Two New Reviews: “Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration” by Louise Bernice Half - Sky Dancer, and Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology and lichenous form by Kim Trainor

“Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration”

Written by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-781779-400840

 

 

Award-winning Saskatchewan writer Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer is renowned for her candid, Cree-infused poetry and presentations. Her latest book, Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, braids memoir, poetry and essays to reveal where the author’s found inspiration and, I would say, contentment, after a tumultuous early start. In the eloquent introduction by the author’s daughter, Omeasoo Wahpasiw, the latter writes: “My mom dances with both her bones and the bones of our people, and when they poke and punch her with their insistent rattling, she does us all a favour, as painful as it is, and leaves them naked in the wind.”

Until age seven, Halfe lived with her family in a log cabin on the Saddle Lake Reserve and practiced traditional Cree ways of life. She doesn’t pretend that it was perfect. Her father drank and was emotionally volatile (“His heart was a cave of stalactites.”). Her parents “stooked hay, picked rocks/in white farmers’ fields”. Halfe “learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. [She] also watched [her] grandparents work on the land and live their spirituality.” She was forced to attend Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta at age seven, and for the next seven years was stripped of using the Cree language she’d grown up with, endured abuse, and lost her identity.

Regaining the Cree language—nêhiyawêwin is used liberally in this work, and an extensive glossary’s included—has been central to Halfe’s personal and professional development. “We must examine and appreciate the depth and richness of our language in order to understand our ceremonies and the heart of our culture. Indigenous languages … cradle the traditional knowledge and wisdom of the people,” she writes. “We need this language of meaning and purpose, of action and vitality, to lift us beyond the era of victimization.”   

I appreciate that this book takes on so much. There’s inspiration and the writing process (she compares it to autumn leaves that “twist and turn with the sun, whipped and rattled by the winds”); personal history (“No running water. Just buckets/of slough water sifted/through a pillowcase.”), including her spirituality, in which ceremony is of great import; her trust in dreams as “a source of information;” the influence of storytelling and Elders; environmental awareness and great respect for the natural world; the value of long walks; legends; much about wind (yótin), which “gives us direction and carries the breath of all life” and is featured in many of the poems; and there is the poetry itself—or simply poetic lines within her prose—that have given me fresh appreciation for her writing, ie: “winter is on the small hairs of my arms.”

“The past is forever present,” Halfe writes in “A Keening,” and many of us spend our lifetimes figuring out how to reconcile this. Halfe appears to be well on her way. “I live and walk this life in both high heels and moccasins,” she shares, and we who read her are the luckier for it.  

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

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“Blue thinks itself within me”

Written by Kim Trainor

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-781779-401205

 

 

I knew I was in for a different kind of book when I read the author’s dedication, which begins: “For the flying beings, the ones with sharp teeth,/the ones who swim, the fire stones, the trees, the rain.” By the end of prize-winning Vancouver writer Kim Trainor’s text, Blue thinks itself within me, I can affirm that her dedication tracks.

Trainor sees, hears, experiences and questions with the intensity of a scientist and the detail of an artist as she draws readers both into the forest at the two-year Fairy Creek blockade near Vancouver Island’s Port Renfrew—where she joined other protestors to protect old growth logging—and through her elegiac and philosophical quandary re: how best to approach writing a long lyric poem about the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen (a rare and threatened species found on yellow cedar in ancient forests) in a kind of respectful co-making with this oldgrowth resident.

Trainor describes artist Natasha Lavdovsky’s discovery of “over sixty trees draped in glittering specklebelly,” and explains that “The finding of such a large community of oldgrowth specklebelly was evidence of the age of this forest that Teal-Jones [“a privately owned timber harvesting and primary lumber product manufacturing company” – tealjones.com] was in the process of cutting down ...”

The book brims with questions, ie: “What tools might lyric poetry bring to a project of co-making of the world with our more-than-human kin, in the face of this slow-burning ecological catastrophe? What furious witness?” and “How will I stitch the poem’s ecosystem into its seams …?”

Trainor admits that her deep dive into how to work artistically with oldgrowth specklebelly lichen at times “engages with complex poetic and ecological theories.” True thing. I far more enjoyed the concrete, sensory-rich descriptions of the Fairy Creek site, where protestors had “code names”—Trainor was “Crow”—and shared supplies: “headlamps, compressions sacks, dry bags, whistles, and a body cam for arrestees to wear in order to document their experiences.” She acknowledges that the land-defenders “combine[d] the most basic of technologies, fire, and one of the most complex, the smartphone, as [they held] vigil with forest and kin.” Constant rain; working in the dark; difficult terrain; and interactions with RCMP, liaison officers, and paramilitary-trained officers (with the Community Industry Response Group) made for great challenges. The protestors created “hard blocks,” “soft blocks” and “blobs” (with protestors interlocking arms), and Trainor was sometimes on the front line. “A blue [RCMP officer] gouged his thumb under my chin, then slipped his hand down to my neck and pressed so hard I couldn’t breathe, his other thumb screwed into my right shoulder at a painful pressure point.” I understand the passion here; one of my family members also participated in the Fairy Creek blockade.

The nonfiction book also includes Trainor’s quiet, beautiful, sensorial moments—a necessary counterpoint. “At night in my one-person tent, the sound of the creek rises, flows through huckleberry and salal, seeps through thin nylon, flesh, bone. I am awash with creek. World pours in.”           

