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Almanac challenges readers to care about wilderness

Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac

By David Pitt-Brooke

Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Greystone Books

287 Pages, $14

Reviewed by Quinn MacDonald

When David Pitt-Brooke published Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac, he hoped it would be part of a larger effort that would secure the Clayoquot Sound as a widely treasured and protected place, beyond the grasping hands of industry and development. But, as he reluctantly admits in his note for this edition, “nothing could be further from the truth” (xii).

Logging continues, diseases from salmon farms have led culls in the millions, and in August 2013 Vancouver-based Selkirk Metals began exploratory mining for gold in Clayoquot’s Tranquil Valley, to the chagrin of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, who have declared the area a Tribal Park. After decades of activism, and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve designation, the Clayoquot’s position remains perilous.

A trained biologist and veterinarian, Pitt-Brooke worked for Parks Canada as an environmental officer in Glacier, Mount Revelstoke, and Waterton Lakes before he arrived at the Pacific Rim in 1995. It was love at first sight: “I thought I’d gone to heaven. This is one of those rare places where the storehouse of nature is still full to the brim” (3). But as he watched the tourists come and go too hurriedly, and thought of other nature-lovers who lacked the means to make the trip, he knew more had to be done to share the beauty of “this very special place” (5). With this book, he saw his opportunity to help.

Pitt-Brooke has written for a number of scientific and environmental publications, including Canadian Geographic; in 2002 he received a Canadian Science Writers’ Association Award. Chasing Clayoquot is his first book, and in a 2004 interview with Tofino Time Magazine he revealed that it took seven years to finish the project—making it truly a labour of love. The book brims with scientific and historical information, as you would expect with Pitt-Brooke’s background, and while the meticulous research paints a more complete picture of the landscape, the amount of exposition at times became onerous. It would have been more enjoyable if it were integrated into the engaging personal narrative. Jargon and scientific terms like “desiccation” and “profligate” also could have been better explained or left out (172).

The Almanac structure effectively creates a (compressed) sense of life in the Clayoquot, and the monthly incursions into a surprising variety of microhabitats imbue the book with a deep sense of place. And while a little more editing and guidance might have helped with some instances of cliché and redundancy, his vivid and detailed descriptions, particularly those from the air and sea, capture the wild beauty of the West Coast. At times I found myself transported back to my Granddad’s fishing boat, cruising through the Barkley Sound, with the taste of salt water on my lips and the cry of gulls all around.

Pitt-Brooke feels more whole in the natural environment, but also more responsible: “In wilderness we must take responsibility for ourselves. Or maybe: in wilderness, we’re allowed to take responsibility for ourselves. A rare privilege in these times.” In this time of and murky supply chains, it’s easy to waive responsibility for how our lifestyles degrade the environment on which we ultimately depend. Pitt-Brooke sees these effects first-hand, and wants to share that feeling. This book implicates its readers in the cycle of environmental degradation, but also enlists them as protectors: as you read, you become responsible for the Clayoquot.

Whether you’re familiar with the coast or stuck inland, this book is worth the read. The second edition keeps alive Pitt-Brooke’s dream of bringing the beauty of the Clayoquot to a wider audience, as he reminds us that it will take a constant effort to keep these places timeless and whole.

Quinn MacDonald is an environmental activist and UVic student.

Novel explores moral distress

The Dove in Bathurst Station

By Patricia Westerhof

Brindle and Glass

229 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Katrin Horowitz

According to one character in The Dove in Bathurst Station, moral distress is “when you know what you should do but you don’t do it because it seems impossible.”  And how, Patricia Westerhof asks, do you extricate yourself from the life-sucking tentacles of moral distress?  That’s the core dilemma raised in her novel, which follows the tortuous journey that protagonist Marta takes as she looks for a way out of the guilt-baited trap she has painstakingly constructed for herself over the past 13 years.

Westerhof ‘s novel is an intriguing exploration of belief systems, from simple faith in chance and omens to more complex varieties of religious thought.  She highlights the profound impact that our beliefs have on our lives, and she does a masterful job of making the protagonist’s inner life feel real and important.

