Three Book Reviews: The Wind and Amanda's Cello by Alison Lohans; The Glass Lodge by John Brady McDonald; and Restorig Relations Through Stories by Renae Watchman

“The Wind and Amanda’s Cello”

Written by Alison Lohans, Illustrated by Sarah Shortliffe

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$23.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-15-7

  

It’s been such fun watching Regina author (and musician) Alison Lohans successfully focus her literary talents in so many different directions. The well-known multi-genre author has just released her 31^st book, and it’s a standout among the many children’s books that cross my desk each year.

Firstly, Lohans knows how to tell a story—whether it’s a novel for young adults, an early-reader chapter book or an illustrated children’s book like her recent release, The Wind and Amanda’s Cello—and it begins with language. In the opening spread of this colourful softcover, we read that “the wind grew restless.” Personification is effective in all writing, but perhaps particularly so when a writer’s engaging young readers. Sound is the most critical element in this book, and Lohans writes about it like she’s making it—a conductor directing an orchestra. We hear that life-like wind as it “whooshed by cars on the highway; it rattled gates and scattered old leaves on the sidewalk.” Note how the author uses specific details—another hallmark of quality writing.

The wind is indeed a powerful character in this story, and it finds its way into young Amanda’s cello, where it “whistled between the strings” and into “the dark inside of Amanda’s cello, where it hummed as Amanda played.” The girl immediately knows that “Something strange is going on,” and, as if also affected by the wind’s magic, her cat makes its own music as it “walked across the [piano] keys.” The girl and her pet play a sweet duet, but that doesn’t stop Amanda’s mother (or Amanda’s father) from telling Amanda that she mustn’t “forget [her] scales.” I admire the realism.

Others are also positively affected by Amanda’s humming cello—her orchestra mates, the paperboy, and neighbour Luke Garcia who “worked on his motorcycle in the driveway next door” and “forgot to turn on his radio when Amanda was playing her cello.” Time moves along in this delightful story, and when a baby girl joins the family, Amanda’s wind-swirled cello soothes the infant and helps her sleep.

As Amanda ages, music teachers insist that she’s outgrowing the cello and she tries several new ones, but, yikes, “not a single one of them hummed.”

The book’s also a treasure because of the lovely watercolour illustrations provided by Sarah Shortliffe. There’s a profound difference between books commercially “illustrated” via computer (the wide-eyed characters in many of these books look the same) and books in which a human has drawn or painted unique images that truly reflect the author’s words and the emotions the story evokes. Shortliffe’s images reveal details, like the painted lines on the grey highway crawling through green hills, the fold on the sheet music the wind’s caressing on the piano, and the brown waves beneath Amanda’s toque as she plays for her baby sister.

This book succeeds for the reasons above, but also—and especially—because Lohans has managed to capture the love Amanda has for her cello, and the cello’s reciprocal love for her. 

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

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“The Glass Lodge: 20^th Anniversary Edition”

By John Brady McDonald

Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.99  ISBN 9-781998-273119

 

As the name suggests, Shadowpaw Press Reprise is in the business of publishing previously-released books, often with edits and other improvements. The Glass Lodge: 20^th Anniversary Edition, a holds-no-punches poetry collection by Saskatchewan writer John Brady McDonald is one such book. First published in 2004 by Kegedonce Press, the Néhiyawak-Métis writer/artist/actor/musician/

historian—yes, he has a lot going on—from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak has given the new hardcover edition a spit-shine, with “frank, fascinating insight[s]” into the poems’ angsty geneses, and several images of the initial handwritten pieces.        

McDonald’s been recognized for both his writing and artwork. His nonfiction book Carrying it Forward: ESSAYS FROM KISTAHPINÂNIHK garnered two Saskatchewan Books Awards in 2024, and his art’s been shown internationally. This multi-talented, Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal awardee (Saskatchewan), has had an extraordinarily diverse life, ranging from promiscuity and addiction issues to studying at England’s University of Cambridge and presenting his work in Australia.

 The book’s told chronologically in four parts—“Emergence,” “Eros,” “Kuskitew Peyesis” and “Renaissance,” and includes a “Denouement.” The poems reach back to McDonald’s difficult teenage years: the first poem in the book was written “in [his] math book, after [he] got in a fight with a white kid at school” and “snapped.” In the second piece, “Carpe,” he writes “My mind is a Latin Mass/chanting to be released” and, in the note below, he reveals that this short piece “was written in black marker on the liner notes of a Metallica cassette.”

