Three Book Reviews: Reflections in a Farmhouse Window: A Prairie Memoir by Marilyn Frey; The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer, and Hanging Art: Noah Carey Mysteries-Book One

“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

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“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

 

 

 

Two Book Reviews: Into the Continent by Emily McGiffin, and Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis as narrated by Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis and Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear, retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight, and illustrated by Treasa Starlight

“Into the Continent”

By Emily McGiffin

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-780889-779891

   

I wasn’t sure how to begin Emily McGiffin’s poetry collection, Into the Continent, with its similar but opposite-side-up covers, front and back, and a Page 1 at either end. On one cover, a bayonetted rifle on a creamy background. On the other, a “Big Old Axe” against the same. As I chose a side (the rifle) to start my reading, I hoped I’d find the answer to why the book—praised by Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn—was structured thus. What is McGiffin, author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics, metaphorically saying with this either way-ness and dramatic images?

What I do know is that the University of Regina’s Oksana Poetry & Poetics book series, of which this book’s a part, concerns titles that “[probe] discussions of poetry’s cultural role”. I mined the internet and learned that the author/academic’s work “concerns the interplay of extractivism, empire, and expressive arts,” and she self-describes as “a multidisciplinary environmental humanities scholar researching arts, extraction, and environmental justice”. Currently a Research Fellow at University College London, she’s also studied and worked in British Columbia, Ghana, Scotland, and Toronto. The global sweep of her work—and her politics—became quickly evident.

The tone here hits like a blunt instrument: clearly the poet’s spotlight is on history, and particularly the violent history wrought by Colonialism and greed. The poems build upon one another, story-like, and the poet’s exclusion of titles supports this narrative flow. The Industrial Revolution, bleak landscapes, the sea and the natural world, a slave ship, land ownership, war, sheep farming, rape, and childbirth are grappled with via ingenious language, including some terms—"quern,” “quaggas”—that had me Googling.

The rifle side thrusts readers into Scotland, “coal-hearted” and with “feet in heathered depths,” “mud banks [standing] bleak along the firth” and “glens desolate”. Soon after, while “port lights wink and simmer on the bay,” a ship is “built for human cargo,” and the narration directs the plot: “i await my carriage”. Note the small i.

Things really get moving on the “age-old/murderous sea,” with “the hull a rising/reek as cargo vomits”. McGiffin demonstrates a sharp ear for cacophony: there’s “grunting hogs” and “planks’ and rigging’s groan”. I noted a reverence for creatures, and admire the image of a “purple-turbaned snail [dragging] a hind foot”. The juxtaposition of the industrial and the natural—ie: “pig-iron dawn” and a single vulture “scything under fisted bright”—is dynamite.

The ship docks, and we find “castaways, dispatched to master/a thorned land”. The linebreaking “master” is clever indeed, and it ushers in the next series of poems. What’s to be mastered? Oh, so much—and that’s just the rifle portion.      

The work’s original, musical, feminist (“the bible is the size and weight of one man’s hand”), and clearly not pro-Capitalism or Colonialism. The rifle? War, oppression and power. The axe? Settlement and divisions. Perhaps the inverted structure represents the ambiguity of beginnings and endings. History often viciously repeats itself.    

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

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“Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis”

As narrated by Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis and Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear

Retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight

Illustrated by Treasa Starlight

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-780889-779853

   

The University of Regina Press is doing important work with their commitment to honouring the traditional languages, legends and cultures of Canada’s First Peoples, and the list of books in their First Nations Language Readers series recently grew again with the landmark publication of Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis. This is the first book to be published in Tsuut’ina (“a critically endangered language”) in more than one hundred years. It contains nine traditional narratives originally narrated by Elders Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis (1883-1987) and her son, Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear (1912-1989). Here they’re retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight, the grandson of Bessie Meguinis. Dr. Starlight spent much of his early childhood with Meguinis, listening to her stories and teachings as he recovered from tuberculosis, and with the help of colleague Dr. Christopher Cox—and chapter-beginning, black and white illustrations by Treasa Starlight—he shares invaluable knowledge of this tonal language that less than twenty people now speak.     

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia (online version), “The Tsuut'ina language (often known as Sarcee) is an Athabaskan/Dene language of northern Canada,” and “Today, Tsuut’ina territory is in southern Alberta, bordering the southwestern city limits of Calgary.”

In the book’s foreword, Dr. Arok Wolvengrey, Professor of Algonquian Languages and Linguistics at First Nations University of Canada, writes “it is my hope that this book will be one small yet crucial piece in the multifaceted approach required in the Tsuu’tina’s efforts to retain and revitalize their beautiful language”. This collaborative publication is a “teaching tool” that incudes a linguistic analysis and a comprehensive Tsuut’ina-English glossary.

The stories themselves cover diverse subjects. In “How the Earth was Created—The Old Man and the Muskrat,” there’s a flood and an “Old Man” who, Noah-like, built a boat for “All of the animals”. He directed first a beaver, then a muskrat to “try to grab some dirt from the bottom of the water”. The muskrat succeeded in returning with “a little bit of dirt in his paws,” and from this, and with the help of “a fast-running bird,” the earth became “whole again”.   

The matter-of-fact “Buffalo Lake” concerns the water that flowed “uncontrollably” from a slaughtered buffalo’s bladder to create Buffalo Lake, beneath which “the buffalo turned into an island there”.

