“Leaving Mr. Humphries”
by Alison Lohans
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth
Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$12.95
ISBN 978-1-927756-07-2
There are some writers you can always depend on to turn out a good book,
regardless of the genre. I first knew Regina author Alison Lohans as a short
story writer for young adults. She’s also impressed me with her novels and
children’s books. The ability to genre-hop and keep the literary standards at
high-bar are Lohans’ trademarks, so I’m not surprised that Leaving Mr. Humphries, her tender story about a child reluctant to
let go of his stuffed blue teddy bear, Mr. Humphries, also delivers a read that
simultaneously entertains and plucks at the heart-strings.
This book is the result of a familial collaboration: it’s illustrated by
Gretchen Ehrsam, Lohans’ American cousin, who-like the author-enjoyed childhood
vacations at the family’s cottage in Dorset ON.
What first impressed was how quickly I was engaged. With kids’ books,
writers don’t have the luxury to slowly beguile readers, and Lohans instantly gets
us into the main character’s head and heart-space.
Josh is the protagonist. His mother is off to “a conference in the city,”
and he’ll
have to stay with Grandpa and Aunt Judy
at their cottage. “My insides have a lonely, hurting feeling. I hold on tight
to Mr. Humphries,” we read on page one. The story unfolds in clear, short sentences-the
kind a child might “think” in-and images are credibly presented in the same way:
“[Aunt Judy] helps me into a fat orange life jacket.”
As three generations enjoy a motorboat ride, outdoor meals (“Bugs bang
into the screens but they can’t get us”), pie baking, and exploring, Lohans
does a superb job of keeping the story in Josh’s young voice. She also
believably demonstrates his anxiety re: sleeping in the attic, where “bats flap
and squeak,” and using the outdoor toilet in the dark, raccoon-filled night. As
long as Josh has the security of Mr. Humphries, he manages well.
A secondary theme in this book is aging. Josh frequently notes his
grandfather’s advanced age. “Mr. Humphries and I wade in the lake while Grandpa
sits in a chair,” Lohans writes. The boy sees his grandfather as “old and
shaky,” and his hands shake when he works on a jigsaw puzzle. His daughter
warns him not to take the boat out alone.
Lohans is also a musician, and
her use of sound in this book stands out. She writes: “On the lake, a loon
makes lonely sounds,” “feet clang on the metal steps,” and “Hummingbirds whir
at the feeder.” Josh notes how “The bottom of the boat scrunches on sand” and
“Water slurps and splashes.”
There are no notes on the accompanying full-page illustrations, but they
look like woodcut prints and perfectly mirror the story’s subject and tone.
Regardless of their intended audience,
children’s book have to first pass muster with the wallet-holders. Free copies
are generally part of the payment for book reviewers, so I asked myself this:
were I not reviewing Leaving Mr.
Humphries, would middle-aged me buy this book? You bet your blue teddy bear
I would.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Red River Raging”
by Penny Draper
Published by Coteau Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$10.95
ISBN 9-781550-505849
It’s a dull, wet day and I’ve nowhere to be but home-hurray!-because
today I’ve had the distinct pleasure of reading Penny Draper’s novel Red River Raging cover-to-cover, and
it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Coteau Books published Red River
Raging as part of its Disaster
Strikes! Series, which includes six other Draper titles. After reading this
latest book, I certainly see why Coteau keeps Draper on its publication roster:
this “Juvenile Fiction” is a terrific story, skillfully told, and I’m happy to
sing its praises to readers of any
age.
The back cover copy whet my appetite for this gripping
Manitoba-flood-based, coming-of-age story. Thirteen-year-old Finn is the only
child of Vancouver scientists, and while his parents are off to Russia, their
reluctant son’s exiled to the rural, St. Agathe MB home of his cookie-baking
grandmother and crusty-but mysterious-great grandfather.
Finn quickly makes friends at school, including Clara, who becomes his
girlfriend (and has an interesting side-story herself); and Aaron, who “got run
over by a bale of hay” and is in a wheelchair. When a major flood threatens,
Finn initially feels “It’s about as exciting as reading a murder mystery when
you already know who the murderer is and when he’s going to strike,” but he
soon learns how real and devastating it will be when the Red River becomes the
Red Sea. He rallies classmates to create a sandbag-filling “Flood Club,” the
military helps out, and even Peter Mansbridge arrives: “everybody’s saying that
his being here officially makes this a disaster. Now we can panic.”
One of Draper’s greatest achievements is how she seamlessly unrolls the
plot of this adventure story-about the 1997 Red River flood disaster-and also spins
out a very credible character story. I
became completely entranced by the likeable and humorous narrator, Finn, but
the author also does a bang-up job of developing secondary characters, like Aaron,
and the young geography teacher, Ned; they seem like real people, not just “extras”.