Musical influences abound: Nirvana, Jim Morrison (McDonald’s “spiritual mentor”), and the poet’s favourite band, Guns N’ Roses. Of the latter, he confesses that their “music and lyrics were angry enough to serve as an equal frame against which to measure my own.”

This is not your grandmother’s poetry; violence is definitely a theme here, including gang violence. In “Colours,” about being “jumped-in” to a gang, we read  “Fists and feet pummel me/blood springs from my lips/again and again/The pain, the chain/across my back.” Writing authentically about street experiences like this would have an impact on young readers, and I’m not surprised that McDonald’s been a popular presenter. 

One of my favourite lines is “On this snow-covered concrete,/I ate from a garbage can/and am better for it” (“St. George of the Road Allowance”), and his description of a river as a “frozen snake of water” also stands out. 

The free verse poems are formally centred on the page. At one point the author admits that the poems in the “Eros” section “make [him] cringe in embarrassment” re: their romanticism, and we see this in melodramatic phrases like “my soul cries out,” and “Forbidden love is ours,” but good on McDonald for baring that young, love-tortured soul. I maintain that nobody has an “easy” life, but some suffer more than others. McDonald, fortunately, wrote his way toward a healthy lifestyle. “Words were my life-saving medium,” he says, and he proves through his “renaissance” that he is “so much more than a well-read Indian.”

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

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“Restoring Relations Through Stories: From Dinétah to Denendeh

Written by Renae Watchman

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$35.95  ISBN 9-781779-400031

   

The striking cover photo of Renae Watchman’s Restoring Relations Through Stories: From Dinétah to Denendeh features green aurora borealis dancing above the natural monolith Tsé Bit’a’í (the Rock with Wings), Watchman’s “maternal family’s hometown landmark” on Navajo Land near Shiprock, New Mexico. In her new book, the Diné author and associate professor in Indigenous Studies at McMaster University (Indigenous Literatures and Film) frequently addresses the “sentinal’s” cultural importance to the Diné (Navajo), and she discusses ties she discovered between the American Diné and the Dene people north of “the medicine line” in Canada.

The scholarly text examines traditional stories by Diné and Dene storytellers, writers and filmmakers and explains their significance. Watchman advocates for “the recognition of hane’ [story, narrative, wisdom] in oral, literary, and visual formats (spoken, published, directed, and beaded) to demonstrate “Hózhǫ́,” an important Diné precept that encompasses beauty, order, harmony, and the idea of striving for a balanced life. The tragic effect of COVID-19 on the Diné; ceremonies; beadwork; and “pretendians” are also some of what’s covered.

 Watchman introduces herself by acknowledging her Clan relations, as is the Diné custom. She explains that in 2011 she met members of the Tsuut’ina First Nation, a Dene community in Alberta, and, though the nations are now “geographically, culturally, politically and economically distinct,” through sharing stories, she learned of their “kinscapes.” The Dene she visited recommended she “include their stories in [her] book,” and she has done so in this literary journey that “encourage[s] reading for restoration,” and “demonstrate[s] the narrative arc of restoration and restorying of relations.” Again, out of respect on her “story-gathering journey,” she “only shares[s] oral stories that have been previously published.”   

The author’s chosen not to italicize Diné bizaad (the Diné language) words in her five-chapter book; it’s an act of “decolonization,” she writes, and quotes an online article which proports that italicizing every word apart from English “̒only serves to set them apart as exotic, deviant or as part of a particular colonizing anthropological project.’” (A sound argument, and the reason I’m also not italicizing other-than-English in this review.)

The photographic Shiprock pinnacle has appeared in “at least twenty-eight documentaries and motion pictures,” Watchman writes, including a Disney feature film, John Carter. The scholarly writer discusses both non-Diné and Diné productions shot in the area, and argues that “non-Diné storytelling erases, replaces, and displaces.” When the Tsé Bit’a’í image is appropriated for items like “postcards … billboards, mastheads, and coffee mugs,” and used in films without Diné context, this “ironically contributes to her epistemic erasure.”

Watchman says it’s not the presence of Indigenous actors in a film that deems it Indigenous, rather  “indigenous agency as a creative behind the camera” make it so. I appreciated her analyses of Diné filmmaker Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest and Diné Larry Blackhorse Lowe’s 5^th World, and while I wasn’t able to access the full films, I found scenes and interviews via Youtube that heightened my appreciation for both the films and for Watchman’s well-researched and well-written treatise.

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