There are narratives about how the brave Tsuut’ina separated into northern and southern peoples; a tale about the Tsuut’ina meeting the Blackfoot (“they all intermarried … we were all initiated into different societies and ceremonies”), and a story about how a buffalo gifted a young man with the “holy” abode that is a teepee, and how the teepee is structurally representative of a buffalo.

I could almost hear the speakers in the above stories and others—about the Beaver Bundle, water monsters, Thunderbirds and Black Soldiers—and credit the entire crew responsible for sharing, translating and preserving these stories, word for word. How musical it must have been to hear them in their original Tsuut’ina.       

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

 

 

Three Book Reviews: The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson; What Fills Your House Like Smoke by E. McGregor; and Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide by Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, with Miriam Körner, and photos by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird

 “The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails”

Written by Matthew R. Anderson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-780889-779655

   

Uncanny timing. I recently completed a pilgrimage walk—the 300-kilometer Camino de Santiago (Portuguese Coastal Route)—and not a week after my return from Europe I was reviewing a book about a very different—but much closer to home—set of pilgrimages. The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails, by Swift Current-born and raised educator, author and Lutheran minister, Matthew Anderson (who’s also walked the Camino de Santiago), is compelling, exceedingly well-written and researched nonfiction concerning three ambitious Saskatchewan pilgrimages across Treaty 4 and 6 pastures, valleys, roads, ranches and farms, abandoned homesteads, brush belts, villages, First Nations’ reserves and more via the Traders’ Road/NWMP Patrol Trail (2015), the Battleford Trail (2017), and the Frenchman Trail (2018), and creating “healthy new stories” on the journey. “By walking,” Anderson writes, “our group was attempting to pay attention”.  

These “good walks” were undertaken by an eclectic assemblage—including clergy, writers, Elders, family members, a hydrologist, naturalist Trevor Herriot, and book dedicatee and Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society president Hugh Henry—to connect to the land and its stories while respecting the First Peoples who walked these trails long before Henry Kelsey set foot on them and Colonialism dealt its calamitous blows. Anderson makes a connection between long-distance walking and decolonization. He writes that Canadians “need to create better narratives about this land and our place, past and present, in it” and to question “the bright and shiny pioneer narratives”.

This mind-expanding book is steeped in empathy for Indigenous Peoples. Anderson writes of broken treaties and the mass starvation of Indigenous Peoples, and includes several quotes from Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Smudging and leaving tobacco were an integral part of these respectful pilgrimages.

Also noteworthy are the numerous poetic descriptions of prairie landscape and weather; anecdotes about group interactions and the hosts; and Anderson’s familial mission: to return a portion of his recently-deceased parents’ remains to the Shaunavon-area, “lonesome little grave” where the author’s infant older sister—whom he’d never met—is buried. Detailing the walk from Wood Mountain to Cypress Hills, Anderson says “gusts … scared up clouds of grasshoppers that would then be caught in the wind and ping off our bodies like flung gravel,” and “antelope zig-zagged away at our approach”.

The skilled weaving of the personal here-and-now (including Anderson’s serious leg infection during the final days of the Frenchman Trail), folklore and recorded—though not necessarily true—history brilliantly steered me through the sizeable book. A shocking revelation for this Saskatchewan-born and raised reader was that during the November 27, 1885 mass hanging in Battleford—eight nêhiyaw and Nakota were executed—Indigenous students from the Battleford Indian Industrial School “were forced to watch the hangings”. All these years later, racism is still prevalent in the province: the 2016 killing of Colten Boushie created a further divide.

This award-worthy book deserves a long slow read. Probably multiple reads. There’s much to take in with each of these prairie pilgrimages, and each “felt holy in its own way”.  

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

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“What Fills Your House Like Smoke”

Written by E. McGregor

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9781771872522

 

I must admit, the title of E. (Erin) McGregor’s debut poetry collection—What Fills Your House Like Smoke—greatly piqued my interest. I’m partial to similes and metaphors, and McGregor’s title was a poetic hook—what, exactly, does fill this Winnipeg poet’s house with metaphorical smoke? I guessed that butterflies and sweet peas wouldn’t be at the heart of it.

McGregor holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and the sheer variety of poetic forms—prose poems; free verse; quatrains; couplets; concrete; and experimental, sound-oriented pieces—in the book is consistent with the range I’ve seen in other first books by creative writing students. What differentiates McGregor’s poetry, however, is its nearly singular focus on the theme of personal identity; often, first books “free range” across themes and subjects. McGregor’s poems weave pain into a story.   

McGregor is a “Euro-Settler/Métis,” and in her piece “Weeds”—another metaphor—she begins: “Don’t judge me too harshly/for not understanding the small things/that come with your blood”. In that same poem: “[white people] have me by the roots/it’s confusing”. The poet contends with her lineage, and, in particular, the maternal line, including her grandmother, Dora—to whom the book is dedicated—and her mother, both of whom had “the drinking disease”. She writes of the hardships Dora faced, including an abusive husband who “beat her up and cleaned her out,/stole her dogs”. Of Dora’s siblings, she writes of “The streets of Toronto that swallowed one brother, the train/wheels in the Fraser Valley that bisected/another. The sea of alcohol/that could not be swum.”

The poems are real and raw—full of hangovers and lousy partners, class disparities and Death Apnea. And they’re credible, though the back cover copy claims the book’s “an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of [McGregor’s] grandmother”. I applaud this imagination. In the opening poem— “Instructions for the Death of a Grandmother”—McGregor writes about her grandmother’s “gurgle-thick breaths,” and the poet wonders if Dora can smell “the stale alcohol” on her granddaughter’s skin. Hyperaware in the hours after death, McGregor considers “the way gas-bar lights make everything look silver” and she notes “the song that is playing on the radio”. At times grandmother and granddaughter are close, sharing “Japanese chicken wings and rice,” and other times they struggle with the “finding of things to give words to”.   

