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"I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book."
Homesick
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Homesick
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This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
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Purchased during a Saturday afternoon book binge at Tanglewood Books, while slacking in Kitsilano with Mr. goatgrrl. An earlier novel by the author of The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing.(Left: author Guy Vanderhaeghe.) |
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Alec Monkman, a seventy-three year old widower, lives in the small town of Connaught, Saskatchewan where his friend Mr. Stutz help him keep things going. Alec's daughter Vera and her younger brother Earl have long since left home, and Earl's departure, which took place some time after Vera left, is somewhat of a mystery -- both to Vera and to the reader. It's now 1959, and Vera -- thirty-six years old and herself a widow -- has returned to Connaught for the first time in seventeen years, accompanied by her twelve year old son Daniel. Daniel has started getting into trouble in the larger city of Regina where they've been living, and Vera has moved him to Connaught for his own good.There's bad blood between Vera and her father Alec, but we don't really know why. Daniel and Alec are a different story -- the two hit it off famously. Alec includes Daniel in boozy late-night card games and Sunday afternoon TV sports binges, and Daniel finds in Alec what he has lacked all his life: a father. The very thing at which Alec failed so abysmally with Vera. I loved this novel for its descriptions of life in small town Saskatchewan in the 1950s -- which seems to have been unique in many ways, but also reminiscent of my parents' tales of growing up in a neighbouring province during approximately the same post-war era (frugal, hard working, hopeful, bucolic, corny, domestic and hopelessly anti-semitic). Vanderhaeghe's characters are so vividly depicted you feel like you knew them, gritting your teeth at their foolishness and grieving their passing as it occurs. Only a couple of characters (Earl, and Vera's late husband, Stanley) remained more in the shadows than I would have liked, which was the book's only weakness. It's overwhelming strength lies in the depiction of Vera's strained relationship with her father (which will be painfully familiar for some women, and -- I guess -- some fathers), and the warmth in the emerging relationship between Alec and Daniel. (Top left: the goatgrrl's grandmother, Elva Oliver McKenty, one of several family members at the front of my mind as I read this book. This photo taken at a family cottage in Manitoba in 1943.) |
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Released 5 yrs ago (1/12/2007 UTC) at -- wild released somewhere in Vancouver in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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