At the start of the book Marta, a 30- year-old guidance counsellor, focuses on the seemingly impossible, like the rock dove that hops into her subway car at Bathurst Station.  She interprets it as a mysterious sign from God and struggles to understand it.  This search for meaning in unusual places also leads her to explore the earthy underside of Toronto.  She finds a pungent, quiet place where the temperature is always constant, a labyrinth of confusing tunnels, drains and storm sewers full of leaks, echoes and impenetrable darkness.  And she knows that she’s risking her career by trespassing.  It is, of course, an extended metaphor for her interior life, with its dark memories of her teenage boyfriend whose suicide is the source of her guilt.

Meanwhile, Marta is ambivalent about everything in her life above ground, including her career and her marriage.  She is an insightful guidance counsellor who takes on issues ranging from an obscene t-shirt to a potential suicide, but she mourns her former career as a singer.  She enjoys the rich diversity in her inner city neighbourhood, especially St. Anne’s Anglican Church with its Group of Seven paintings, but she also blames her husband for his lack of a real job that would support moving to an upscale part of the city.  Marta claims to love her husband, but she suspects him of various infidelities and she’s frustrated by his failure to succeed as a band manager.  As the distance between them grows, she has a series of internal arguments with herself about whether to divorce him.

Unfortunately her husband never quite convinces us that he is anything more than a foil for her ambivalences.  And despite an early sex scene, their interactions lack emotional resonance.  Most of their conversations seem to be between a couple of roommates who barely know each other.  But that’s a minor flaw in a novel that is less about interpersonal relationships than about Marta’s relationship with herself and her God.  Throughout the book we find ourselves hoping that Marta will find forgiveness for her trespasses.

Katrin Horowitz’s latest novel, The Best Soldier’s Wife, was published in September 2013 by Quadra Books.

 

 

 

Love thy grandmother, says memoirist

The Truth About Luck

By Iain Reid

Published by Anansi

254 pages, $18.95

By Richel Donaldson

The Truth About Luck is Ontario author Iain Reid’s second memoir. Reid, whose first book was about moving back home after university, was recently named as one of five up-and-coming Canadian authors by the Globe and Mail. In The Truth About Luck, Reid invites his grandmother, 92, on a five-day vacation. When it turns out that the vacation is really a stay-cation in Reid’s apartment, his grandmother takes the opportunity to share some of her life story with her grandson. What ensues is a charming and bumbling dialogue between two people getting to know each other.

Reid’s writing is honest and self-deprecating, full of humor and detail.  Readers can easily put themselves in his shoes when he describes waking up in the morning, his fear of house centipedes, or his nightly insomnia: “I might start thinking of all the moments in a day when it’s possible to choke on food or catch a foot and fall down some stairs. Other nights I think about something completely arbitrary.” The way he so carefully describes his grandmother brings her to life in the same way: “Her hands have held on to elegant toughness, apart from the odd liver spot or new freckle  . . . they’re strong, womanly hands.”

The narrative starts almost too slowly. It takes a while for Reid and his grandmother to warm up to one another, and the awkward silences become monotonous.  Only when Grandma starts telling her stories does the memoir become engaging. The actual events of the story exist in a confined environment – mostly the apartment – and a brief time span. Reid’s grandmother’s memories about her little brother Donald are some of the most powerful in the book:  “There at the bottom of the stairs was this lanky figure, a few feet away, a boy. I never would have thought I could recognize his posture, but I could . . .I knew it was him.” Grandmother tells stories about her experience in the war and childhood memories with such vivid sensual experience that when she stops, and the focus returns to the vacation, it is almost a letdown. Reid’s attempts to entertain his grandmother and make her comfortable are heartwarming, but they pale in comparison to the richness of his grandmother’s recollections.

Even though some parts of the memoir may be monotonous, the read is worthwhile. Reid’s realizations about his grandmother are incredibly powerful. She teaches him a great deal in the course of five days — about what it means to be alive and how to approach death. The ending of this book will make you want to grab your grandmother and listen to her with the dedication and interest that Reid did.

Richel Donaldson is a political science student at UVic. She grew up on Vancouver Island surrounded by family. She enjoys writing about indigenous culture and has learned a great deal from her own two grandmas. 