The poems are set in a few different locations, including Edmonton (“Edmonton is a thin soup, at first”) and Winnipeg, with its “goose shit and shadows”. In Edmonton, Dora’s husband “retrieves her from toilet-stall floors/and carries her, like a hunter with his kill,/to the cold car”. This poet demonstrates deft, non-sentimental handling of intimate personal experience, poem after poem.

What fills this house with smoke? Bravery. Honesty. Curiosity. The matriarchal line contains all the strengths and “lesions” of three generations, and the youngest of these women—through examination, contemplation and literary skill—is doing her best to slowly clear the smoke, and understand who she is.

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

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"Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide"

Written by Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, with Miriam Körner

Photos by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$49.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-032-7

 

In these modern times, when we want information our “Go To” is usually to Google or Youtube it. If one wanted to learn to tan moosehides, for example, they could indeed go online to discover how, but some steps might be missed. If tanning moosehides is indeed your intent, now there’s an excellent resource that you can hold in your hands or spread on a table: Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide. 

The softcover guidebook by northern Saskatchewan residents Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, and award-winning La Ronge writer Miriam Körner takes readers through the twenty-four steps involved in the time-consuming process of tanning moosehides, “a skill passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial”. The book is filled with colour photographs provided by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird, and it begins with a helpful introduction.

If you’re from the north, you may already know the various uses of tanned moosehide. They were and are “sewn into mukluks, moccasins, mitts, vests, jackets, pants, tent coverings, dog harnesses, toboggan bags, bedding, snowshoe straps, laces and a lot of other day-to-day items”. You may have also seen beaded moosehide purses, credit card holders, earrings, and dress clothes for Queen and King Trapper winter festival events. The introduction relays that historically, Woodland Cree families on remote traplines all worked together to process the hides—it’s a huge job. Now one can learn some of the tanning skills— and “get knowledge from Elders”—at hide camps or culture camps, but there may not be time to learn everything.

Recognizing that it’s important to pass on the skills they learned with their own families, Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation’s Tommy Bird and Lawrence and Lena Adam of Fond du Lac Denesuliné First Nation have combined their “decades of experience” in moosehide tanning to share with newbies, “so that the youth of today can once more pass this knowledge on to the next generation”. In Tommy’s back yard, the trio have tanned “more than thirty hides from start to finish, and smoked “more than a hundred that had been softened in tanneries”.

It takes strength, perseverance, skill and practise to do this traditional work. The materials list is surprising, including “A small pot to cook the brain mix in,” “Oatmeal,” and “Sunlight liquid dish soap and/or bar soap”. On the optional list of materials: “Common salt,” “Sawdust” and “Spruce cones”. A bone scraper is among the important tools for tanning moosehide, and the writers include the steps to make your own from “the leg bones of moose, elk, deer, or bear”.

I particularly liked Step 24: “Sit Back and Admire Your Work”. The accompanying photo shows Elder Lena Adams and her husband Lawrence holding a finished hide that looks “soft like a fleece blanket”.

The detailed instructions, helpful photographs, and “trouble-shooting tips” in this guide are inspiring, and I hope copies of it frequently find their way into the hands of those who desire to do this culturally significant work.

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

 

 

Five Book Reviews: Protecting the Prairies: Lorne Scott and the Politics of Conservation by Andrea Olive; Unpoken by Tammy Ottenbreit; A Moment of Clarity: Stories of Lives Lived and Unlived” By F. E. Eldridge; “The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief” by Steven Mayoff; and “My Little Métis Sleepy Horse” written and illustrated by Leah Marie Dorion

“Protecting the Prairies: Lorne Scott and the Politics of Conservation”

By Andrea Olive

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-780889-779600

   

Andrea Olive’s Protecting the Prairies: Lorne Scott and the Politics of Conservation ingeniously illuminates the fifty-year history of Saskatchewan’s environmental policies and conservation practices (or lack thereof) via a political biography of lifelong conservationist, activist, farmer and politician Lorne Scott, who began building bluebird nest boxes as a teen and eventually served as Saskatchewan’s Environment and Resource minister. (And there’s much of import in between.) Through exhaustive research and interviews with Scott and his conservationist and political contemporaries, Olive makes a strong case for why Scott’s considered to be “Saskatchewan’s most important naturalist,” and her writing’s so dynamic, this reviewer didn’t notice she was getting a broad education in Saskatchewan politics, as well as conservationism.    

Humble, community-oriented and sans secondary education, Scott’s earned so many accolades and awards, there’d not be a wall large enough to contain them: from the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, Ducks Unlimited, Canadian Nature Federation, and the Whooping Crane Conservation Association; an Order of Merit (“as an outstanding young citizen”); a Saskatchewan Centennial Medal; the Saskatchewan Order of Merit; a Governor General’s Conservation Award; and the Order of Canada … just to name a few.

He's published numerous newspaper and magazine articles; worked at the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History and as a park naturalist for Wascana Centre Authority (both in Regina); banded tens of thousands of birds; served on/presided over myriad boards and organizations; and been a politician. Scott was nominated as the NDP candidate for the Indian Head-Wolseley constituency in 1990, and elected as government member of the Legislative Assembly for that area—where he was born, raised, and remains—in 1991. From his service as reeve to his ongoing work with Nature Saskatchewan and his position of chair of St. Andrew’s United Church Council in Indian Head, this man’s legacy of volunteerism and his commitments to conservation and community have earned him glowing praise across the board, from politicians to fellow farmers in the province where, Olive writes, “most people … seem to be rather carefree on environmental issues”.