   

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

 

 

Four New Reviews: "Something for the Dark" by Randy Lundy; "Into the D/ark" by David Elias; "The Chorus Beneath Our Feet" by Melanie Schnell; and "My Monster Mommy," written by Megan Ryan, illustrated by Brenna Senger

“Something for the Dark”

Written by Randy Lundy

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95 ISBN 9-781779-400888

 

I’ve reviewed four of Randy Lundy’s transcendent poetry collections, and each time I’ve come away thinking surely this is as good as he gets. Then a new title’s released … and the ceiling rises again.  

Something for the Dark, Lundy’s latest, follows Field Notes for the Self (2020) and Blackbird Song (2018) in a trilogy of meditative books that address the whole of it: life and meaning; connections with people and place (he’s often “on the back deck” with cigarettes and coffee, and his poems surreptitiously venerate the prairies he long resided on); seasons; his beloved creatures (particularly dogs and birds); nothingness and silence; and writing poetry (“These lines are getting the/discussion nowhere”).

I built a fire in the woodstove, lifted the old dog up onto the couch, and, in silence and solitude, let the words nourish me. Lundy possesses the artist’s gift of seeing, certainly, but he also exhibits the rare ability to render images and experiences into something other, something that borders on the holy—a crow feasting on the rib of a “road-killed deer” holds “a strip of meat/in its beak, a red prayer flag hanging limp in the February wind.” Poem after poem, we find a singular “kind of knowing” and acceptance, ie: “There will be dark and cold; it will go on for/days and months.”

There are at least a dozen uses of “nothing,” including “Nothing is hidden here;”  “Nothing remains/to say;” and a “silent, brooding” father:

           sitting at a kitchen table in a

           fourteen-foot-wide trailer, one hand holding a cup of coffee

           in front of him and a cigarette hanging forgotten in the other,

           staring out the single-pane window and seeing nothing but

           his past

Lundy’s father “died early and alone at the back/of the trailer [the poet] grew up in.” All these nothings contain much, including a grandfather who “taught me/to make of silence something rather than nothing,/something from nothing.”

I believe we all need poets to tell us what we didn’t know we were yearning to hear: that “A broken, long-/abandoned wasps’ nest [hangs] like the body/of a headless owl. And, for those who write and those who don’t, that “our job is to stand at a distance,/avert our gaze,/and wait.”

Lundy slices away the noise and gently, even reverently, delivers us to emotional ground zeros, ie: a man who has just chainsawed his rotting apple tree is weeping, in part because “rotted-into-emptiness” rings personal. The tears make him feel

          embarrassed, even

          slightly ashamed, though there was no witness except the two

          dogs, one on either side, muzzles raised in concern, taking turns

          rubbing and then leaning their weights against [his] legs.  

Consider “the dog’s/ears that hang like a pair of temple bells.” The red meat of Lundy’s prayer flag. This writing feels like a new religion, but it’s the oldest of all—the one in which “rocks breathe,” and “your spirit has nothing to do with/heaven or eternity./Just these things, here and now, that you can touch and see.” Preach, Poet.

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

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“Into the D/ark”

Written by David Elias

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.00  ISBN 9-781998-926381

   

Into the D/ark is the dream-like and aptly-titled new novel by veteran Winnipeg writer David Elias, as all is not well for blacksmith/artist Clarence; his wife, Rose; and their fire-disfigured sons in rural Manitoba circa 1963. Indeed, Rose’s best friend, Martha—who inadvertently photographs JFK’s assassination while on holiday—and her fanatical, ark-building brother, Abe, are also battling demons. Like the snow-whipped landscape, the characters are driven toward a frenzy with their disparate obsessions: Rose’s love of women’s magazines; her self-exiled sons’ non-stop watching of American TV programs (their panacea in the rough shack they’ve named “Bachelor’s Paradise);” Martha’s black and white photography, and her secret love for Rose; Abe’s ark project; and Clarence’s shift from welding farm implements to creating nonsensical metal monsters.

The key to this original book’s success is manyfold. Firstly, the distinct characterizations and the author’s ability to credibly portray madness are remarkable: an entire, almost fantastical chapter is dedicated to Clarence’s unravelling, which coincides with the removal of his welding mask:

 

          … he now bathed in glorious unending light, all because he kept

          his naked eyes fixed on the dazzling blaze of metallic fusion, never

          looking away, never yielding, until he’d noticed the fiery sphere where

          the welding rod met the steel grow and widen, brighten, intensify, until

          it expanded to fill the entire room and left him standing in a sea of pure

          white.

 

If this sounds Rapturous, it’s deliberate. This is Mennonite country. Clarence’s fervour among his “phalanx of iron creatures” takes on a quasi-religious tone, and it’s akin to scripture-quoting Abe’s passion for his ark. These are creation stories of a strange kind. Both men are “Not eating. Not sleeping or bathing. Wearing [the] same clothes day in and day out.” Clarence is regularly “embroiled in the maelstrom of a wildly complex idea that buzzed his brain like a crazed moth,” and “a cocktail of toxic chemicals” is “slowly poisoning” him.

There’s heavy use of symbolism, ie: the image of “Tiny droplets of mist” is reimagined throughout the novel as sparks, snow, ashes, and the spray of blood on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink pillbox hat. The “shiny” stool in Clarence’s shop echoes the boys’ burned skin; JFK’s “thick, shiny hair” the moment before he was shot; and the First Lady crawling across the car’s “shiny black surface” in the moment after.              

Elias masters both sweet scenes (Rose milking a cow; Rose rubbing lanolin into her sons’ ruined skin) and the macabre—the blacksmith shop’s explosion that “[liquefied] the skin on her boys’ hands and faces,” and the Kennedy assassination, in close-up.