Daughter recalls father’s past with heart, humour

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter; Growing up with a gay dad

By Alison Wearing

292 pages; $24.00

Reviewed by Cecania Alexander

When I pick up a book, my dearest hopes are, admittedly, a bit unfair. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter – a nonfiction family memoir about Wearing’s growing up as her father discovers his gay identity in a time of political turmoil – met all of them, and threw in a few delicious surprises.

Wearing’s voice is delightful, not surprising as she is a musician, a dancer, a theatre performer, an award-winning one-woman-show star (including an adaptation of Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter). Her first book was an international bestseller (Honeymoon in Purday: An Iranian Journey). Wearing conveys humour, emotion and soul through art – she could make a fun, heart-warming journey out of peeling a baked potato.

In Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, anecdotes, research, and lively stories are combined with her voice to form a fantastic ride. The memoir  begins in peachy childhood with an artistic, caring mother and a goofy father who “enjoyed skipping down sidewalks singing choruses from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas while pumping his elbows out to the ides and snapping his fingers like castanets,” and all things “festive.” But Wearing grows up amidst choppy waters as her father explores his gay identity, keeping his double life from the family, eventually coming out amidst great obstacles. At times I was dumbfounded with shock; at others I felt a surprising familiarity and connection to the family’s struggles; mostly, I was laughing.

The disruption of Wearing’s family was hard on her, as was accepting her father’s homosexuality but the strife is washed with wildly hilarious stories in which Wearing pokes fun at her family (recounting one brother’s obsession with poo, a family Christmas in which everyone accidentally ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms, and of course her father’s many quirks), and at herself   At one point she describes her hair as “thick knuckly masses, something a (brief) boyfriend was once generous enough to inform me was the stuff that makes up a rhinoceros’s horn.”

About two-thirds into the book, the point of view shifts to her father via diary entries, newspaper clippings, letters and notes during his coming out. These scraps of overwhelming struggle blew me away, revealed a violent world that I could not have otherwise fathomed. The story culminates in a sentimental, occasionally overly sentimental, acceptance, love and appreciation for family in all its fairy dust and demons. However, I forgave the story its sentimental weight because I just plain enjoyed it so much, and felt its resounding relevance.

This is an important memoir. Fortunately, it is also a story that anyone with a heart will enjoy.

Cecania Alexander is a fourth-year Creative Writing student at the University of Victoria.

Technology helps us manage ourselves

The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us

McClelland and Stewart

$19.95, 229 pages

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

Nora Young is a well-known Canadian broadcaster and writer who lives in Toronto and hosts CBC Radio One’s Spark, a program that focuses on how technology affects the world around us. In 2012, she released the book The Virtual Self: How our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us, which has since gone on to become a national bestseller. She also visited the University of Victoria recently to discuss the implications of technology with students.

In The Virtual Self, Young explores the concept of self-tracking and how technology is changing the way people manage and register information. Using examples that range from Benjamin Franklin’s journal entries to the social media posts that helped pinpoint the location of a pipe-bomb in 2010, Young identifies different methods of self-tracking that increase self-awareness and make people more accountable for the way they spend their time.

One thread of this self-tracking relates to weight management. As Young explains, the web is rich with services to help people lose weight and stay fit through recording diet and exercises. In the book, Young identifies several technologies that are helping people shed pounds, such as FitBit, a small wrist monitor that tracks calories, exercise and even sleep by using 3-D motion sensors. There are also countless websites, such as FitDay.com, dedicated to giving specific information about the nutritional information for different foods in order to make it easier to keep tabs on how many calories users consume in a day.

Although Young discusses the benefits of these technologies, she acknowledges the concern that if people are too vigilant about their tracking, the danger is that “sources of bodily delight and physical expressiveness, such as running or eating a meal, are reduced to stats driven, objectified activities.” By demonstrating the positives as well as the negatives of these budding technologies, the reader is given a comprehensive look at the technological tools available today.

I appreciated that Young not only describes these technologies, but also tries them herself, creating authenticity and character in a research-driven book.