Superhuman? It would almost appear so, but kudos to Olive for also delivering a balanced perspective. She alludes to Scott’s complicity (as Environment Minister) with the NDP government on uranium development, and writes that “climate changes leaves him fumbling”.

Olive is a SK-born political scientist and human geographer at the University of Toronto Missisauga. Her passions are “environmental policy” and “understanding how people see and value their relationship with nature”. Aside from her revered subject, Lorne Scott, she credits writer and grasslands conservationist Trevor Herriot, author Wallace Stegner, and American conservationist/ author Aldo Leopold as inspirations. She speaks often of the “western paradox”—the desire for a sustained, resource-based economy and the reality that such economy plunders natural resources, habitats, and the creatures who depend on them.

After reading Olive’s exquisite book, one might indeed believe Lorne Scott wears a cape, but no, “To his family and friends, he is just Lorne—the farmer driving around in an old van with the licence plate “Nature”.   

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

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“Unspoken”

By Tammy Ottenbreit

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-988783-97-0

 

It’s delightfully surprising to encounter a book penned by someone who’s come to writing after a career in a completely different field, and find that the book proves well worth the read. Case in point, Unspoken, by Regina’s Tammy Ottenbreit. A longtime medical laboratory technologist, Ottenbreit “needed something to challenge her creative skills” upon retirement, and she found it in writing Unspoken. The mostly historical novel is based on the “tragic tale of [her] great-aunt,” and Ottenbreit does her relative’s story justice in this 278-page fictionalized account. It opens in 1922 Winnipeg, ends in Moose Jaw (2016), and includes a realistic Atlantic sea-crossing for a group of Hungarians lured to Canada by the promise of “one hundred and sixty acres for ten dollars”.

We initially meet Sister Maria, a nun and midwife at the Sisters of Mercy home (for “the poor and unfortunate women”), where dead babies are buried with graves “marked with a rock, handpainted by the older children”. Gulp. We can surmise that contemporary Clair, in Saskatoon, will have some connection to the empathetic nun. The former’s on a mission to discover who her deceased father’s biological mother was. Claire has abandonment issues: her father left the family when Clair was eleven, and there’s a “beast that gnaws at [her] soul”. She hopes that a DNA testing kit and diligent research will provide some answers to the mystery of her father. She has an urn with his cremains, and considers how bizarre it is that “A man’s entire life [is] taking up less space in the closet than [her] shoes”.

It’s two other female characters, however, that are the story’s main focus. Anna is married with children and about to board a ship in Liverpool, along with her siblings and their families. Anna’s daughter, Annie, was born deaf and mute, and her “affliction made her dear to [her mother’s] heart”. A morbid cliffhanger near the end of Part 1 in this three-part novel makes it impossible to put the book down.

Ottenbreit’s at her finest when she’s describing the difficult sea journey across the Atlantic on the Bavaria. Walking the gangplank to board was terrifying for Anna: “The height hypnotized me, and the sight of the icy grey water swirling below froze me in place”. The steerage area “reminded [her] of a burned forest of tall, leafless trees in all directions. Dim oil lamps hung from hooks …”. The red-bearded deckhand leads them past the section designated for single men, and warns “Women and children alike have been grabbed, and no good comes from it”. Indeed, these rough men became “bolder and more offensive as the days passed”.                 

Twenty years after immigrating, the Hungarian families are celebrating Dominion Day 1921 in Saskatchewan, where they’ve happily homesteaded between Regina and Moose Jaw. When Ottenbreit skillfully juxtaposes a sexual assault with “party lights glittered in the distance,” I know she’s earned a seat at the Authors’ table. For pacing, plotting, interesting characters and a satisfying ending, Unspoken earns high marks.   

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

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“A Moment of Clarity: Stories of Lives Lived and Unlived”

By F. E. Eldridge

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-007-5

 

Beyond the handsome cover of Saskatoon writer F.E. Eldridge’s first book, A Moment of Clarity: Stories of Lives Lived and Unlived, I discovered bittersweet tales that span decades, cover a rainbow of emotions, and cross borders both real and metaphorical. Except for one, the twenty-two stories feature female protagonists … from an Annapolis Valley, NS girlhood in the 1950s to a young woman’s lonely college days in Edmonton, and from work in NWT to mid-life relationships and concerns in Saskatoon and nearby Dundurn, SK.

The stories are “loosely based” on Eldridge’s own experiences, which lends extra authenticity to the settings and characters. These sometimes yearning, sometimes feisty main characters are generally from large, impoverished but hard-working rural families, and they often have difficult relationships with their mothers. Solace is frequently found in dogs, ie: Harold, “a black, long-haired mongrel of uncertain origin” whom character Lily confides in after her baby sister dies; Reggie, a German shepherd that enjoys road trips with his widowed owner, Lil Thomas, who operates a herb farm and finds a duffle bag filled with $90,000 (will she keep it?); and vomiting siblings Opal and Pearl, seven-year-old “Medium-sized black German shepherds” who “[fidget] like a couple of restless tap dancers to be let into the backyard”.   

