Stories

Bowen, G. 1990

Deadly Appearances. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 267 pp.
AEU BARD PS 8552 O927 D278 The first tale in the series. Andy Boychuk, the politician Joanne Kilbourn works for, dies apparently from poisoning at a political rally. As things go on, it becomes clear that he must have been killed by a member of the inner political group. But who and why? Then Jo gets sick and realizes that she has been poisoned too. All is unravelled eventually, as the mystery in Regina is resolved. (18/Aug/1998).

Bowen, G. 1991

Murder at the Mendel. Re-issued 2000. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 213 pp..
Sally Love is a successful and talented artist whose personal life is a mess. Her new exhibit at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon is generating controversy. So when her former business associate, Clea Poole, a deranged and unstable woman, is found dead at the gallery, suspicion natural falls on Sally. As her friend, Joanne Kilbourne, currently living in Saskatoon for a year, lends her support, not believing that Sally could be capable of murder. Besides, Sally's mother, Nina, had almost been a second mother to her, after her father died and her mother slid into alcoholism. So Jo feels she owes the Love family a debt. Sally's young daughter, Taylor, is showing signs of being a talented artist as well, and so Sally is determined to take Taylor away from her estranged husband, Stuart, and give her the freedom to develop artistically. Then history repeats as Sally is also killed at the Mendel, at a celebratory Valentine's Day dinner. She dies from anaphalaxyis brought on by almonds sprinkled on her food, evidence that the killer knew of her food allergies. Deep waters, these. Jo is forced to look at old loyalties and friendships in a new way to discover the real culprit. Incidentally, I bought this book at the Mendel Gallery during a recent visit to Saskatoon - it seemed appropriate! (05/Apr/2008).

Bowen, G. 1992

The Wandering Soul Murders. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 207 pp.
Read while I was in Regina, where the story is set. Again, Professor Joanne Kilbourn is the central character. The story concerns the apparent suicide death of Christy, a troubled woman who had been her son's, Peter's, girlfriend. As she investigates, Jo finds out some very disturbing things about Christy's background. (17/Aug/1998).

Bowen, G. 1994

A Colder Kind of Death. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 217 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8553 O8995 C6 Joanne Kilbourn is faced with the uncomfortable prospect of reliving or reinvestigating the murder of her own husband six years earlier when the man accused of his murder is himself killed in an apparent drive-by shooting at the jail. Gradually some unpleasant connections between that past and the present are made and it become clear that old friends may have been involved in the earlier crime. Nicely evokes the prairie atmosphere of Regina, especially the winters. (03/May/1998).

Bowen, G. 1996

A Killing Spring. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 266 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8553 O8995 K55 Set in Regina, a mystery partly solved by Professor Joanne Kilbourn, a member of the PolySci Department. When the head of the Journalism Department is found dead in suspicious circumstances, it's up to Joanne to comfort the widow and try and disentangle an ugly plot in which some of her own students seem to be involved. Things aren't helped when one of her problem students, who has complained that another student is harassing her, disappears and is later found dead too. Jo is a likeable character and the locale and setting are right. (04/Jan/1998).

Bowen, G. 2000

Burying Ariel. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 254 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8553 O8995 B87 Professor Joanne Kilbourn is faced with the repercussions of the murder of a young colleague in the PolySci Department of the university in Regina. Things get ugly when a radical strident feminist clique use the death as an excuse for a campaign against the man they think is guilty. (26/Oct/2001).

Bowen, G. 2002

The Glass Coffin. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 337 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8553 O8995 G53 Jo Kilbourn is preparing for Christmas in Regina and also preparing to help an old friend, Jill, with her wedding. Things don't go smoothly when Jo meets the fiancé, Evan MacLeish, and loathes him on sight, finding him cold and self-absorbed. Unfortunately, in the midst of the wedding celebrations, Evan is found dead. It looks as if the key to his murder may lie in the films he made, using his family to feed his cinematic creativity in an unpleasantly detached and voyeuristic manner. Evan's family members certainly stretch the meaning of "dysfunctional" and are too self- consciously theatrical to be believable. The resolution of the plot relies on coincidences that stretch credulity. The winter prairie scene is right, but, for me, the plot is too contrived. (13/Mar/2004).