Elias also addresses the “self-imposed exile” of men, and Martha infers  that “All that conspicuous absence and suffering was really a gesture. A feeble attempt at some kind of heroism.” Human connections, community—these render a person healthy and whole.

From the bright flame of the welding torch to the darkness of human nature, this brilliant novel contains it all. Its unforgettable climactic scene is something you must discover for yourself.

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

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“My Monster Mommy”

Written by Megan Ryan

Illustrated by Brenna Senger

Published by Meow! Pete’s Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$15.99 ISBN 9781069345912

 

The luckiest among us were read to as children, and long may that wonderful tradition continue. Giving children books as gifts—and spending quality time sharing these books with our loved ones—can lead to a lifelong love of literature. In today’s hectic technological era, I wondered if the sharing of “bedtime stories” is something that exhausted contemporary parents still have the time and energy for. After a little Googling, I learned that as recently as 2024, children's and YA books [still] accounted for 40% of all English-language book sales in Canada. That’s great news—for writers and readers.

With all the children’s books published over the centuries, coming up with original ideas can be challenging, but Saskatchewan writer—and busy mom—Megan Ryan has a delightful new children’s book that is indeed unique. My Monster Mommy is also timely: it addresses how mothers who also work outside the home might be extra tired, and require a little “alone time” as they switch gears between their jobs/careers and family time.

The softcover My Monster Mommy—digitally illustrated by Brenna Senger— introduces us to young Sammy, who’s concerned that his mother is some kind of monster because of the unusual things she says and does. After a “fraught” night, the child finds his father watching football—and here illustrator Senger uses humour to show a male figure literally watching a stationary football on a screen—and asks if mom’s “turning into a Yeti,” because “She was hairy and stinky and her mood was real sour.” Sammy’s patient and loving father ensures him that his mother is not becoming a Yeti, “but she does/need her time,/For personal hygiene,/to help her feel fine.”

The book, dedicated to “all the moms who feel like monsters,” addresses this grown-up theme in a way that children can both comprehend and enjoy. The story’s told in rhyme, providing a musicality that children aged three to eight might especially appreciate.   

Still unconvinced, Sammy wonders if perhaps his mother’s a Zombie (“She got up with her eyes closed and walked/into the door!”), or a Ghost (“Sometimes when I look for her, she/vanishes! Poof!”), or a Banshee (her awful shower singing has even Sammy’s omnipresent stuffed dinosaur holding his hands over his ears). She comes home late and sometimes Sammy doesn’t see her until the morning: could she be a Vampire? Again, each of Sammy’s concerns is quelled by his compassionate father. He confirms that the boy’s mother loves Sammy deeply, and that “Being a mother is the most precious gift, But/sometimes she just needs a break from her/shift.”

 We learn that Sammy’s mother is a nurse who works nightshifts. The book’s author is a longtime Care Aid in Saskatoon. This topical story, paired with Senger’s bold, humorous and telling illustrations, ie: dust bunnies under the couch, would be a great addition to any child’s library, but especially to the scores of youngsters whose mothers share the simultaneous responsibilities of earning income and trying to be the best mother possible.   

 

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

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“The Chorus Beneath Our Feet”

Written by Melanie Schnell

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781998-926329

   

Regina writer Melanie Schnell’s debut novel, While the Sun is Above Us, earned her the Saskatchewan First Book Award and The City of Regina Award at the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Awards, and I expect her recently released second novel, The Chorus Beneath Our Feet, will also garner attention, particularly for its ambitious plot.  

Schnell’s braided several surprisingly disparate elements and parallelled the relationships between two sets of siblings in this crime story set in “Ravenwood,” Alberta. The first brother and sister were among the 100,000 Barnardo’s Homes’ children shipped from England to Canada to labour on farms between 1869 – 1948. These 100,000 “home children” were ripped from their families and treated extremely poorly in Canada. Ravenwood rumours suggest that the bodies of these separated siblings are buried beneath the massive oak tree (the “Harron Tree”) in the city’s central park. A local construction company is razing the tree for the construction of a mall, and protesters are rallying around the stately oak.

The second set of siblings are Jes, an army Sargeant who’s returned home after eight years in Afghanistan—he’s accompanying his fellow soldier and best friend’s body, and Jes himself is sporting an eye patch thanks to the same explosion that killed his buddy—and Mary. Jes and his weird-since-childhood sister lived with a “mean drunk” father, and their mother was killed in a car accident when Mary was twelve. Mary stopped speaking shortly after the fatality, and now she’s “ended up in the park with the other homeless people,” including the delusional Norse-mythology-themed-cult leader, Izzy. Jes literally sleeps in the oak tree, which has  “told [her] its real name” (“Oman”), offers her “a secret knowledge,” and has shared that the home children’s bodies are indeed buried beneath the oak’s canopy, and they must be reunited before the tree is felled.  

Jes never treated his strange sister—who writes “maddening nonsensical notes”—kindly, and he’s remorseful now, especially once he learns that a newborn’s body was found hanging in the tree and the police want to question Mary in connection with the murder.

There’s a strong sense of immediacy here: the park’s demolition begins Saturday; Neil’s funeral in Edmonton is also on Saturday, and protocol requires that Jes be there; mentally ill “Charlie,” another unhomed park dweller, informs Jes that Mary’s life’s in danger; and nobody can tell Jes where his sister is. The clock’s ticking. Mary believes Jes can save the tree (and thus reunite the historical siblings), but as has been her way, she’s left only obscure notes for her brother. She’s learned that “in the cacophony of life, to pierce the rampant blindness and deafness, one must attempt to communicate in a way that the words can touch someone deep beneath their skin,” as Oman communicates with her.