Finn tries to figure out his 94-year-old great grandfather, who goes by
his surname, Armstrong, and “kind of looks like a garden gnome, only mean.” The
boy is perceptive. He says “I’ll use my wiles to break into Armstrong’s mind,”
and eventually the pair begin bonding over that great game, cribbage. Finn
recognizes that when he’s with his parents on global assignments, his
anthropologist father hires a grad student “supposedly to be my babysitter. But
I’m actually bait. The grad student’s real job is to write a paper about how
the local kids live. So they need me to get out there and play with all the kids.”
We witness Finn transform from city boy to country boy, from a child to
a young man who loves “to see the walls of white bags grow around somebody’s
life and know that I’m helping them protect what they love the most.”
There
is an exceptional, other-worldly sub-plot that I don’t want to give away:
please buy this eminently satisfying book, and discover it. Wow, wow, wow.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
________________________________
“Every Happy Family”
by Dede Crane
Published by Coteau Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 978-1-55050-548-1
Crane’s novel is a realistic study of family and the complex
relationships that develop between generations, between husbands and wives, and
between siblings. Readers are privy to the private thoughts, fears and hopes of
various members of the Wright family over a period of five dynamic years.
The story is told through the perspectives of each of the Wrights. Introspective
Jill is an “itinerant linguistics scholar”. Words
matter to this woman. Her Sandwich Generation responsibilities involve caring
for her increasingly eccentric mother (the older woman spontaneously invites
two men and a woman-“we need a fourth for bridge”-to live with her), and parenting
three teenaged children: studious Quinn; athletic Beau; and adopted Tibetan daughter,
Pema. The familial roster also includes Jill’s husband, Les, and her artsy
sister-in-law, Annie.
Crane’s taken on a large cast and she’s successfully
created completely individual identities for each member. It was interesting to
watch this family grow and change as life dealt it some heavy hands. One of the
most intriguing story- lines concerns Pema, a “hormone soup” when we first meet
her at age 14. At the outset, a letter’s arrived from Pema’s birth mother, and
although Les is supportive of a reconnection, Jill can’t emotionally process
it. A few years later Pema travels to Jampaling to meet and live with her
biological family. When she’s sharing a bed-“a grass-stuffed mattress on top of
two wool carpets”-with her step-sisters, she remembers back to when “Her
biggest concern in life [was] matching the colour of her highlights to her
shoes.”
Quinn becomes an architecture student who eventually connects with a
woman his educated mother will look down upon. One of his endearing
idiosyncrasies is his habit of thinking of people as the buildings he feels
would best represent them. His girlfriend, Holly, is the architectural
equivalent of “an old-style cement water tower on a smooth expanse of prairie.”
As in real life, these characters are
sometimes delightfully bizarre. Creative Auntie Annie makes leather cumberbunds
and flapper tops from plastic straws. She has “a collection of nineteen house
keys stolen from lovers.”
Illness plays a roll with two characters, and when one is dealing with
cancer, he credibly states: “It’s like having someone sit on your shoulder and
whisper ‘you’re sick, you’re sick, you’re sick’ in your ear while you’re trying
to think about something else.”
Families are not static, as Crane ably demonstrates. Late in the book we read “How well can we know anyone?” Even when
living beneath one roof, it’s difficult for family members to truly know each other. Then the
kids grow up, move on, and life spins beyond anyone’s control. By the time you
reach the novel’s final scene, you’ll feel like you’re right in the room. Crane
delivers a heart-rending experience.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Fog of the Outport”
by Robin Durnford, artwork and design
by Meagan Musseau
Published by JackPine Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$30.00
ISBN 978-1-927035-07-8
JackPine Press is well-known for publishing artsy chapbooks. I was
prepared for the unconventional, but admit I didn’t know how to approach Fog of the Outport. The textless,
off-white cover and grey, hand-stitched spine offered no clues as to what might
be inside, thus genre, creators, and even the title awaited discovery.
I opened the book and was delighted to find a dramatic landscape
reflected in silkscreen prints; a design that merges with the unfoldable back
cover to create an innovative, three-paneled panorama.
This limited-edition chapbook, written by Robin Durnford, and
illustrated\ designed by Meagan Musseau-Newfoundlanders both-is a gorgeous collaboration
featuring prose poems named for each month of the year-“february” to “february”.
It’s a memorial to the life of the poet’s father, whose own father died when he
was five, and it’s an homage to Durnford’s widowed grandmother, left with nine
children to care and provide for on “the exposed bone-belly” of Francois NFLD,
an isolated, south coast outport.
