Three Reviews: Why Not Now? by Denise Leduc, illustrated by Karin Sköld; Something Big by Jenna and Avery Wasylkowski, illustrated by A.E. Matheson; and The Day Petuna Had Pglets in the Strawberry Patch (Adventures of the Barnyard Boys) by M Larson, illustrated by FX and Colo Studio;

“Why Not Now?”

Written by Denise Leduc, Illustrated by Karin Sköld

Published by Lilac Arch Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$17.99  ISBN 9781778286933

 

I experienced quite the shock when I began Denise Leduc’s new book, Why Not Now? I’d recently reviewed the Aylesbury, Saskatchewan writer’s thoughtful children’s books—Poppies, Poppies Everywhere! and Letting Charlie Bow Go—and assumed this newest softcover was also for young readers. I dived right in—without reading the back cover text—and a glance at the large, well-spaced font also supported my notion that I was about to read a junior novel. Thus, the book’s first paragraph gave me a jolt: “Arriving at the Vancouver airport, Frank felt reinvigorated … He was glad his son, John, had insisted on coming.” What the …? I flipped to the back cover. Surprise!

Leduc had me laughing at the genre-flip and my own presumption; Why Not Now? is a hi-lo (high interest/low reading level) book for older readers, ie: seniors with dementia. It’s also part of a series of hi-lo titles described as “heartwarming tales … especially crafted for people experiencing cognitive impairment.” With Sköld’s soft and uncluttered wildlife (bear, eagle), landscape and activity-based illustrations appearing between each of the short chapters; an engaging, intergenerational family story starring the grandfather, Frank; and a handful of discussion questions following each of the ten easy-to-read chapters, Leduc has penned yet another success.

As we age and have less years ahead of us than behind, it’s natural to lose our sense of adventure. Fear and health issues are among the inhibiting culprits—even good old-fashioned common sense often prevents us from living our final years to their fullest. In Leduc’s story, Frank wonders what his life might have been like had he taken more risks. He’s now travelled to the west coast with his son, John, who “insisted” he come along to visit Frank’s cherished grandson, Max—who “reminded [Frank] of his younger self and what might have been”—and to “witness the life [Max] had created.”

Frank had not seen Max for years. Now a grown man with a fiancée and a career as a helicopter pilot “out here in the mountains,” Max is elated to host his dad and grandpa for ten days, and tells “Gramps” that the trip is “all about you.”

The author’s discussion questions arise from the story and include both specific and general questions, ie: “What is the prettiest place you have lived or visited?” and “Do you like eating fish? If so, what kinds?” I imagine this story working extremely well in both group settings and in one-on-one sharing.

I highly suggest you read this heartwarming and realistic tale to learn about the major adventure that begins Frank’s visit—he surprises himself and everyone else, and could even be on his way to becoming a “Youtube sensation.” I will say that Max is seriously impressed with his grandfather’s spontaneous escapade. “‘Gramps, you are the coolest guy I know,’” Max says.

Will another adventure follow tomorrow? Will that little voice inside Frank repeat those three important, titular words? Leduc shows us that aging can be an amazing adventure.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Something Big”

By Jenna and Avery Wasylkowski, Illustrated by A.E. Matheson

Published by aemWORKS Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$11.95  ISBN 9-78177-980702

 

Illustrator/publisher A.E. Matheson has done something big. She’s teamed  whimsical illustrations and a fanciful conversation lifted from “real-life” (I’m assuming, as the front cover declares the story’s a “conversation” between Jenna and Avery Wasylkowski), and created a delightful—and most unusual!—Christmas-related story that spotlights childhood imagination and belief.

I hadn’t even reached the first page of text before I was mesmerized: the book opens with a two-page, full-bleed spread of a green dragon with translucent wings chained to charcoal-coloured boulders. His eyelids are heavy, smoke vapours from wide nostrils, and one of his three grey horns appears like a party hat atop his fringy head. This well-crafted image inspires curiosity: what exactly is this clawed creature?

Turn the page, and one enters a completely different scene: a realistic family breakfast with a mother, father and son around a kitchen table. Here, too, I’m slow to flip the page, even though the opening text’s compelling: “So? Any thoughts on what you’re asking Santa for Christmas?” (We don’t know which parent’s asking this question, and this interesting lack of attribution’s another trait that sets this children’s story apart.) The boy responds: “Yup!—I want a dragon.”

The illustrator’s attention to realistic details and generous use of colour draw me into the image: Dad’s reading the weather forecast (-15 and sunny) on a tablet; Mom’s in a housecoat; the salt and pepper shakers are half full; beyond the window above the gold-piped radiator, it’s winter-morning dark; and there’s a design etched into the backs of the wooden chairs. All of these specifics cleverly demonstrate that the illustrator is telling this story along with the co-writers/conversationalists.