The various subplots and the connections between characters are much like a tree’s tangled and extensive root system. This fast-paced novel reminds us to offer grace to ourselves … and to those who are nothing like us.           

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

 

 

 

 

Three New Reviews: Green, written and ilustrated by Zachari Logan; No Straight Lines by Ruth Chorney; and A Home for Hairy by Maureen Ulrich, illustrated by Brenda Blackburn

“Green”

Written and illustrated by Zachari Logan

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781998-926251

   

 

In reading visual artist and poet Zachari Logan’s art/poetry hybrid collection, Green, I was struck by the recurring motif of seeing, and Logan’s recurrent inclusion of the natural world’s diverse creatures and plants. Awe and wonder are integral elements in this innovative work, a fact that Logan asserts in his illuminating introduction, which concludes: “[this work] is, ultimately, an exploration of my own enchantment with the world …”. The title also reflects Logan’s artwork in this collection: the fifty-one pages of drawings—mostly of leaves, branches and blossoms, and all done “in green ink, pen and pencil”—were completed in a sketchbook he purchased in Venice.   

Logan’s a well-known Regina, SK artist with a global curriculum vitae. Indeed, prairie gophers, “old wasps and potato bugs” are comfortably juxtaposed against the “turtles of Morningside Park” viewed at New York’s “East 96^th Street” and “Vitosha Boulevard’s/bulging trees in Sofia”. Logan was invited to exhibit his work in Bulgaria, and references Bulgarian painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev (the “̒Bulgarian Bruegel’”) as well as Caravaggio, El Greco and Canada’s Tom Thomson in this superb collection.

While employing a range of poetic styles, most of these reflective poems are written in free verse and many are narrative, including “The People I Meet on the Street,” which contains the terrific line “To walk on the sidewalk/is to draw time with your feet”.

Time is another of the poet-artist’s preoccupations (“Night dreams of a way/to the day”), but seeing eclipses all else. We meet “A Blind Raccoon in Central Park” with “Milky eyes,” and Logan reports phones “that reflect back a silver-coin gaze”. There are “concerted eyes,” “vehicle eyes,” “miniscule design human eyes,” “Carousel eyes,” “once open eyes,” and “glass-rounded eyes,” as well as many uses of “gaze,” plus “red glow side-stares” and the sun’s “afterimage/in bright fuchsia that dims to lush green”. The fixation with seeing is perhaps expected of an artist, but Logan delves deeply beyond surfaces and employs unique descriptions in remarkable ways, ie: hares’ “winter coats of built-in/anticipation” and, my favourite—a cat scratch in the prose poem “The Old Cat” is described thus: “A tiny/red stain on blue jean; an intentional, unintentional valentine.” Another zinger, from “Burgundy 1-17”:

 

             One full moon and I’m still

             at your death bed gazing at a burgundy rose

             in a bouquet.         

 

Contemporary concerns like the current US administration and climate change are also intimated. Any reader will know whom Logan’s referring to here:

 

             All of his

             horses and all

             of his men

 

             could not bring

             the price of eggs

             down again.  

 

This is a wide-ranging and nuanced collection. The poems spring off the page with hares and hornets, millipedes and blackbirds, crickets and ravens, and the artist’s myriad experiences, ie: “painting the exhumed root systems of nearby weeds;/all clumped and fleshy like tiny human organs”.

Different from looking, Logan explains that “Seeing .. is being able to visualize the experience of looking and transcrib[ing] it into a given material; to have it in turn gaze back”. Yes. Mission accomplished.

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

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“No Straight Lines”

Written by Ruth Chorney

Published by 7SpringsBooks

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 978-1-7383235-3-1

 

Chalk it up to interesting and relatable characters, dynamic plots, and rural settings so viscerally described, you can taste the prairie soil on your teeth: Kelvington, SK writer Ruth Chorney’s latest book, the contemporary mystery No Straight Lines, is another winner. From the police interrogation of protagonist Ingrid that opens the story—a clever device for providing readers with relevant background information—to the satisfying epilogue, I was quickly entranced by this novel—the author’s fourth—set in fictional Kettlebank in northeastern Saskatchewan.   

Ben Franklin’s credited for saying “nothing is certain except death and taxes,” and while there’s no mention of taxes in this beguiling mystery, death veritably abounds. First Person narrator, Ingrid, is on “extended compassionate leave” from her kitchen designer career in Toronto. Born and raised in rural Saskatchewan, the twenty-something returns to Kettlebank after her father, a farmer, is found dead in his hayfield “on the shady side of the baler”.

Ingrid, “a home-town star who made good,” fled Saskatchewan two days after her beloved brother Eric’s funeral: he was killed in a questionable car accident six years earlier, and she’s not been back since. In Toronto, her Armenian fiancé, Gregor, died in a rock-climbing tragedy. Ingrid’s wise grandfather is gone, and even the dog, “Old Patches,” has moved on to greener pastures.

Presently, while Ingrid’s returned home to bury her father and help her mother transition to widowhood, the town’s rich and narcissistic womanizer, Tristan Everleigh, has tragically fallen off the abandoned trestle bridge that borders Ingrid’s family’s property—and Ingrid and her old best friend, Mariah, witnessed the event. Accident, suicide, murder?

