“Been in the Storm So Long"
Written by Terry Jordan
Published by Coteau Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$21.95
ISBN 9-781550-506877
I've long considered Terry
Jordan to be a masterful writer, but if there's any justice in the literary
universe, his latest novel - the epic and historical Been in the Storm So Long - should earn him national award
nominations. This captivating story centres on the sometimes discordant rhythms
of family and community, the restless and hungry Atlantic, and the music that
scores and changes lives. The mesmerizing tale moves with lyricism and grace,
transporting readers from a small Nova Scotia fishing village to New Orleans.
Protagonist John Healy is "just
another sickly Irish infant begun in Sligo," whose father moves the family
to Canada for a brighter future. Jordan's characters are imaginative
storytellers and dreamers, some with peculiar gifts (ie: John has "the
ability to listen to clouds"), and they've brought their superstitions
across the pond. "There was sorcery everywhere on the water; be wary,"
a young John is warned, "and it was left at that." When a whale
beaches on a shoal and the curious come to inspect (and slaughter) it, John's
mother claims that "Pure grief'd be the cause of that," and wonders
"How much sorrow does it take to fill the likes of a poor thing its size."
From then on, John dreams of becoming a whaler.
Jordan deftly creates atmosphere.
Odette, a gifted violinist from childhood (and John's future wife), plays her
music from the hills above the village, competing with sea birds. "At
times, on the hill, she walked in a fog so calm and thick she could turn and
still see the path where the movement of her legs and body had made a cloudy
stir." Odette's dream is to see the world and "experience music that
was not her own." A third significant character, Daniel Burke, was tragically
orphaned as a teen and thus moves in with Odette's family. Daniel dreams of
Odette.
The text is rife with foreshadowing,
though the story's so broad and rich, one would need to return to the beginning
to thread all the clues together. On each page the author wields his pen like a
poet who knows the secret to mesmerizing readers. Here Jordan describes the
all-important weather: "It snowed the sad spring day they sailed, in
Halifax, too, the hopeful first morning they arrived in Canada. The air was
shaggy with it …"
The tale transports us across borders,
generations and cultures. Here's a gem from a sweaty New Orleans' dance hall
scene: "Shadow shapes – all alphabets of arms and legs – jumped to the
music, every face dark-skinned except for his." Another fine line, concerning
John and his precocious son, Gabriel, as they pull in their fish net:
"Line upon layer of fish had spilled onto the sand, head to tail to head
to tail all the same direction inland, lying there obedient as dogs and so
uniformly configured they seemed like the scales on their own dying sides."
This is a storm-tossed and
heart-swelling sea of a book. You should experience it.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Goodbye Stress, Hello Life!”
by Allan Kehler
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth
Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$15.95
ISBN 978-1-927756-53-9
Stress: every person deals with some
amount of it. Some turn to vices (drugs, alcoholism, over-eating); some become
angry, fearful, or depressed; many become physically ill; and fortunate others
view stress as a challenge to be dealt with in positive ways (ie: changing
routines, practicing mindfulness, exercising). If stress is threatening to sink
you, reading Saskatonian Allan Kehler's latest book could be a swell start to
swimming out of it.
Kehler is a public presenter with a
wealth of experience, both professional (addictions counsellor, clinical case
manager, and college instructor) and personal (mental health and addiction
issues) that fuel his authority on stress and living a healthier life. The blurb
on Goodbye Stress, Hello Life! is a strong
motivator for any potential readers: [Kehler] empowers you to take an honest
look at what lies beneath your stressors, and provides the tools to heal
through a holistic approach. You will be inspired to stop existing and start
living …"
What I appreciate most about this book
is the great and diverse analogies Kehler employs, ie: he talks about the body's
"sympathetic system" acting like a gas pedal during a stressful
event. This is the "fight or flight" response: in times of stress, we
tend to either jam the gas (flight) or hit the brake (fight). (Doing nothing is
another option.) Among balanced individuals, a natural ebb and flow exists between
these reactions, but one can become "stuck" on either response, and
this is where addictions and other negative choices may kick in.
Another analogy concerns the teachings
of a turtle … the turtle "teaches us the importance of going within"
and, in this fast-paced and instant gratification-society, "to slow down."
When we truly look inside ourselves, Kehler maintains we "will find all of
[our] answers," and slowing allows us to be silent and listen to our
"gut" for "strong and accurate information." Agreed. I took
a Mindfulness class recently, and the instructor spoke of people having two
brains: the gut brain and the intellectual brain, and said that the deepest
thinkers think very little. Instead, they go still and wait for the "gut
feeling," which is a much more reliable brain.
Kehler's text is peppered with
interesting statistics, ie: "One study revealed that 75 to 90 percent of
all doctors' office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints
(Goldberg, 2007)." Learning to deal effectively with stress could be
beneficial at so many levels, from reducing doctor's visits for ulcers and
fatigue to extending lives that ended too early from stress-influenced diseases
like cancer, diabetes and stroke.
The author discusses remedies for
workplace stress, ie: time management and progressive muscle relaxation; the
importance of not only talking about one's pain but also "feel[ing] your
feelings; and the lessons we can learn from children. He says "A sense of
child-like wonder manifests itself when you build a tree fort or engage in a
game of tag." Again, I find myself agreeing: only yesterday, I went
skating … and even tried a few spins.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Lifting Weights”
by Judy McCrosky
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$18.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-105-1
Saskatoon's Judy McCrosky has a
reputation for pushing the limits. As a multi-genre writer she's authored an eclectic
repertoire of material, including literary short stories, sci-fi and fantasy,
non-fiction, and even (under a pseudonym) a Silhouette Romance novel. In her
latest short fiction collection, Lifting
Weights, McCrosky asks us to step slightly outside the borders of reality
and spend a few hours in unusual worlds that may be closer than we think.
