went terribly wrong, but can’t pinpoint where. The first half of the book is necessary for the second to exist, though it seems as though they never touch each other, tied to invisible threads. You can’t quite remember everywhere you’ve been, but you know you’ve experienced something profound. The book is remarkably human in this way. It is a story about humans as they stand next to each other—what they need to take from each other in order to survive.

Read the epigraph after you finish the book. It will shake you.

Jenny Boychuk is a recent graduate of UVIC’s Department of Writing now living in Vancouver.