Bowen, G. 2004

The Last Good Day. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 335 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8553 O8995 L38 The scene shifts from Regina to cottage country in the Qu'Appelle Valley for the next episode in this mystery series. Joanne Kilbourn has been lent a cottage/summer home there by a friend of hers, Kevin Hynd, a lawyer. All the homes in this community, which is gated, belong to lawyers and their families from the firm of Falconer, Shreve, Altieri and Wainberg. The locality is so over-run with lawyers that it is called Lawyers' Bay. The partners in the firm all met years ago when they were students at university. They were so obviously destined for success that they were nicknamed the "Winners' Circle" by their fellow students and the name stuck. Twenty-five years later and they are still a close-knit group. So when one of them, Chris Altieri, is found dead in his MGB in the lake, an apparent suicide, it appears to crack the mystique and reveal the fact that perhaps all is not well at the firm. Jo gets dragged into the story incidentally, since she is on the fringes of the group at Lawyers' Bay, an outsider, and watches the group dynamics and senses the unhappiness and tensions, without knowing the cause. Then at Chris' funeral, one of her former students, Anne Millar, tells Jo that she is worried about an acquaintance, Clare Mackay, who was a junior associate lawyer at Falconer Shreve. Clare apparently left the firm abruptly several months before, but no-one seems to have seen or heard from her since. Anne finds this behaviour out of character and wonders if Jo knows anything about the firm that might help explain what is going on. Apart from a general sense of unease, Jo has no specific information that anything is wrong. She is hoping that the summer break might also give her time to reach some stability after her breakup with Alex Kequahtooway, a police officer. Instead, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the tensions of Lawyers' Bay. Less reliant on improbable coincidence than the previous book, this one is more successful. (15/Oct/2005).

Bowen, G. 2007

The Endless Knot. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 413 pp.
AEU BARD PS 8553 O8995 E54 The novel, set in Regina, opens by describing Joanne Kilbourn's burgeoning relationship with Zack Shreve, a brilliant lawyer and paraplegic, who is disliked by many people because of his ruthless will to win in the courtroom. Zack is defending Samuel Parker, a wealthy man who is accused of attempting to kill Kathryn Morrissey, a muckraking journalist. Morrissey recently published a book, Too Much Hope, that described the messed-up lives of some adult children of rich and famous (in Canadian terms) people. Much of this information had been gleaned by interviews with these offspring, who were often emotionally fragile but trusted her. Her portrayal of them in the book was deemed cruel and a breach of journalistic ethics by many, including Joanne. One of Kathryn's subjects was Sam Parker's son Glen, currently transitioning into a female state as Glenda. Her parents, pillars of the fundamentalist right-ring Christian evangelical movement in Calgary, are devastated. Glenda's mother rejects her. But rather unexpectedly, Sam supports her and is furious with Kathryn. In a confrontation, Kathryn in shot and injured. The only witness is Jo's old family friend Howard Dowhaniuk, a former politician and drunk, whose own son, Charlie, was another of the people profiled by Kathryn. The story gets even more convoluted and entangled when new relationships between the characters are revealed. The central elements of the tale are the trial of Sam Parker and the deepening relationship between Jo and Zack that eventually blossoms into marriage. A good read as always. (16/Jan/2008).

Braithwaite, M. 1986

All The Way Home. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 220 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8503 R14 A83 Hugh Windmar, now in his 60s, is travelling home to Saskatchewan for the first time in forty years to attend a family reunion. Rather awkwardly written and filled with memories of the Depression and prairie angst. (16/Jun/1987).

Butala, S. 1984

Country of the Heart. Fifth House, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada 232 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8552 U87 C85 This story is laden with clichés. A young girl returns from the big city to a farm in rural Saskatchewan. On finding out that she's pregnant, she tries to commit suicide. (06/Aug/1985).