As with any great mystery, Chorney dispenses numerous characters who’d like to see Tristan dead, and she keeps readers guessing until the end. While the small town’s citizens gossip and churn over possibilities, Ingrid does the things she loves: shoot at a “cardboard target” fixed to “a big straw bale” at the family’s “̒rifle range;’” enjoy tea and conversation with her caring and capable mother; visit with Mariah and her son—whom everyone in town knows is “Casanova” Tristan’s, too; and run. She runs “across the grazed-down pasture, around the slough” and “There are signs of summer’s end: gold and bronze sarsaparilla leaves in the underbrush; plump red rose hips with their waxy shine; and a few poplar leaves falling onto the path.”      

Ingrid tries to “assign logic to grief,” and for me, dramatic plot aside, this novel’s very much about how everyone manages grief differently. Ingrid and her mother find “digging potatoes” and cleaning the basement healing activities, and her mother considers going back to work. The latter says: “I know that grieving is a process and I need to give myself time.” After her fiancé’s death, Ingrid lost herself in her design work.

Unlike the trestle bridge that adorns the cover, there were “no straight lines” on the prairie landscape back in the day, as Ingrid’s grandfather frequently professed. Similarly, grieving, like this captivating novel, is full of twists and turns.    

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

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“A Home for Hairy”

Written by Maureen Ulrich

Illustrated by Brenda Blackburn

Published by Flatlands Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99 ISBN 978-1-0691135-1-1

 

What I know about Saskatchewan’s Maureen Ulrich is that she understands how to engage readers, her genres and subject matter are varied, and her children’s picture books—ie: Sam and the Big Bridge, which I previously reviewed—are delightfully heartwarming.

Ulrich, a former teacher, recently released another moving story for young readers. A Home for Hairy is a softcover featuring a foul-breathed cat (Hairy) with low self-esteem, and Alison, a busy healthcare worker and weekend-warrior (aka adventurer) who takes a chance on fostering the scruffy-looking feline at the animal shelter, and welcomes him into her life.

Though Hairy’s weekdays are spent inside young Alison’s brick apartment building while she’s at work or reading medical texts and crashing, exhausted on her couch (the illustration for this page shows her asleep on her couch with phone in hand, kitty litter escaping the cat box, and household chores undone), he enjoys “watching the world go by” from his windowsill perch, and during the weekends he and Alison get up to outdoor adventures like hiking, canoeing, and, when winter blows in, snow-boarding. These are daring and questionable activities for domestic cats, and regarding snowboarding, “It turned out Hairy didn’t like this adventure at all. Icicles froze to his whiskers as Alison whooshed down the hill.”

The book’s illustrated by Brenda Blackburn, an Estevan-area artist, who, like Ulrich, is a retired teacher and cat lover. Her full-colour, full-bleed illustrations “were created with Berol Prismacolor pencil crayons on Dura-lar polyester film,” and she ably demonstrates Hairy’s various emotions—sadness, surprise, worry, contentment, fear, joy and love—through his expressive green eyes and different-on-every-page postures. (The image of wide-eyed Hairy in Alison’s blue backpack as she cycles him home from the animal shelter gave me a chuckle: it’s not unlike my own dog’s expression when we took him tobogganing.)

Though orange Hairy may not agree with all of orange-haired Alison’s adventures, the fostered cat quickly becomes comfortable in her “sunny window,” and perpetually fears the return to the shelter. “He hoped he would never have to leave her,” Ulrich writes, next to illustrations that show a dripping and life-vested Hairy in a canoe, and Hairy walking across snow in cat-sized snowshoes.  

Often there’s a blatant “moral to the story” with children’s books, and I appreciate that this author doesn’t make the moral obvious. We sense that outside of work, Alison is mostly alone, and she confides in Hairy that “Before [he] came into [her] life, she was lonely and exhausted.” She says the rescue was mutual, and alludes to doing “̒more stuff with [Hairy] next summer.’” The takeaways—I won’t call them morals—are multiple: never give up, take a chance, life’s better with someone—or some cat—to share it with.

And what forthcoming adventure does fearless Alison have planned? Blackburn’s final illustration is a metaphorical exclamation mark, and a fitting end to this lovely story, dedicated, in part, to healthcare workers and rescue cats. Like all the best kids’ books, adults will enjoy it, too.    

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

 

 

 

Book review: The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde, written by Caroline Pgnat, Illustrations by Alan Cranny

 “The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde”

Written by Caroline Pignat, Illustrations by Alan Cranny

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$16.95  ISBN 9781771872874

  

It’s daunting to receive a 406-page novel for review. If poorly-written, it’s a tremendous slog to read. On the flip side, if the story’s seeped in richly-described settings, features distinct and memorable characters, and showcases deft plotting (including a major twist), the pages quickly slip by. Fortunately, The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde—a historical novel for young adults by Governor-General Award-winning writer Caroline Pignat—fell firmly into the latter camp.   

 My first surprise was that the title character is a girl. Fifteen-year-old Finn lives rough on the streets of 1913 Dublin. She “was in the business of surviving,” which included pickpocketing, and “lying was Finn’s mother tongue.” The scrawny lass has no memory of family, is targeted by another young urchin, Dooley, and—when she can escape the Woodhall Workhouse orphanage where she’s kept in a medicated fog—she sleeps beneath “a rusted sheet of metal,” cold, hungry, and among rats.