In The Virtual Self, Young examines surprising uses of tracking technology that could greatly improve the health of users. From the asthma inhalers that have a GPS to better monitor where flare-ups occur, to Twitter feeds that pin-point and monitor the spread of infectious diseases, tracking technology offers many opportunities to advance our health.

The Virtual Self is well-written and packed with historical and contemporary examples. It opened my eyes to opportunities available to me, many readily accessible through the Internet or my iPhone. Several books already outline how technology is shaping our society, but few do it with such a fresh voice or attention to detail. Young puts it nicely, “Self-tracking is our gin. It’s an almost impulsive desire to document the actual states of being and physical presence.” If that’s the case, we can all drink up.

Jenny Aitken is about to enter the technology-rich job market after finishing her undergraduate education.

 

 

Leacock-winner’s characters warm-hearted at core

Dance, Gladys, Dance

By Cassie Stocks

NeWest Press

300 pages; $19.95

By Joy Fisher

When 27-year-old Frieda Zweig answers an ad about a beautiful old phonograph for sale, she’s hoping to meet Gladys, who’s selling the phonograph because she’s giving up dancing and needs the room for baking. Frieda, in retreat from a broken romance and determined to give up her attempts to become a visual artist, hopes Gladys can show her how to lead a “normal” life.

Instead,  answering the ad puts Frieda in touch with the paranormal .  Gladys, it turns out, is a ghost, albeit a friendly one who has Frieda’s best interests at heart. When she answers the ad, Frieda meets an elderly but lively man named Mr. Hausselman, who teaches photography at the local art centre. “Mr. H.,” as Frieda soon comes to call him, offers her a room in his house at a price she can’t turn down. Thus begins an adventure that will ultimately lead Frieda on a path of personal growth.

Gladys and Mr. H are just two of many colourful characters convincingly drawn by Cassie Stocks—an accomplishment worth celebrating in the author of a first novel — which has won the 2013 Stephen Leacock Award for humour.

There’s Norman, Frieda’s ex, a well-meaning fellow who feels duty-bound to keep his promise to his dead father to manage the family’s string of porno shops; Norman’s mother, Lady March, who fancies herself a spiritualist but isn’t afraid to bare it all for a worthy cause; Ginnie, Frieda’s art school mate, who’s determinedly climbing the corporate ladder in the commercial art world; Mr. H’s son, Whitman, a Hollywood filmmaker who buys his best screenplays from Marilyn, a brilliant druggie who lives in a Winnipeg flophouse; Mr. H’s neighbour, Miss Kesstle who crochets incessantly and, though never married, has a solid maternal instinct; and a doomed girl named Girl who is the last of Gladys’s line.

It’s a little easier to understand how this novice author managed to create such diverse characters when you read her bio. No spring chicken when this novel was finally published, Stocks is described as “a biker chick, a university student, an actress, and a rich man’s gardener.” She had also worked as a waitress, an office clerk, an aircraft cleaner, had raised chickens and had even been the “caretaker of a hydroponic pot factory.” In short, by the time she wrote this book, Stocks had already lived a long and diverse life, and she clearly poured all of her experiences into her characters.

And almost all of them, in spite of their individual differences, eventually come to have the best interests of the others at heart. The book is set in Winnipeg and is imbued with all the solidarity and fellow-feeling of the participants in the Winnipeg General Strike. These characters eventually organize a sit-in on the roof of the local art centre when the city decides to sell the building to a chain store. They succeed in saving the centre, of course, and, in the process, weave a web of support for one another that’s also revitalizing for the reader.

And what of Gladys? Well, in the end, Gladys dances one more time while Frieda cheers her on, and then she disappears for good, but not before Frieda reclaims her own identity as an artist by getting out her paints to capture the dancing image on canvas.

“I hoped you’d do it,” Gladys says to Frieda, when she sees Frieda plying her brush once again. “Mission complete.”

This is not a profound novel, but it’s a warm-hearted one. I loved hanging out with the characters in this book.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing.

