Melodrama in the wilds of British Columbia: the title alone deceives.
A lyrically somber, mannered debut about a family of women without fathers or husbands during the two wars. They migrate from Scotland to British Columbia, on land touching the Shulus reserve.
The mother-daughter dynamic is essential fodder to MacPherson’s elliptical tale as it hints at terrible secrets in the heart of wayward daughter (and soon mother) Min, whose life is shaped by her relationship to the Indian reservation abutting her mother’s property. Min is one of two daughters of widow Fran Petrie, who prosperously took over the working of a dairy farm in Merritt, B.C., after tracking down her absentee Scottish husband, killed subsequently in the Great War. Min’s daughter, Ana, narrates her own story years later, conjuring difficult, sometimes gossamer, mostly bitter and perplexing memories of her mother after they moved to Princeton, B.C., where Min’s husband worked in the mines and where they raised their children when not at Min’s mother’s farm: Ana, Theo and Willa—the death of the youngest by eating poison berries implicates Min in gross negligence as a mother. Ana witnesses other questionable lapses on her mother’s part when she follows her and sees her with men. MacPherson vaults over great blocks of time, switching points of view and leaving the reader to identify just where the narrator is—in the present of Min’s pubescent girlhood, grating against her watchful mother, or at Ana’s 16th year, when Willa has just died and Ana begins to be suspicious of her mother? The death of little Willa, “like a misplaced bracelet, a cast-off shoe,” is almost unbearably terrible in this character, and Min’s unrepentant nonchalance regarding her children strains credibility. MacPherson ups the ante breathlessly with atmospheric foreshadowing—about the death of Willa, the disappearance of Theo, the true identity of the Indian lover, never disclosed—until the project becomes a tiresome exercise that backfires.
Melodrama in the wilds of British Columbia: the title alone deceives.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-55192-596-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Polestar/Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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