This lively book’s two other important characters are Eddie, a lonely apprentice archaeologist (under his archaeologist father) at the National Museum, and the 9^th century monk, Tomás, who penned a mysterious illustrated manuscript, recently unearthed in a bog. The tattered “Bog Book” is “a mulchy brown mess,” and Eddie’s painstakingly trying to piece it back together while his widowed father struggles to decipher it.

Pignat expertly weaves the monk’s dramatic story between chapters concerning Finn and Eddie. She shares the youths’ growing emotional bond and mutual mission to find “the legendary Cauldron” (that’s long obsessed Eddie’s father), Irish lore, adventure, Viking invasions, archaeology, and more than a wee bit of magic. The Ottawa writer drops a major plot twist almost 350 pages into the story, which makes the tale even more compelling.

The Irish are storytellers, and Pignat, who was born in Ireland and raised mostly in Canada, frequently honours the art and importance of story with lines like “My chapter may come to an end, but the tale always continues in the telling” and “̒There is no greater truth than tales if you but dig a little beneath the surface’”.  She even includes an Irish legend, “The Children of Lir,” within the novel. And the Irish lilt is frequently present, ie: “Affection has many faces, so it does.”

Pignat paints early Dublin viscerally and credibly, and in an interview (\included at the back of the book she explains that “Often [her] settings are as important to the story as the characters.” Here is Pignat’s Dublin:

 

     The city smelled like a soup of many simmering things—engines and

     horseshit, blacksmiths’ soot and bakers’ buns, butchers’ blood-covered

     sawdust, that ever-changing stink of a crowd, all cigarette smoke, pomade,

     perfume, and workingmen’s sweat, the unmistakable hint of malt and barley

     from what brewed at the Guinness factory, and of course, under it all, that

     briny scent of the sea.    

 

This fast-paced, well-researched book transported me, and I thoroughly enjoyed all things Irish while I was away, and Finn’s important discovery that “though the way be winding, it gets you there. Eventually.” 

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

Three new reviews: "Fireboy" by Edward Willett; “We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition” by Sarah Hernandez; and “Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary” by Vincent Collette, Tom Shawl and Wilma Kennedy

"Fireboy"

By Edward Willett

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-42-3

 

There are several things I can count on each time I open a book for young readers by Regina author Edward Willett: the story will be technically well-written; the characters credible and clever; and whatever weird, fantastical situations the young cast finds themselves in, there’s bound to be laughs along the way. In short, I know I’ll be impressed.

Fireboy is the Aurora Award-winning author and publisher’s latest title, and with this blaze-paced novel it’s clear that Willett’s lost none of his … fire. The story’s told by thirteen-year-old Samantha “Sam” MacReady, who missed out on her Grade 7 overnight field trip (“a camping-trip-and-astronomy-adventure”) in May and thus was spared when her fellow “Limberpine,” Alberta classmates were involved in a tragic school bus accident. The bus was driven by Grade 7 science teacher Dr. Ballard, and he and a single student—loner Meg, from the wrong side of the tracks—were the sole survivors. The remaining nineteen students mysteriously vanished, and no one can say for sure what even caused the bus to flip on its side.     

After the news crews left the small town folks alone and “The rest of the world moved on,” motherless Sam “dealt with [the tragedy] by moping and throwing things and binge-watching anime.” She especially mourns the loss of her best friend, Lorenzo. Sam’s dad takes her camping to try to cheer her, but the poor weather does little to improve her mood. She says, “̒He thought we would bond through shared misery. I don’t know if we bonded, but we definitely mildewed.’”

Later that night Sam’s woken by a voice calling her name. She leaves her tent to find that the previously extinguished campfire is now wildly ablaze, her name’s being called from within it, and she sees Lorenzo’s face in the fire, but “It looked like a mask made of glass and filled with flames.” Then he screamed.

The following night, Lorenzo appears to Sam again, aflame “in the trees behind [Sam’s] barn.” The boy’s become a walking, talking campfire, and he tells Sam that he doesn’t know what happened the day of the accident, but he woke up “locked in a room.” He doesn’t know where his actual body is, but he knows the other kids are detained, as well. There’s a powerful masked man and his wife, in lab coats, and a vague awareness of being controlled by the man via a strange pressure, but Lorenzo’s quickly learned how to return to his human body from his “flamesicle” state, if only briefly.

Sam has her work cut out for her. How will she rescue Lorenzo and their classmates? Does Dr. Ballard or the vice principal have anything to do with the crash and abduction? And what in the world do the four classical elements (Earth, Wind, Fire and Water) and Paracelsus, “’the prince of alchemists,’” have to do with all of this?

Sam’s life’s become “a straight-to-video horror movie,” and it’s a treat to read Fireboy and find out why.

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

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“We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition”

By Sarah Hernandez

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$39.95  ISBN 9-780889-779181

   

In We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, American academic Sarah Hernandez (Sicangu Lakota) examines the colonial dismantling of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota intellectual traditions, including “star knowledge through oral storytelling.” She writes that when missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth century, the “linguistic [colonization]” began.

Hernandez teaches Native American literature and is the director for the Institute for American Indian Research at the University of New Mexico. She states that “missionary translations of the Dakota language set a dangerous precedent that denigrated Oceti Sakowin star knowledge and supplanted [their] tribal land narratives with new settler-colonial land narratives that ensured that many of our people converted to Christianity and assimilated to the American nation.” Missionaries learned the Dakota language and printed bilingual Dakota-English newspapers which contained “misinterpretation[s] of Dakota origin narratives” and essentially “delegitimize[d] the Oceti Sakowin’s intellectual traditions”—and Christians replaced them with their own. These settler-colonials subsequently “stripped the Dakota nation of 35 million acres of land” and forced them onto a “ten-mile-wide reservation” in Minnesota.