Turn another page and there’s the dragon again—it’s also featured on the glossy cover—and the child announcing that it’s not a pretend dragon he’s interested in, he wants “a real scaly, pointy, fire breathing dragon.” Even the cat on top of the fridge looks surprised at this response. As the story continues, the mother asks logical questions, ie: “How in the world will Santa fit that in the sled?” and “What will this dragon eat?” There are even a few funny pages about the dragon’s “poop,” and a corresponding illustration shows dad using a driveable snowplow to scoop the huge pile of dung. The child has a fun answer to each question, ie: the dragon “eats stars and there are lots of stars. And stop calling him dragon—his name is Torchy—without an ‘e.’” Again and again, the child “outsmarts” his rabbit-slippered mother as he gets dressed and prepares to go to school.

No bio notes are included with this book, so I consulted www.aematheson.ca to learn more about the illustrator/publisher. This “self-taught book person of all trades” has collaborated with several prominent Saskatchewan writers, including Alison Lohans and David Carpenter. Matheson works in an academic library, and has “written, illustrated, designed, published, and hand bound, many books.”

Something Big is a merry, welcome addition to the more traditional slate of children’s Christmas-season stories.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“The Day Petunia Had Piglets in the Strawberry Patch (Adventures of the Barnyard Boys, Book 3)”

Written by M Larson, Illustrated by FX and Color Studio

Published by M Larson Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$13.99  ISBN 978-1-7780956-2-7

 

How delightful to read The Day Petunia Had Piglets in the Strawberry Patch, the third illustrated children’s book in The Adventures of the Barnyard Boys Book Series by rural Saskatchewan writer and environmental consultant Melanie Larson. This glossy-covered and colourfully-illustrated softcover once again features six-year-old narrator Finn and his brothers Owen and Dez, and reveals a happy family in an enviable rural country setting—ah, those bright, sweeping prairie skies—amid a menagerie of farm animals. As with her previous titles, Larson’s subtle humour emanates from easy-to-read pages in this well-produced book, and some details in the full-bleed illustrations also amuse.

The boys’ latest adventure concerns searching the farmyard for their adopted pig, Petunia. Petunia’s no ordinary hog … she’s a Kunekune pig: “She has a very short snout and feeds on grass, like a cow or horse.” On page one, readers learn that Petunia formerly lived at a petting zoo, but “Her owners couldn’t keep her anymore because she was getting too big.” Kudos to Larson: I didn’t initially perceive that this largesse might be a clever clue to the porcine plot.

It's admirable how Larson puts a lot of proverbial “eggs in the basket” with her books. Aside from the boys’ adventure, this is also a counting book: as the children search for the missing Kunekune, they encounter their family’s litany of working and domestic animals, and each time discover that the animals have multiplied, ie: Dolly the donkey has a “brand-new baby donkey,” and at the goat pen, Dez finds “three goat kids with their daddy, but no Petunia the pig.” The illustration that accompanies the latter page shows the boys’ barefoot mother doing goat yoga—Downward Dog, to be specific—in the grass with a kid on her back.

Brother Owen checks the stable and again, no Petunia, but he does find the “cat Rosie with six baby kittens!” The image here shows Owen watching the kittens cavort while he reclines on golden bales; the use of yellow, orange and gold is found on several pages, and it echoes the “sunny” nature of this story.

Larson’s also included an activity at the end of the book: young readers are reminded that “Each animal has a job to do on the farm,” and invites children to flip back and locate the llamas, cattle, chickens, etc. and to consider their various jobs. Even the cats and dogs play important roles for farming families, which is something town or city children may not be aware of.   

I was curious to learn more about Kunekune pigs. A quick Google search unveiled that they are “a small breed of domestic pig rom New Zealand” with great personalities! They “flop over for a belly rub at just a simple touch” and “get along well with other animals.” (Wikipedia)

Readers may wish to check out Larson’s other titles, including Count Them! 50 Tractor Troubles. And on the subject of counting … eight is significant in this new book’s conclusion. Can you guess why?  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

 

Two Reviews: I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn't Like: A Memoir by David Carpenter, and Danceland Diary, by Dee Hobsbawn-Smith

“I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like: A Memoir”

Written by David Carpenter

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-227-0

  

When I discovered that Saskatoon’s David Carpenter was releasing a new memoir, I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like, I immediately wanted to review it. I knew it would be illuminating, well-written and downright fun, because this is what I’ve come to expect of Carpenter’s work, whether fiction or nonfiction, and this latest title’s cleared the bar. Carpenter’s a bonafide storyteller and a “rabid conservationist,” and his entertaining stories and mind-broadening research into “this ancient cafeteria called nature”—and who and what threaten it—is an epiphanic read.   

The memoir’s an homage to “creatures with Fangs, Claws, and Other Pointy Things,” from mosquitos, snakes and weasels to the apex predators: wolves, cougars and bears. Over eighteen mostly short chapters that “follow the chain of predation,” we learn about Carpenter’s lifelong passion and reverence for the winged, finned and four-legged. “I seem to have a thing for predatory animals,” he writes. “My journals are full of them.” He’s been keeping field notes for fifty years re: his “sightings of and adventures with predacious creatures,” from boyhood memories of fishing on Lake Wabamun, Alberta to adult interactions with rattlesnakes in Arizona and black bears in Saskatchewan.   