In the first story we meet fifteen-year-old Tess, one of a family of six children. Tess is responsible for “mak[ing] the family supper every night” and getting her younger siblings off to school. Mature beyond her years, she’s the daughter of a hard mother and a father who suffers his wife’s wrath, and drinks more than he should. When the children bring home a blind kitten, their father surreptitiously kills it, and—as suggested in the titular “moment of clarity”—empathetic Tess considers “the quiet war that must be raging within him”.      

Eleven-year-old Lucy also works hard: she earns money picking fruit and vegetables in the Annapolis Valley, and her mother insists that the girl “use her summer wages for school clothes and supplies”. It’s 1961, and Lucy’s thrilled to receive her brother’s hand-me-down bike, even if it doesn’t have a seat, back wheel or chain. Without the bike, she’d be walking the three miles to school.

These characters aren’t always presented in a positive light. Nan, in “A Sister’s Ambiguity,” steals from her father and resents her sister, who suffered greatly after drinking lye as a toddler. Anna Mae pesters her grandma’s boarder to let her try chewing tobacco. With just a year between them, sisters Laura and Florence get into outrageous physical fights so often, a social worker steps in and threatens to remove one of them from home. The hatred extends into adulthood.  

In this book filled with women, it’s interesting that my favourite story, “Mr. Simpson,” concerns a man. It’s a mental health story—Ralph’s phobic about bugs—and an example of how when we choose a perspective far different from our own, the resulting story can be profound. All in all, well done F. E. Edridge.

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

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“The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief”

By Steven Mayoff

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781989-274972

   

 

Buckle up, Readers. PEI’s Steven Mayoff has penned a clever and entertaining novel that melds Pink Floyd; Judaism; art; dirty local politics; asinine radio show hosts; a foul-mouthed, riding crop-wielding webcaster in Anne of Green Gables orange braids; a hurricane; and a trio of unlikely characters—Judas (yes, that Judas), Fagin (from Oliver Twist) and Shakespeare’s Shylock. The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief is an immersive trip that leaps across the fine line between gritty realism and magic realism, and I’m glad I went for the ride.  

Mayoff’s book aptly begins with a Socrates quote about madness, “which is a divine gift,” and for much of the 347 pages the First Person narrator and politically-subversive artist-of-some-acclaim, Samson Grief, wonders if he has indeed gone mad. Grief creates “fantasia(s) of Jewish iconography set on modern-day Prince Edward Island,” and his most acclaimed work is Anne of Bergen-Belsen, a painting of a raggedly-dressed Anne Shirley with burning eyes, tattooed numbers on her skeletal forearm, and a Star of David armband. She’s standing before a concentration camp fence and a “candy-striped lighthouse”.

This powerful and controversial work attracts the attention of “the Supreme One,” and his messengers—Judas, Fagin and Shylock—spontaneously appear “in gaudy summer shirts and goofy headgear” to protagonist Grief. They explain—in individually distinct and cracking good diction—that The Supreme One (aka God) has “seen fit to bless this small red mote [PEI] as the new Promised Land”. Before that happens, however, Grief must build a synagogue on the site of a 100-acre garbage dump, which a shady, bolo tie-wearing local entrepreneur-turned-MLA already has slated for a money-making resort and kids’ camp. This nefarious politician’s daughter is the gal webcamming in the crimson bodice, and his hijab-wearing ex-wife is the woman Grief’s falling for.   

 Aside from its hilarious originality, this novel scores high points for Mayoff’s ability to differentiate the diverse cast, including the “three boils on [his] psyche’s backside,” whom the author brilliantly distinguishes through voice. Fagin’s Cockey accent is bang on, and Shylock speaks thus: “’The man hath been well knocked off-kilter, if not in evidence of his frame, then most surely in the maze of his brain,” and he also delivers this apropos gem: “̒What form doth reality take and what may be said of fiction? Is one a mirror for the other or are they clothed by the opposite ends of a single thread?’”

Mayoff’s previously published the award-winning short story collection Fatted Calf Blues, a novel and two poetry collections. A painterly writer, he explains Grief’s “love at first sight” with the island’s “cobalt rivers and cerulean bays” and the “endless sky of washed-out robin’s egg blue.” From farmers’ markets to the Confederation Bridge to “the slightly concave loneliness of living on an island” and the Crazy Diamond bar managed by his Pink Floyd-loving, moonshine-selling friends, Mayoff’s painted a riotous portrait of his beloved PEI, complete with hurricane (“Hurricane X”) which might indeed usher in “a new beginning” for Canada’s smallest province.  

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

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“My Little Métis Sleepy Horse”

Written and Illustrated by Leah Marie Dorion

Published by Gabriel Dumont Institute Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$17.50  ISBN 978-1-988011-31-8

 

Sometimes simplicity’s best, and that’s particularly true when it comes to the plots for board books written for toddlers and young children. Prince Albert, SK Métis writer and artist Leah Marie Dorion keeps it simple—but also beautiful and bilingual—in her board book My Little Métis Sleepy Horse, released by Gabriel Dumont Institute Press. The vibrantly-illustrated story’s Michif translation is credited to Michif language keepers and educators Irma Klyne and Larry Fayant, both also from Saskatchewan.

The book shares a day in the life of a nameless girl and her beloved horse, beginning with “My horse wakes up. I wake up.” The full-bleed illustration opposite this reveals a yellow and orange, groovy-styled sun with rays like long arms that stretch across the page; cheery, oversized flowers; and the basic figures of a horse and a black-haired girl wearing a purple dress. The child’s arms salute the sun, and the colours and stylistic use of imperfect circles within all the objects—including the grass and the sky—set the upbeat tone.