This imaginative ten-story collection
features a wide range of plots, from the moving "Shelter," about a
distraught mother navigating both her brain-injured son's care and the return
of her estranged husband, to a tale about a lonely pathologist, Andrea, who
finds a "disgustingly cute" hamster in her home and soon has
sixty-one furry new animal friends. This story makes parallel statements about
the earth's ecology (the shrinking ozone layer), and men's inability to see
beyond the surface of appearance when considering a partner. Andrea finds a
warm community among her female, quilter friends, but when she goes to a party
she has to "wear a dress of cute hamsters to be seen by men."
The crowning story is "Death
TV". There's a strong science fiction trend in movies (and Netflix TV
series) currently, and I could easily see "Death TV" produced as a
"Black Mirror" episode. The story concerns Perry, a photojournalist
who is the "acknowledged expert on anything to do with the Death TV
Network," which is every iota as grim as it sounds. As the story opens,
Perry's sitting in a bar with a friend watching a TV screen: "… a man,
wrinkled face peaceful, rolled his eyes toward the camera, and breathed his
last. Perry reached for another handful of potato chips and munched on them,
watching as the show switched to another deadbed scene." The more gruesome
the death scene - ie: motorcycle accidents, deaths on the series Gladiators - the more potential TV viewers. Sadly, this does not seem
far-fetched.
Perry stays tuned to accident calls and
races on his motorcycle to be first to photograph the deaths. In this future
world – again, it seems frighteningly nearby – he breathes fresh air through an
"Airomatic" (oxygen tank connected to his motorcycle). "Darwin
laws" have made mandatory helmet-wearing a thing of the past: "New
laws left people free to make their own choices, and that was the sign of a
civilized society." How brutal has civilization become? When a train-car
collision call comes in, Perry considers what he may find. "Maybe the
vehicle hit by the train would be more than just a single car. Maybe it would
be a school bus." Dying children, he thinks "would be good TV."
Symbolism and contrast are major
features in McCrosky's unique work, and in "Death TV" the public's
hunger for death scenes is balanced against the life of a gentle mortician
whose passion is caring for monarch butterflies. What happens when an associate
producer from Death TV arrives at his door? Oh, you should really find out.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“Road Allowance Kitten”
Written by Wilfred Burton, Illustrated
by Christina Johns, Translated by Norman Fleury
Published by Gabriel Dumont Institute
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$15.00
ISBN 978-1-926795-72-0
This bilingual children's picture book
- with the green-and-yellow-eyed, plot-important kitten on the cover – gently
tells a true and unpleasant story in prairie history: the poverty, hardship and
displacement of the Road Allowance Métis. Like it sounds - and as explained
in the back-notes - a road allowance is "a strip of [government-owned]
land adjoining a parcel of surveyed land … set aside in case roads will be
built in the future."
One need not know the historical truth
to appreciate this well-delivered story about family and friendship, sharing,
and both the joys and hardships of living a basic lifestyle, but it bears a
reminder. After the 1885 Resistance, numerous Métis
displaced from their traditional homes and land used scrap materials to build
new, often uninsulated and tar paper-roofed shacks on road allowances. They
worked for local farmers (ie: clearing fields of rocks and trees), and picked
Seneca root and berries, grew gardens, trapped and hunted (though a 1939 law
made year-round and unlicensed trapping and hunting illegal, and expensive
fines resulted). "Squatters" don't pay tax, and their children,
therefore, were not allowed to attend school. The government began relocating
(aka "evicting") the Road Allowance people in the 1930s, and Burton's
story concerns the 1949 displacement of Métis
from the Lestock area to Green Lake. It's a story he'd heard told, in slightly different form, by
three women.
The author does a lovely job of unobtrusively
painting a realistic picture of the lives of the Métis
characters, complete with jigging, sashes, and bannock in the grub box. Cousins
and best friends Rosie and Madeline crack ice in the ditches, play a game
called Canny Can, and chase "flittering butterflies and nectar-seeking
bumblebees." The girls discover a calico kitten "in a dusty Christmas
orange box under a pile of rubble," and proceed to share the beloved pet.
It's a happy, if simple, existence for
the children, but when "strange men in suits from town" arrive, their
families are given just a few days' notice that they'll have to move "way
up north in the bush". Rosie's father tries to put a positive spin on it:
"'They promised us our own land. There are lots of trees to build a log
house. There'll be good fishing in the lakes and good hunting in the bush.
Maybe even a school for you!'" Will the kitten go with them?
The colourful illustrations tell their
own stories, ie: clothes drying over a barbed wire fence; beaded moccasins and a
homemade quilt; a wagon transporting families' entire, boxed-up lives to the
train station. The softcover comes with its own soundtrack - the story's read
in English by Wilfred Burton; Michif narration's by Norman Fleury- and includes
a glossary, map, and even instructions for Canny Can.
Road
Allowance Kitten tells an important story that prairie
children may not learn in school, but should. "This was their home. The
only home they knew. The home they loved." How tragic that it should all
go up, literally, in smoke.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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