There is story here, and art, and language that made my mouth water. In
the first “february” piece, one does not so much read as she does listen to the words:
“this story begins in the rock-slide sea-bowl of one lost harbor,
secreted amongst the gull-ridden shady rows of hills and cliffs stoic and
reaching toward Miquelon. a parallel universe stuffed with the stink of fish
guts and salt, tipping houses, thick with paint, falling slowly into
persevering cliffs, slippery and wild, ice-crusted in winter, blooming in
summer with the brambleberries and beach rocks, black flies and stouts …”
I was so taken by the musical, alliterative phrases, like “we slipped
lovely and lonely into the living again,” that I didn’t realize until the end
of the second poem that the poet was cleverly inserting rhyme into her stanzas,
ie: “the mom in the kitchen, clutching arms to her chest, nine boiled potatoes
on nine plates for the rest.” Hunger’s both depicted and symbolically
represented in the hard-consonants and uncapitalized, long-sentenced, prose
poem form.
This could be a handbook for what it’s like to grow up in Newfoundland.
We have “red-bottomed rubbers,” “sprayed shellfish and sticky dories,” “black
waves and dips, reaching for savagely granite-stacked cliffs.” There are
mummers, described as “snowstorm-hurled gargoyles” who scare the child with
their “shape-shifting in kitchens.”
In the hard year that followed her grandfather’s death, the poet’s dad
failed Grade One, explored a shipwreck, and “sprouted and frolicked, choked on
lobster and Pollock.” The chapbook is rife with hyphenated words that really
hit the mark: “sea-urchin throat,” “blood-bogs,” “fuzz-bearded tuckamore” and
“stink-sinking marsh” are among my favourites.
This rich language is balanced against digital reproductions of Musseau’s
delicate ink and watercolour paintings, which suggest landscapes rather than mirror them.
Fog of the Outport will
satisfy those poetry-lovers who mourn the absence of rhyme in contemporary
poetry, and it will sate aficionados
of free-verse\prose-poetry. Google” Fog of the Outport CBC” for an excellent
televised feature (“Land and Sea”) on the creators and story behind this book.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
______________________________________________
“Stepping Out from the Shadows: A Guide
to Understanding & Healing from Addictions”
by Allan Kehler
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth
Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 978-1-927756-12-6
Unhealthy addictions are prevalent in contemporary society, and if you
visit any bookstore, you’ll note that books about addictions also fill the
shelves. When one who’s experienced
the wrath of addiction puts pen to paper, it tends to add weight to the words.
Allan Kehler is a Saskatchewan author, addictions counsellor, educator, and
presenter, and he’s also struggled with both addictions and mental illness. His
book Stepping Out from the Shadows: A
Guide to Understanding & Healing from Addictions, is an easy-to-read
guide for those struggling with addictions, and for those who love and support
them.
Kehler names some of the reasons why one might become addicted to a
substance or behavior (like compulsive gambling or over-eating). These include
a lack of love and nurturing within the home environment, mental illness, peer
pressure, or some specific trauma which resulted in suppressed emotions. “The
person takes comfort knowing that something exists that will bring them out of
their painful reality.” As use escalates, however, a habit that was once a
“want” evolves into a “need.”
The author also addresses “the face of addiction.” Society may
stereotype addicts, as the author confesses he once did. His preconceived
notion of an addict-“an older man dressed in torn and dirty clothes … wild and
tangled hair … fingers wrapped tightly around a bottle, or a needle protruding
from his arm”-made it hard to identify himself as an addict. That notion, he
explains, is no longer valid: addiction does not heed age or social status.
Kehler backs his text up with statistics. He writes that a U of A
psychiatrist and addictions expert discovered “that while seven out of 10 [addicts]
continue to be employed, less than 10 percent are actually identified as having
addictions.”
He also talks about responsibility, and says that while “the disease of
addiction isn’t a choice … the behavior is.” “It is the addict who initially
chose to pick up the bottle the pill, the joint, the cards, the food, etc.” The
compulsion to continue the destructive behaviour is so strong, he explains,
that when one is told to stop “this can sound like being told to stop
breathing.” That’s powerful stuff, and it really puts into perspective the
vice-grip hold addictions can have on an individual. Kehler asserts that
talking and letting people in are key to recovery.
In Stepping Out from the Shadows
I learned that “Addicts tend to avoid mirrors like the plague because they
don’t want to see what they’ve become,” and that addictions may pause emotional
growth, so if young people begin drinking heavily at age 15, their emotional
age may remain at that age, “even if they stop drinking at 30.” What a
frightening thought!
This book is well-written, organized, and researched. It offers strong hope
for addicts and their loved ones, and the fact that the author has battled and
beat his own demons should be highly inspiring to those who feel they will
never be happy, healthy and whole again.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
______________________________________
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