Text is minimal, ie: “My horse eats grass. I eat an apple,” “My horse runs fast. I run fast,” and My horse rests. I rest”. The words and corresponding illustrations demonstrate the girl’s close relationship to her horse and the activities they share, ie: jumping and playing. The horse theme is apropos, as “Horse stories are an important theme in Métis oral history,” and though any child could certainly enjoy this small, easy-to-hold book, when Métis children have this story read to them, it “can help reconnect [them] to their Métis cultural routes on the high plains”.  

Dorion’s been writing and illustrating books for several years, and her numerous titles include The Diamond Willow Walking Stick: A Traditional Métis Story about Generosity and Relatives with Roots: A Story about Métis Women’s Connection to the Land. If you’re already familiar with her award-winning work, you’ll know that “Her artwork celebrates the strength and resilience of Métis women and families”.

The story comes full circle, with the child and horse sleeping on the ground— after a fun and active day—beneath dragonflies, stars, blue and purple circles and the blue infinity symbol that’s featured on the Métis flag. “The symbol represents the immortality of the nation,” (metisnation.org) and again, this is fitting, as books like Dorion’s keep the Michif stories and language alive. This illustration also appears on this sturdy book’s cover.  

Translators Klyne and Fayant share extensive backgrounds in preserving the Michif language. Klyne grew up on the road allowance east of Katepwa in the Qu’Appelle Valley. She worked for the Department of Education in Regina and served thirty-two years with Gabriel Dumont Institute. Fayant, also from the Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance, “picked stones and cut pickets for farmers” in his youth. He lives in Balcarres, SK, and continues to teach Michif.   

We’ve all heard about “a boy and his dog”. Thank you, Dorion, for mixing it up, and sharing “a girl and her horse” story … in two languages.

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

 

 

Five Book Reviews: Jawbone by Meghan Greeley; The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber; Benny's Dinosaurs by Ashley Vercammen, illustrations by P Aplinder Kaur; Prince Prickly Spine by Tekeyla Friday, illustrations by James Warwood; and Faith in the Fields: Picturesque Ukrainian Churches of Saskatchewan by Fritz Stehwien

“Jawbone”

By Meghan Greeley

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 9-781998-926008

 

Original. Startling. Candid. Jawbone is a quick-read novella by Newfoundland writer, performer and director Meghan Greeley that encompasses the inherent joy and terror of being alive and being in love. It’s outrageous that a book this polished is the author’s debut title.

I initially wondered what I was getting into. Greeley writes: “I was wired shut, and then a man put his latex fingers in my mouth and cut out the wires with gardening shears”. What? Plotwise, the narrator—a concertina-playing actor—is recuperating in a small cabin (she told the Airbnb owner that she was “looking for the loneliest place in the world”) after an accident left her both physically and emotionally shattered. We know her boyfriend had moved to California months earlier, and his letters are scattered throughout the text. The red-haired costumer designer the actor’d been sharing an apartment with was tantalizingly bizarre, ie: they created a list of tasks that take approximately a minute to complete, like “Microwaving a small portion of leftovers”. And the roommate—she of the “smoothest skin”—is difficult to read. Just friends? More than friends? Then there’s the climactic aquarium incident, among a crowd and before a bloom of jellyfish.   

All in all, Planet Earth seems too alien to navigate and the narrator wants “to disappear,” so she decides to apply for a nonprofit-sponsored, never-return trip to Mars, and must create a minute-long video audition. Trouble is, her jaw’s been wired and speaking’s impossible. For now, there’s the cabin, where she learns that “twenty-nine showers” is “the lifespan of a bar of Irish Spring soap if you are rigorous”. For now: memories.

You can’t help but fall at least a little in love with this narrator; she bleeds insecurity, strangeness and desire across every page. Among the things that make her ache: “the smell of wet snow on pines; the last lines of television shows” and “any mention of the beaches of Normandy”. She bought a hat “that made [her] feel more like [herself] than anything ever had before”.  

Though the premise sounds “out there,” the story’s completely earthy. The memorable cast is compelling, eccentric and will say (and do) almost anything, often apropos of nothing. The roommates “drank gin and put bras on [their] heads and pretended [they] were dumb men”. They played “Winter” in summer, exhaling smoke from a “half-smoked cigarette” and pretending “that the smoke was [her] breath, frosting in cold air”. Underneath the stream-of-consciousness reveries, remembered conversations, and the actor’s eclectic confessions (“My teeth felt different in California;” she “concoct[s] email passwords from the things of which [she is] most deeply ashamed”) lies a credible story of simmering attraction. Readers, you’ll feel it, too.

Looking to kick 2024 off with a fabulous read? Jawbone is a book for anyone who has ever “wanted something, something, something else”. Finally, the cover is another example of how Radiant Press is producing the most gorgeous books out there. It shimmers. And much like the text within it, it’s positively radiant.    

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

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“The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative\acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin”

By Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-781778-690174

 

It’s innovative, bilingual, and gives us another kind of Genesis. The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative/acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin is a Cree/English poetry collection by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, a Regina writer, editor and professor of Indigenous Literatures at the First Nations University of Canada. Archibald-Barber has ingenuously combined traditional Indigenous creation stories—The Star stories—with quantum physics, and the result is a star-studded collection of eye-opening poems.