Carpenter’s an avid fly fisherman, and his beloved brown trout get copious attention, too, as does Little Bear Lake, where in 1997 he and his wife, Honor Kever, bought a ramshackle cabin and transformed it into an idyllic retreat (difficult septic tank notwithstanding), where fish and friends are never far away, Kever’s planted trees and bushes, and “Eagles and ospreys patrol the skies.”

Expect offbeat, like Carpenter’s rescue of a drowning dragonfly (“a biplane with enormous opalescent eyes”), and his desire to see alligators and rattlesnakes in the wild (missions accomplished in the US). When it seems the author’s had fun writing, the reader has fun too.

Expect an education. I learned much, including the differences between weasels, pine martens, fishers, badgers and wolverines. “In the hockey game of nature, [wolverines] deserve a lot of time in the penalty box.” And until recently, mosquitoes (“draculating fiends”) killed “more than a million people annually,” but “Malaria-bearing mosquitoes certainly delayed the destruction of the Amazon rainforests,” too. Carpenter’s merging of anecdote and fact works.

There’s also much here I personally relate to, ie: the “near-galvanic pain” of a black widow bite (I was bitten in Sooke, BC) and the “burgeoning” presence of wild pigs (I found a skull near Middle Lake, SK). Cougars roam my current neighbourhood. Though long thought to be loners, Carpenter’s enlightened me: sometimes cougar do “socialize in diverse groups.” This book: terrific conversation starter.

Where did our fear of apex predators begin? Perhaps with the Goldilocks story: entitled girl breaks into bears’ home. “[Goldilocks] reminds us all too well of who runs the show in our present day Anthropocene. The bears’ habitat is her playground. The Goldilocks story sums up what human beings have done to the terrestrial wilderness, the ocean, the atmosphere, and now the climate.” Maybe, Carpenter posits, “Goldilocks is us.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Danceland Diary”

By Dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.900  ISBN 9-781989-274828

   

‘Tis a wondrous thing to watch a writer’s oeuvre grow. I’ve had the pleasure of following Saskatchewan’s Dee Hobsbawn-Smith evolution as she’s published enviable books of poetry, short fiction and nonfiction—including the scrumptious Bread & Water: Essays—and now this hard-working writer’s earned another literary moniker: novelist. Danceland Diary, the award-winning author’s premiere novel, is saturated with poetic imagery, a juicy plot, and longing.  

First-person narrator Luka Dekker’s been born into an off-colony Hutterite family that harbours dark secrets—indeed, keeping secrets seems an intergenerational trait for these “gypsy Hutterites,” and Luka’s got a dandy of her own. It’s been twenty-two years since Luka’s unstable mother, Lark, abandoned Luka and her sister, Connie, and moved to the west coast. The girls were raised by their grandmother, the matriarch Anky, and never saw Lark again. At eighteen Luka left her rural Saskatchewan life to attempt to find her beautiful and elusive mother in Vancouver. The timing of Lark’s disappearance eerily lines up with Robert Pickton’s murders of women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Is there a connection?   

Luka’s thirty when the novel begins. She has horticulture and botany degrees, and a seven-year-old son, Jordan. Anky’s dying, and Connie’s called Luka back to Saskatchewan to help care for her. Luka and her son are “just staying until Anky kicks her clogs.” Every generation of this family’s plagued by the secrets they’ve held close, but when Luka finds Anky’s journals and learns what happened to her grandmother at Manitou Beach’s Danceland on a fateful day in June 1943, the narrator starts snapping puzzle pieces together.

The novel’s part mystery and part history­—Luka “want[s] to know who [she] is”—and a quiet love story’s percolating on the side. Readers will root for Luka, who’s lifelong search for her mother parallels a perennial desire for happiness. 

Fittingly, considering Luka’s education and dream of operating a market garden, Hobsbawn-Smith pays keen attention to what grows in prairie gardens and fields. Even her similes demonstrate this attention to flora, ie: at an old-time threshing demonstration, farmers’ wives are “relegated to the edge of the field like poppies,” a yellow lady’s slipper is a leitmotif, and at twelve, Luka “cut off [her] braids with the garden secateurs.” Food, too, gets spotlighting: these folks eat a lot of kuchen, and there’s the usual “sliced ham and coleslaw and homemade buns and squares and colourful jellied salads” at Anky’s funeral at the “old Hutterite country church” near the farm. I clearly see old Reverend Waldman at the service, “a faded, narrow-gauge man in a freight train of a tweed jacket two sizes too wide,” his voice “dissipating into the air like a spent train whistle.”

And what’s a proper prairie novel without descriptions of winter? “Hoarfrost like jewelry on tree branches. Smell of woodsmoke. Stars, the northern lights. The coyotes’ songs echoing like glass about to crack.” Fabulous.   

My favourite scene concerns Anky’s wedding night consummation at the Bessborough Hotel. I read it and howled. Bet you will, too.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM