“Reflections in a Farmhouse Window: A Prairie Memoir”
By Marilyn Frey
Published by Marilyn Frey
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.95
ISBN 9-780981-380346
One of the many joys of reading memoir is learning you share certain places, people or experiences with an author. I didn’t anticipate crossovers between my life and Saskatchewan writer Marilyn Frey’s, but I discovered multiple intersections while reading her candid, thought-provoking and beautifully-written book, Reflections in a Farmhouse Window: A Prairie Memoir. Like Frey, I’ve also lived in Middle Lake, Meadow Lake and Saskatoon, but overlapping communities aside, I really connected emotionally to the sixty stories this talented writer shares about her rural upbringing, the joys and trials of family life, weathering major transitions, and knowing when it’s time to take a few moments for oneself.
After a long career in banking—from teller beginnings to becoming a District Manager who frequently travelled—Frey now has the time to turn her attention to her passion for writing, and I’m so glad she does. It’s rare to read a first-time, self-published writer’s book that sings the way this one does: it’s clear that Frey has put the time in re: learning the craft of writing. Her use of literary devices (like personification), the inclusion of unique details, and showing rather than telling are just a few of the qualities that elevate this work.
And there’s so much interesting material here. The book’s chronologically structured, beginning with Frey’s first memory (hot woodstove vs. toddler in a “cotton dress with puffy sleeves and a Peter Pan collar”), and one story rolls smoothly into the next. During her 1960s and ‘70s childhood, Frey and her siblings worked hard at farm chores and were “never short on ideas to keep [them]selves amused”. As a young wife, Frey and her husband lived four years in a poorly-heated mobile home with a “mouse invasion,” and when they moved to an acreage near Cudworth, they endured “ever-persistent snake issues”. They often witnessed their affable St. Bernard, Butch, “slurping up a snake as though eating spaghetti”. “Herculean” Butch also got stuck beneath the family’s Pinto (while chasing a cat), and “lift[ed] the car on two wheels as he tried to break free”.
Frey’s keen eye and ear also add to the
impact of these sometimes edge-of-your-seat anecdotes. “The wind howled a
devilish cry, and the willow trees reached their craggy arms to the sky,” she
writes. A teacher’s “Nixon-like jowls shook when he moved his head and his thin
lips seemed to be drawn in as if holding back something he wanted to say”.
The stories are often humorous (ie: getting shunted from a dance class) and always heartfelt, but Frey also portrays life realistically: a break-in, a rape, her daughter’s near-drowning and a suicide are among the serious disclosures.
The 272-page memoir concludes with a multi-generational family gathering, and a moving reconnection with Frey’s childhood home—where the book began. This reader experienced great satisfaction in the full-circle structure, and Frey’s graceful acceptance that the house—now with new owners and transplanted to Wakaw Lake—was “no longer [her] home”.
This is a mesmerizing and triumphant read.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“The Downloaded”
By Robert J. Sawyer
Published by Shadowpaw Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 978-1-98-939899-9
Robert J. Sawyer is well-known in the science fiction realm. He’s written over two dozen novels and won the sci-fi world’s Big Three: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novel, FlashForward, inspired a same-named ABC TV series, and he also scripted the finale of the web series Star Trek Continues. Sawyer’s also a member of the Order of Canada.
I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, but I am indeed aware of Robert J. Sawyer. I heard him present at a Saskatchewan Writers Guild conference decades ago, and remember thinking that his brand of sci-fi was something this fan of realistic literary fiction just might enjoy. Fast-forward to the present: I recently read his 2024 novel, The Downloaded, and appreciated how this talented author has created a reality where humans are still basically the same as the ones who currently walk the earth: they have complicated feelings, they make mistakes, they crack jokes. And, in the case of the twenty-four astronauts and thirty-five ex-cons who populate The Downloaded, they also make frequent movie references.
The story is relayed through a series of interviews with various characters, including Dr. Jürgen Haas and Captain Letitia Garvey, lead players among the team of astronauts (and robots) on an international mission to travel to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri b on the starship Hōkūle'a to “repopulate the Earth if a disaster happened”. The crew “uploaded” in 2058. Unbeknownst to them until 500 human years later (it’s four years for the astronauts in their simulated reality; their actual bodies have been frozen and their consciousnesses uploaded into a quantum computer while they remained stationary in the ships’ coffin-like “silos”), the ship never left Earth’s orbit. Something “ground civilization to a halt” after the bodies were frozen and before they could be transferred to the starship, and the astronauts and prisoners learn they’re still in Waterloo, Ontario at the Quantum Cryonics Institute, among “the twisted skeletons of buildings”.
What was this catastrophic event, why are criminals selected to spend
their prison sentences in “cryosleep” alongside the astronauts, and who is the mysterious
interviewer? Plus, what do Mennonites have to do with it all?
What Sawyer does well is take a serious situation like earth’s demise and, with lighthearted banter, unusual scenarios, and characters with major attitude, make it all seem like a romp. Dr. Haas says he’s “looked at clouds from both sides now”—a Joni Mitchell reference. He “first realized that things had gone to ratshit” in 2548. There was a “great privacy revolt” in the 2040s. COVID-50 has come and gone. Mars has been colonized.
On top of all the other challenges the astronauts face in their strange new reality, they learn that a “whopping great mother of an asteroid will smack right into the Earth” in seven years. Combine a whole lot of science, a shipload of humanity and the chops of a veteran writer, and you’ve got a fun-filled futuristic novel for the here and now.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Hanging Art: Noah Carey Mysteries—Book One”
By Jim Handy
Published by YNWP
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.95
ISBN 978-1-77869-033-4
Looking for a page-turning summer read that features a likeable sleuth, a zippy plot and is saturated with local colour ? Yes? Then do I have the book for you. Hanging Art by Saskatoon’s Jim Handy is the University of Saskatchewan Distinguished Professor of History-turned-novelist’s first in a series of novels called the Noah Carey Mysteries, and I found it hard to put down.
The book is equally divided between Saskatoon’s downtown core and Toronto. The bike-riding, Cross-Fit and martial arts’ practicing sleuth—a retired history professor, not-so-coincidentally—knows his way around both cities. Noah Carey is also a coffee afficionado, and if you’re familiar with Saskatoon, you’ll enjoy the references to places like City Perks, Night Oven Bakery and the Citizen Café, where he “got a Cubano instead of a latte to mix things up a bit”.
The Remai Modern art gallery (“a pile of cantilevered square boxes in rust-coloured cement”) and a smaller gallery also feature large in this art-themed (note the title) story. Carey’s case concerns the dubious suicide of a promising young Saskatoon artist, Ronnie Robinson, who lives and paints in the city’s warehouse district. When his friend finds him “Swinging from a rope in the middle of the loft,” Robinson’s parents—who operate a market garden that employs immigrants—elect to hire Carey to uncover the truth, and insist that “Ronnie did not kill himself”. Carey, the witty First-person narrator, says he “only take[s] cases that look interesting—and don’t seem like they’ll involve sitting in a car all night long”. This case qualifies. He believes “historians are basically private eyes already—digging through the evidence to find lost stories or set old ones straight”.
Carey’s well-connected. Close friends include a Legal Aid lawyer, a Saskatoon police officer, and an art gallery owner. He also knows other academics and has kept in touch with students. Of his Muay Boran teacher, Sidney, he says “For someone who looks more Russian than Thai, he has to work hard to pull off the ancient Asian wisdom stuff”. This highly-peopled mystery also naturally contains several unpleasant types, including senior artist Edith Maxwell, who claims that “Painting is a craft hard-won through decades of dedication and work,” and believes that Ronnie didn’t deserve his acclaim, and Robinson’s neighbour, an artist who “looked like a biker out of a ‘60s movie”.
Carey’s a down-to-earth, affable guy who wears “almost nothing but mock neck shirts, chinos, and casual sport coats,” and, like me, believes that bow ties are “the worst kind of affectation—as if the wearer is deliberately trying to come across as a cheap southern lawyer”. He dates an Eritrean-Canadian economist, drives “a ten-year-old Audi A6 wagon,” and is not too proud to line dance. When the job gets tough and he has to employ his martial arts’ skills, he sends one goon “hobbling away … looking very much like a badly wounded Sasquatch”.
Hanging Art had me hooked; I look forward to seeing where Handy takes Noah Carey next.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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