The author essentially contemporizes Cree oral tradition stories (that “teach us how we are all related to Creation through the same source of energy and spirit”) by spinning them into poems that merge with the “spiritual and scientific understandings of the cosmos and the quantum foundations of reality”. He cites Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear’s talk on quantum physics and Indigenous spirituality as a major inspiration, particularly Little Bear’s discussion on “how the quantum superstrings are what Indigenous cultures have traditionally called spirit”. He also laud’s Cree educator Wilfred Buck’s video, “Legend of the Star People,” which describes the “Hole-in-the-Sky—a ‘spatial anomaly’ or a ‘wormhole’ that leads to and from the spirit world” via the help of Star Woman and Grandmother Spider. By presenting his work in English and Cree, he simultaneously also helps keep the Cree language alive.     

This stunning collection’s divided into two sections: “The Star People” is the stronger of the two. It’s told within a sweat lodge’s “dome of woven willows” and contains the Creation narrative. Throughout the book the poet effectively weaves the here and now with the celestial, ie: “a sudden splash cuts the silence/rocks cracking in the cosmic hearth/the universe takes its quantum shape/fills itself with its first breath”. This first powerful poem, “Emergence,” includes: “and I crawl out through the door/a dazed child, a little spirit/dragging space-time behind me/like an old blanket”. The three-page piece introduces the “story of the stars/of the stones/of our grandfathers and grandmothers,” and in following poems we meet the Star Woman, who “dances/with a blanket made of stars” and Grandmother Spider, guardian of “the quantum door”. Star Woman “plucked a string” from “countless self-amplifying loops” and eventually “the galaxy began to fray/stars spilling out like scattered beads”. The Creator steps in and warns to respect “the threads” as they “belong to the universe and hold the sky together”.

Star Woman sees the “earth gleaming in the starlight”. She wants to go there, and does, in human form. The other Star Children, hearing her sing, soon follow, and become “the People of the Earth”.

It's a fascinating braiding of the traditional and scientific, and some kind of magic happens as a result. The poems also touch on how “the balance was undone”: the “Paper People” arrived, the Indigenous “were barred/from walking on the open land,” and traditions were lost.

This stanza alone proves this poet’s prowess:

the busker strums a song

                                          on the corner

where our light

              cones overlap

and the strings vibrate

for a moment

as I catch your glance

          from the window                      of a passing car.

 

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

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“Benny’s Dinosaurs”
Written by Ashley Vercammen, Illustrated by P Aplinder Kaur
Published by Home Style Teachers
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00  ISBN 9-781778-152924
 

It’s common for children of a certain age to go through a dinosaur phase—if memory serves, my own son was about seven when he was passionate about dinosaur books, facts and toys. Prolific Saskatchewan writer and Home Style Teachers’ publisher, Ashley Vercammen, has tapped into that possibly universal dinosaur appeal with her colourfully-illustrated softcover Benny’s Dinosaurs. She’s dedicated the book to her “dinosaur-loving nephew, Benny”.  

On the first page we learn that the titular “Benny” is a paleontologist about to lead a tour because “It’s a field trip day!”. A picnic will also ensue. Dressed in a brown uniform with a ranger-type hat, brown boots and a backpack, the swarthy blond paleontologist introduces us page-by-page to a variety of well and lesser-known dinosaurs in a rainbow of colours, and some of the creatures feature spots, horns and feathers. The story is illustrated by P Aplinder Kaur with playful-looking dinosaurs—Triceratops is green, Kosmoceratops is blue with fifteen horns and spikes, Tyrannosaurus Rex is dark pink—and their polka-dotted eggs. P Aplinder Kaur—also a cartoonist and digital marketer— lives in Kharar, India. Author and illustrator have teamed before.

Tour guide Benny engages his audience with questions and comments, and on each page Vercammen includes the phonetic pronunciation of the dinosaur being discussed, ie: Giganotosaurus, which “was a little bit bigger than the T-Rex,” is pronounced “Jai-ga-nuh-tuh-saw-ruhs,” and the elephant-sized Xenoposeidon is pronounced “Zen-o-puh-sai-dn”). This could be very helpful for early readers and older folks.   

Young children will enjoy the bold, cartoon-like illustrations, and even at this reviewer’s great age, it’s fun to learn new things about dinosaurs. I didn’t know that the dinosaur with the longest name is Micropachycephalosaurus. “Phew, I bet he took a long time to write his name!” Benny says. Vercammen often includes light humour in her numerous children’s books. I also didn’t know that Leptoceratops “sometimes walked on two legs” and “lived in caves,” and that “there are over 700 known dinosaurs”. On the prairies, the small and light Albertosaurus “often travelled in packs to stay safe and find food,” Benny explains. And can you name a dinosaur that is the “the height of an average man”? Perhaps the dinosaur-lovers in your family or classroom—or this book!—can enlighten you.

Vercammen lives in Saskatchewan and writes books to engage “readers of varying English abilities in conversation”. She regularly markets her titles at book fairs and other in-person events. If you’d like to see her growing library of books, please consult her website at www.ashley-vercammen.ca. Interestingly, she’s also published a colouring book version of Benny’s Dinosaurs, and readily helps other writers publish their stories via her publishing company, Home Style Teachers.

Benny’s Dinosaurs is a treat. I wonder what this enterprising author will entertain young readers with next? From haircut and dentist appointments to the touching sibling story, Little Big Sister: Big Little Brother, Vercammen’s always got surprises up her sleeves, and she regularly rolls them up to do the hard work of book marketing.

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

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“Prince Prickly Spine”
By Tekeyla Friday, Illustrated by James Warwood
Published by Tekeyla Friday Studios Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$11.99  ISBN 978-1-7772418-4-1
 
 

 How in the world did she come up with this?