Hernandez frequently makes a connection between land and ideology. Countless injustices followed the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, including the confinement of “Dakota women, children, and elders” into a “concentration camp” known then as the Crow Creek Agency, where 300 people died within a year. Survivors were subjected to hard labour and sexual assault. The women—revered as the tribes’ “culture keepers and culture bearers”—still kept their traditional stories alive, despite hardships that ranged from imprisonment to exile to boarding schools.

Traditional stories were passed down through the generations, resulting in almost 200 books authored by Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who used “English-language literacy and the printing press to perpetuate the knowledge handed down by oral storytellers and historians.”

In the book’s second section, Hernandez demonstrates how these oral traditions have been preserved via “re-imagining” by print storytellers, including Charles Alexander Eastman (b. 1858), whose eleven novels feature his grandmother; Ella Cara Deloria (author of Waterlily, a novel concerning Lakota women “bound together by kinship, storytelling, and tradition”); and writers involved in the Oak Lake Writers’ Society, a longstanding “tribal group … dedicated to protecting and defending the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literary traditions” via publications, presentations and a podcast series, #NativeReads.

Hernandez is a longtime member of the Oceti Sakowin-led Oak Lake Writers’ Society, and she contends that this combination of “old and new land narratives, old and new literary genres” is an “extension of the Oceti Sakowin oral tradition,” and that the books produced will “guide and empower future generations by reminding [them] of ]their] connection to the stars, the land, and each other.”

This scholarly text is an homage to the women who were the early story and culture keepers, and it’s a celebration of those Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who continue the Oceti Sakowin literary tradition—and healing—today. The book cover’s significant “ledger art” (art superimposed over a financial or legal document) was created by Ruben Hernandez, the writer’s brother.           

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

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“Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary”

By Vincent Collette, Tom Shawl and Wilma Kennedy

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-781779-400185

   

Language and cultural identity are intrinsically connected, and for the Nakoda people, who believe that “language is a gift of the Creator,” the Nakoda language is, “through prayers and songs, the means by which important cultural values and spiritual knowledge are transmitted from generations to generations.” This is the first tenet I learned in the tri-authored book, Nakón-wico'i'e né uspénic'iciyac/Practising Nakoda: A Thematic Dictionary, published by University of Regina Press.

In Canada, Nakoda (aka Stoney or Assiniboine) is spoken by an estimated 50-150 people … and they’re aging. Understanding the import of language to one’s culture, Vincent Collette—professor of linguistics at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi—teamed with Montana’s Tom Shawl (former Nakoda culture and language instructor at the Aannii Nakoda College) and activist Wilma Kennedy (d. 2020), who lived on the Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation in Saskatchewan and had previously worked with Collette on two other Nakoda books (including a concise dictionary), to create a “thematic” dictionary for Nakoda-learners.

The thematic dictionary makes learning Nakoda easier as Nakoda’s a “polysynthetic language where words are often built up with many elements that attach to the root,” and thus seeing the words in thematic groupings builds the student’s “morphological awareness.” Once the root of each word is learned, and the “morphemes” (a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that contains meaning, and there are five types. "Dog" is an example of a free morpheme … the word "incoming" has three morphemes "-in," "come," and "-ing" – study.com) understood, learning Nakoda’s made easier.

In short, this is no A to Z dictionary: it's “divided into sections meant to enhance daily and ceremonial communication (including dances, ceremonies, and ceremonial clothing),” and yes, one could perhaps find an app and locate the Nakoda word for “dress,” for example, but this dictionary is a teaching tool that will help learners form sentences “in order to communicate in a meaningful way with other Nakoda speakers.”

Nakoda consists of eight vowels and seven word classes, including nouns, verbs, and interjections, like Ahé (an “expression of humility used at the beginning of prayers or songs”). Unlike English, verbs are “almost always at the end of the sentence,” making Lakoda a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language. The writers give this example: English: That dog is running. Nakoda: Dog that runs.

The book’s many chapters, or themes, include the “Human Body,” “Feelings, Instincts, Emotions, and Motives,” and “Agriculture, Gardening, and Ranching.” With this dictionary you can learn how to say both practical, everyday things like, “It is a very nice day today, thus we will go fishing” and “My grandmother is in the garden,” and you can also learn how to say specific things, like “My lips are chapped because of the wind,” and “She had two miscarriages.”

As “full immersion with native speakers is not possible” currently, Practising Nakoda is the next best thing for anyone wishing to learn/preserve the language. It’s a ground-breaking reference book “for the documentation, revitalization, and strengthening of Nakoda language and culture.”

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

 

 

 

 

Two New Reviews: Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, edited by Edward Willett; illustrations by Wendi Nordell and I, Brax: A Battle Divine (A Dragon Assassin Adventure) by Arthur Slade

“Shapers of Worlds Volume IV”

Edited by Edward Willett Illustrations by Wendi Nordell

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.99  ISBN 978-1-98-989398-88-3

You might want to read Shapers of Worlds Volume IV on a sunny beach, or at least in a pleasant space with other people around, because I can 99% guarantee that something’s going to scare the heehaw out of you in this 402-page anthology of sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories, ably edited by Regina, SK’s Edward Willett. Willett’s an award-winning and much-published writer and podcaster who has selected nineteen writers he’s featured on his podcast, The World-shapers, for his fourth Shapers of Worlds anthology. The stories “have nothing in common except they’re all fantastical and they’re all written by authors I’ve interviewed,” he explains. Artist Wendi Nordell’s provided one black and white illustration for each story: I found this particularly helpful in the story in which a many-tentacled “Tangle” is sprouting “small smiling heads” and “flashing needle-like teeth.”