 

Ozeki’s meta-fiction challenges reader

A Tale for the Time Being

By Ruth Ozeki

Viking Penguin

422 pages, $30

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

For those of you who walk West Coast beaches with eyes trawling for washed-up treasure, the Man Booker Prize-nominated A Tale for the Time Being may be a vicarious pleasure. But if you’re hoping for a narrative sustained over 422 pages, you may be a bit disappointed. But just a bit because Ruth Ozeki’s story —  that veers from Tokyo’s seedy Electric Town to a moss-embraced monastery —  is readable, timely, and for the most part, fun.

It’s post Fukushima, and a barnacle-encrusted garbage bag washes up on a British Columbia Gulf island – likely Cortez but it’s never named – and inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox with a 10-year-old diary, a circa-Second World War wristwatch, and a bundle of letters from the same wartime era. It’s picked up by Ruth – the character shares the same name as the author – who begins to read the diary in her rural wooded home.

Teenager Nao has recently moved to Japan from California with her parents. Her father is listless to the point of suicide after losing his Silicon Valley job; her mother spends her days watching jellyfish at the aquarium. Tormented by her bullying classmates and teacher, Nao skips school to write in a manga cafe. She intends to chronicle the story of her activist-turned-Zen Buddhist nun great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko, who, at 104, lives Yoda-like in a tiny, mountainside monastery. Nao had been sent to spend the summer at the monastery, where Jiko serenely unravels the secrets behind Nao’s burns, scars, and anger. By the end of summer, Nao is wiser, having learned some of Jiko’s secrets.

But did Nao survive the tsunami, Ruth wonders as she reads the journal in allotments, not wanting to get to the end too quickly. In alternating chapters, Ruth’s narrative of her small island life filled with clichéd rural folks is an annoyance, but perhaps meant to be. Ruth the Character is a frustrated writer that Ruth the Author takes on a meta-fiction dalliance, ruminating on reader/writer relationships that push the true reader  — you and me — away from who we really want to hear about: Nao.

Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist and filmmaker, does have a gift: her ability to create believably the delicate, healing monastery life as well as the frenetic pop-culture-infused Tokyo that alternately shelters and abuses Nao. Also remarkable is Nao’s fresh voice, the teenager moving between those worlds:

“And because we’re friends, here’s something else I will share with you. It’s kind of personal, but it’s really helped me out a lot. It’s Jiko’s instructions on how to develop your superpower. I thought she was kidding when she said it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a really, really old person is kidding or not, especially if she’s a nun.”

Ozeki has worked as a bar hostess in Japan and also sets Nao in that eerie workplace for a short time. But Nao figures out she has more important things to do, like write in her journal, the time transporter that connects Nao, Ruth the reader/writer, Ozeki the author, and you and me, the readers. The meta-fiction- Zen-Buddhist-traverse works in some places, with footnotes that could be fiction or not. “Can’t find reference to medical cafes or Bedtown. Is she making this up?” character Ruth asks, tripping up the reader. Is this the same Ruth who explains in footnotes that Ijime is Japanese for bullying and omuraisu is a rice pilaf-filled omelette seasoned with ketchup and butter?

Meta-fiction when taken too far is like a plot spoiler. It can deflate verisimilitude, that diaphanous place to which fiction readers either float or strain. As with the waves Juki uses as life metaphor to explain to Nao the futility of flailing against the inevitable, sometimes it’s best to not try too hard. Nao’s conclusion is akin to the reader’s experience in absorbing A Tale for the Time Being: “I never completely understand what she’s saying, but I like that she tries to explain it to me anyway. It’s nice of her.”

Vivian Moreau is a Victoria freelance writer and editor.

Author sees maps as repositories of history

The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island

By Michael Layland

Touchwood Editions

232 pages,  $39.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

            In this meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book, Michael Layland traces the development of the accurate, detailed maps of Vancouver Island we take for granted today. His own qualifications as a cartographer and historian, with a special interest in exploration and map-making, ensure that this account will more than satisfy the most exacting academic and scientific scrutiny, but rest assured, that does not mean it would appeal only to scholars. What this book does, in terms that even those with the most limited acquaintance with maps can follow, is to conjure Vancouver Island almost literally out of thin air.