 That was my initial reaction to the multi-talented Tekeyla Friday’s enchanting chapter book, Prince Prickly Spine. Its royalty, dragon, castles and jousting make it medieval. The futuristic “Pizza Pads” (for playing music) and Pizza Palms (like cellphones, they’re used for calls and texting, but also feature a “pepperoni-flavoured keypad” and are pizza-shaped) give it a sci-fi touch. And the fact that the story’s protagonist is a kid who’d rather be playing video games than keeping his room tidy, exercising or “paying attention to [his] tutor” gives it a very “contemporary kid” feel. And I haven’t even mentioned the prince’s fairy godfather, Joe Troll, who frequently screws up wishes, but then “Nowadays in Medievaldom, anyone could apply to be a fairy godparent, as long as they had a pixie spark”. The Swift Current author delivers a strong dose of humour, and that works in every genre.    

Friday, who is also a stop motion animation and claymation artist, clearly has a wonderful imagination and knows just what juvenile readers appreciate in a book: an irreverent child; a dangerous rescue-the-princess-from-the-dragon mission; and lots of physical comedy, thanks here to a clumsy young prince. Twelve-year-old Prince Evert doesn’t behave like a real prince in any way, shape or form. When his mother enters his messy, foul-smelling room and confiscates his electronics, the prince says fine, he’ll “go outside and walk around the moat,” but that doesn’t cut it with the queen. She sends her lazy, stinking son—he’s not bathed in a month—on a quest: he must journey to “the Shadow Dragon’s Cave and rescue Princess Amelia”. Prince Evert says: “Are you batty, woman?” And even worse luck: he’s not allowed to take his Pizza Palm, so will be relying on an old-fashioned parchment map: “It looked sort of like a caveman’s drawing of a GPS.”

The prince’s humiliating attire for his adventure demonstrates Friday’s fine use of similes: “The sock smelled rancid, like dead, salted fish that had gone rotten”.

The writing is witty, the characters delightful, and the book is illustrated in comical drawings by James Warwood, from Wales. I laughed when I saw the image for the “WANTED ALIVE NOT DEAD” poster, which included this: “Note: She’s too young to marry.” That’s just fine with Prince Evert, who only “wanted to play video games and chat on Medievaldom social media and play MeTube videos,” plus “hang out” with his bestie, Prince Roman Porter.

Other characters include the protagonist’s brother, Don, who calls Evert the “Sloth Prince” and tells Evert that after the Shadow Dragon eats the prince’s feet, he’ll “have to wear wooden ones,” and Tilly, the teasing maid. After the prince loses his horse he connects with his comical fairy godfather, the bulbous-nosed Joe Troll, and the boy hopes for a magical fix to his situation. Unfortunately, the bumbling troll has made another mistake. Will someone be “dragon food by sundown”?  

This book is a royal romp. Enjoyed it!     

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

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“Faith in the Fields: Picturesque Ukrainian Churches of Saskatchewan”

Paintings, drawings and sketches by Fritz Stehwien

Published by Landscape Art Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95 ISBN 9-781738-021901

Fritz Stehwien was a German-born Saskatoon artist (1914-2008) whose life and work continue to be celebrated by many, including his family. The art-filled hardcover is an archival project produced by Waltraude and Barbara Stehwien, and in its introduction we learn that the book “was inspired by two exhibits held at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada in Saskatoon: Faith in the Fields (1997) and Faith in the Fields II (1999)”.

The beautifully-bound book features page after page of full-bleed, mostly pastel images of the singular churches and landscapes Stehwien encountered in his adopted home on the Canadian prairies. (The lifetime artist was forced to serve as a soldier in Eastern Europe during WW II.)

This art book also commemorates the “resilience” of “European settlers encountering the harsh prairie climate”. This resilience came, in part, due to “their faith and strength,” and memorials to this history are found in the Ukrainian churches—“revered prairie icons”—still scattered across Saskatchewan. While some of these architectural delights are now abandoned, others have become designated heritage sites.

The artist returned to Europe in 1942, attracted especially by “the picturesque onion domes in Belarus and Russia”—architecture commonly replicated in Ukrainian churches on the prairies. Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2022 prompted Stehwien’s family to publish this latest book, which they’ve dedicated “to the resilience of the people of the Ukraine who are once again required to draw on their strengths for survival”.  

The pastel, acrylic and charcoal images draw the gaze in and make me contemplate what it may have been like to arrive as a settler on the bare, harsh prairie. Several of the paintings include neighbouring cemeteries, the graves marked with tall Orthodox crosses. The landscapes illustrate the seasons as well, ie: barren winter fields, and spring-filled ponds, as we see in the paintings of the churches in Plainview, Bankend, Fernwood and Theodore. I admire the sunset-strokes behind the Catholic churches Stehwien captured in Bodnari and Yorkton.

The book also includes a list of the Ukrainian churches and the year they were built, as well as a map showing their locations in Saskatchewan. I find the grand Ukrainian Orthodox Holy Trinity Cathedral in Saskatoon, where I attended a very traditional wedding decades ago. Across the page there’s St. George Cathedral, also in Saskatoon, with several onion-shaped domes crowning its glory. I’ve also personally admired many of these churches from the highway during my travels across the province, and on page 36 I find All Saints (Orthodox) nestled between golden-leaved trees and spruces in my hometown of Meadow Lake. Certainly I remember this domed beauty, but I don’t recall ever entering its doors, and that’s a pity.

I’m so pleased that the Stehwien family has chosen to honour their father’s art and their cultural heritage in this artistic way. I hope that it finds its way into the hands and hearts of those who will cherish it.

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