There’s a rich variety of themes, styles, plots, characters and worlds packed into this chunky nerve-rattler of a book. That’s what happens when your contributors hail from across North America and they’re writing about places as diverse as Halifax, California, and “the Sagittarius Arc.” The individual stories are  impressive, most especially—and I’m showing my bias here—the horror stories, but “Garbage,” Joshua Palmatier’s cautionary, futuristic tale about failing to recycle (it’s also about a doomed relationship) will also stay with me.

This anthology covers the horror realm well, rather like the old TV Series, “Ghost Story/Circle of Fear” did. You have your unhappy ghosts, possessed objects, scarecrow people, and various versions of hell. For Elliot Lawson—the protagonist in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s “Matter of Life and Death,”—hell is a nasty, best-selling writer who, posthumously, doesn’t like her book cover, title, or font, and continually sends callous emails to Elliot from the beyond. I didn’t see the terrifying plot twist coming in this simultaneously light-hearted and hellish tale. I  loved it.

“Advent,” by James Kennedy, is in my Top Five. A gripping, multi-layered story, it features some of the scariest horror tropes—a terrifying basement; a communicative furnace (that says “̒I will eat your time’”); a corn husk doll made by the child narrator’s now-deceased father when he was a child. The doll was “decorated with seeds and bits of wood and leaves and pine cones” and the boy’s father “made eyes and a mouth out of seeds and hair from pine needles.” This story works brilliantly in large part because Kennedy’s created such a credible voice, and because beneath all the supernaturalism, this is actually a story about grief. (Another strong story, “Yiwu,” by Lavie Tidhar, is about loneliness.)

There’s a tale about a lawyer who does bad TV commercials; the terror-inspiring “Monster Under the Bed;” a smart story, told via e-mails, about an apartment manager going insane (or is he?); a sweet brotherly bond in “Souvenirs;” and a vase that won’t break in the beautifully-written “Nineteenth-Century Vase.” Also: a graphic story about MAGA-types discussing how to lynch intellectuals, immigrants, etc. In these times, perhaps that’s the scariest of them all.  

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

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“I, Brax: A Battle Divine” (A Dragon Assassin Adventure)

By Arthur Slade

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-26-3

 

I’m unaware of any writers as simultaneously prolific and talented (ie: winning the Governor General’s Award and receiving the $10,000 Cheryl & Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence) as Saskatoon’s Arthur Slade. With more than thirty YA, middle-grade and graphic novels to his credit, Slade is a literary powerhouse. I’ve just completed reading I, Brax; A Battle Divine (A Dragon Assassin Adventure), a thrilling fantasy for young readers who enjoy well-read, wise-cracking, goat-eating dragons (the eponymous Brax, a “Scythian” dragon, is also the narrator of this “diary”); eye-swapping; formally-trained, teenaged-girl assassins; and battles in which the dead are sometimes still alive, will enjoy sinking their teeth into this thick fantasy.

This novel is classic Slade: simultaneously gruesome, literary and comical. Brax bears a sarcastic inner voice, and it’s his internal quips and his dialogue with Carmen—the seventeen-year-old assassin who’d plucked out Brax’s dragon eye and plopped it into her own vacant socket, after which a mortal eye grew in Brax’s socket—that make this book another winner. (The eye swap gave them special talents, including the ability to communicate telepathically with one another.)

Where thar be dragons—even dragons who are dynamite at “̒chess and marbles. And checkers’”—thar be battles, and the duo first confront farmer-attacking “ammits,” which “had the head of a crocodile, the front legs of a leopard, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus … Very, very, very ugly.” And they spit: “The acidic projectile, a brownish, lumpy substance about the size of a mortal head,” hits both Carmen and Brax. The spittle stinks enough to “curl [Brax’s] nostrils inside out” … and it causes hallucinations. What’s not a hallucination is the after-battle pile of ash that issues a warning to Brax, threatening to “̒lacerate [him] from liver to limb.’”

There’s a moat-full of magic in this book, and poof, the female-voiced ash pile forms “into an ancient symbol: the sun surrounded by a snake,” and then it transforms into a leather-vested, hairy-legged, twelve-foot tall being with “leopard-spotted” arms and “a reptilian snout populated by long, sharp teeth.” You know this isn’t going to go well. Meanwhile, Emperor Lipit has been assassinated and his thirteen-year-old nephew, Nagar, is the heir. Nagar, we learn, shares Brax’s taste in literature, and the boy “hires” Brax and Carmen to bring his uncle’s murderer to justice.   

Which, magically, brings us to libraries. Libraries are important in this tale. So are family and friendships. Carmen’s twin brother, Corwin, has his own special eye: a wizard’s. Alas, he’s in “̒a smorgasboard of slices.’” Brax and Carmen are summoned by a “spellbird” to his death scene in “Azadiq”—Brax airlifts Carmen (she travels on his back, naturally) to “the whole dead-brother situation.”

Are the murders connected? Who is the “̒snout-faced-woman goddess thing?’” Will Brax’s character flaw—“to help the weak”—and the fact that he’s “̒a stickler for language’” be relevant in the grand scheme of things within the “̒great empire of Akkad?’” Read this otherworldy book, and have fun discovering the answers.

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