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CONCENTRATION CAMPS OF CANADA

Name: CONCENTRATION CAMPS OF CANADA
Author: Baron Deschauer

by Baron Deschauer with Lucky Deschauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A sensitive, well-told story of one life ruined by the racism of involuntary assimilation.

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A Native Canadian boy tries to find his way as a man despite his cultural alienation in this novel.

The residential school system aimed to forcibly assimilate Native peoples by taking children from their parents. The kids were given European names, punished for speaking their own languages, and put to work. Abuses and exploitation were rife, and many children died. In this tale, Migizi Baswenaazhi, a young Native boy, is taken from his home and put in a harsh school where he’s assigned the name David Bass. Unlike many children, he survives disease and the bad food; polite and hardworking, he at first does well. But David is an outsider in his own country. He turns to drinking for escape and wrecks whatever he’s built up. Yet he’s hopeful, reflecting that he’s like the tannery furs that become soft and warm again after harsh processing: “The truth of the material survived everything.” World War II gives David the opportunity to find his truth as a warrior. But helping to liberate Bergen-Belsen disturbs him, bringing back memories about being sexually abused by a priest at the school. At home, he’s hailed as a hero, though by 1960 he still can’t protect his family from the schools. According to the book’s introduction by Baron Alexander Deschauer (Slaves of Circumstance, 2017, etc.) and debut author Lucky Deschauer, “Hitler was so inspired by the residential school system…that he used it as a model for the concentration camps.” It’s true that Hitler found inspiration from the design of Native American reservations but not from the schools, so this statement and the title are misleading. That said, the schools were horrific, and this novel is far more thoughtful than its sensationalist introduction or title would suggest. The Deschauers capture David’s point of view with intelligence and sympathy. A farmer’s harsh words strike him “like the branches that slapped my face when I was young and followed my father in the bush,” as if even then the world conspired to slap David with his ethnicity. They portray David’s complications well—his anger, self-hatred, despair, and rationalizations—as when he beats his wife with his belt: “I knew how to do it; the sisters and brothers did it often enough to us. They helped me become the man I was.”

A sensitive, well-told story of one life ruined by the racism of involuntary assimilation.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: FriesenPress

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.