            Near the end of the book, Layland refers to the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas, and shows a long list of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw place names Boas collected which demonstrate the First Nation’s intimate knowledge of the coast where they had lived for centuries. By contrast, the earliest European visitors to the North-West in the sixteenth century were venturing into completely uncharted territory, armed only with rumour and speculation and their own courage. The earliest maps of the region reflect this tenuous grip on reality: fragmentary pieces of unattached coastline, possible straits, rocks and mountains covered with tiny hand-drawn trees, straggling lines that peter out when circumstances forced the explorers to turn back. At the time, those early mariners did not even realize they were travelling beside an island, and thought they were mapping the mainland.

            Readers of this book are in much the same position as the very earliest visitors. The island is hidden at first, but as the author leads us through the centuries, its outline becomes more defined, its intricacies more exactly delineated, its salient features given lasting names, each successive map and chart visibly more accurate and reliable, until the familiar outline emerges. Nor is that the end of the process, for the interior of the island remained an unknown quantity for many years, and the surveyors’ maps of areas of development are just as fascinating as those of the ocean-going explorers.

            What is immediately obvious from the author’s entertaining narrative is how much history, how much human experience, is concentrated in these two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional world. The maps are the products of a variety of motivations: curiosity, the search for a Pacific entrance to the fabled north-west passage, politics and jockeying for power, diplomatic missions, trade, gold, farming, colonization. The maps also immortalize the people involved in their making, for it was as commonplace for explorers and surveyors to name the straits and bays and islands and hills they discovered after themselves, their colleagues, and their vessels, as it is for a botanist to add his name to a new species. So Layland shows that in the very names familiar to all Island dwellers, and easily located on any modern map—Haro, Juan de Fuca (who was actually Greek), Vancouver, Broughton, Meares, Mayne, Baker, Pandora, Cormorant, Quadra, Gabriola, Pemberton, to name just a few—lies the whole history of European involvement in “the land of heart’s delight” at the edge of the world. 

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, is being published this spring.

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.

Youth fiction worthwhile despite predictability

Three Little Words

By Sarah N. Harvey

Orca Book Publishers

218 pages, $12.95

Reviewed by Marcie Gray

Sarah N. Harvey tries to say a lot in Three little words. Her novel for young adults ranges over the various facets of family life as she tells the story of 16-year-old Sid. He was a toddler when his mother abandoned him and his foster parents took him in, raising him on one of the Northern Gulf Islands. He leads what seems to be a contented life – the only hint that he is unsettled is the comic strip he draws of a boy who is a lonely outcast. Then a friend of his birth mother arrives on the scene, and Sid learns he has a step-brother and a grandmother in Victoria. Sid, pale and wiry and sporting lots of red curls, discovers his brother has curly hair too – but it’s black, along with his skin. From here, Harvey leads us on a journey into what makes a family, as she explores foster families, birth parents, and siblings who are different races.

These are intriguing issues for the intended audience – teenagers who are figuring out their own place in the world. But this kind of audience also demands action right from the start, and Harvey doesn’t deliver. Instead she tries to hook readers by presenting a mystery: an eight-year-old girl arrives at Sid’s house seeking foster care. Her past is unclear, but whatever has happened, she is now afraid of males and speaks only to say please and thank you. Harvey moves from this mystery to a quick but thorough introduction of the main characters, and along the way, even manages to throw in some satirical sexual humour that will appeal to this audience. But it may not be enough to keep them reading past the first couple of chapters.

If these teen readers stick with the story, they’ll be rewarded. Harvey, an author from Victoria, has written nine books for children and young adults, and her prose is polished, her narrative engaging. She introduces more mystery and a manhunt, along with the ever-present question: what does the title of the book mean? What are the three little words? There are lots of chances to guess along the way, and Harvey has fun with the chapter titles, giving each chapter three words, from “Have a Heart” to “Make My Day.”  It’s entertaining just trying to interpret how she names each chapter.

The plot moves smoothly, if a bit predictably. In a young adult novel, the pacing has to stay on track, and on occasion that’s accomplished rather conveniently, when one character or another seems to read Sid’s mind. But these are minor matters. Three little words takes major themes such as family and tolerance and respect, and wraps them in a tasty novel.  I hope teen readers will dig in.

Marcie Gray used to report and produce for CBC Radio. Today she’s writing her own youth fiction.