Butala, S. 1992

The Fourth Archangel, pp. Harper Perennial. New York, USA 272 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8552 U87 F782 Set in the near future, perhaps the next decade, in a small town in southern Saskatchewan. The town is dying, mainly because farming is no longer profitable - all the farmers are heavily in debt to the banks - and because the area is afflicted with drought so the farmers have no hope of a good crop and getting out of debt. At first, this looks like a "blame the banks" story, and there is an element of that, but Butala feels the farmers have brought this on themselves by greed and a technological attitude towards the land. The tale is told mainly through the eyes of two women, Amy Sparrow, an artist and potter, and Jessie Sheridan, fresh from the city, newly-married to one of the local farmers, Val. Both, in different ways, want the community and village to survive, but neither really has a good way of ensuring that this will happen. Still, they try. There is a subplot here about an informal club of widows, who wield a good deal of power behind the scenes. Many of these women have known each other all their lives and these links sustain them and their families. (31/Dec/1997).

Butala, S. 1994

The Gates of the Sun. Originally published in 1986. HarperCollins, New York, USA 274 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8552 U87 G25 A sad story. Andrew Solomon is bought up on the prairie in the early years of the 20th century. He has a hard life as a cowboy and ranch hand before marrying and getting his own place. His sons are central to his plans but none want to take over the ranch and run it his way. So he ends up dying alone in the cabin where he and his mother first homesteaded. The sadness of his life is redeemed by the beauty of the prairie. (28/Dec/1986, 28/May/1998).

Collura, M. L. 1990

Winners. First published in 1984. Western Prairie Producer Books, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada 129 pp.
AEU BARD PZ 7 C7156 W776 Jordy Threebears is a problem teen, and has been in and out of foster homes for years. Now he is going back to the Reserve to live with his grandfather, Joe Speckledhawk, who has just been let out of prison. Together, they have to learn to adjust to new rules. But Jordy discovers that he wants to learn to ride and gets a wild mare from the prairie. After many adventures, he and his horse, Siksika, win an endurance race in the foothills. Life looks as if it might work out well for Jordy. A "young adult" story that was made into a movie. (10/Apr/1999).

Cullen, M. J. 1982

Goodnight, Sammy Wong. Westlands, Calgary, Alberta 175 pp.
AEU BARD PS 8553 U42 G65 Sammy Wong owns a Chinese grocery store in Lethbridge, Alberta, and this is a picture of immigrant life on the wrong side of the tracks and of the zany people and losers who live there. The portrait shows us a sad dull town with no activity or cohesion. (20/Jan/1984).

Erdrich, L. 1984

Love Medicine. Bantam Books, New York, USA 284 pp.
AEU HSS PS 3555 R285 L6 Narrated from the personal perspective of several members of various Chippewa families over about forty years. Set in North Dakota, it concerns mainly two intertwined Aboriginal families, the Kaspars and Lamartines, and their complex inter-relationships. A rich survey of Aboriginal life. Erdich's characters are always thinking that things are against them but with a great pride in themselves as well. Sometimes the characters exhibit highly self-destructive behaviour. (08/Jan/1988).

Erdrich, L. 1986

The Beet Queen. Bantam Books, New York, USA 303 pp.
AEU HSS PS 3555 R285 B415 Set in Argus, North Dakota, this novel tells the story of a very odd family and their interrelationships. It's 1932 and young Mary and Karl Adare have hitched a ride on a boxcar to seek refuge with their relatives after their mother abandons them. Karl runs back and jumps on the train, but Mary goes to join the family that runs a butcher's shop. So begins a 40 year tale of Mary, her cousin Sita and Sita's friend Celestine James, part Chippewa Indian. Most of these people are disturbed in some way. Karl is bisexual and has a yen to destroy things. Mary is determined and Sita becomes detached from reality and descends into paranoia. Karl eventually drops by for a visit, leaving Celestine with a baby, Dot - the beet queen of the title. Dot is the most disturbed of them all, totally spoiled by her mother and her aunt, with a capacity for destructive violence. (01/Dec/1987).

Erdrich, L. 1988

Tracks. Henry Holt and Co., New York, USA 226 pp.
AEU HSS PS 3555 R285 T759 Set in the early years of the 20th century in North Dakota. Recounts the lives of a group of Aboriginal people and Métis. The Aboriginal people are struggling to hold on to the last of their lands, puzzled by the legal forms and writing of the Europeans and weakened by disease and whisky. Part of the tale is narrated by Nanapush, an elder of the tribe, sorrowing at the gradual destruction of his people and their land, clearheaded enough to realize that they must make an accommodation with the Europeans but are unsure exactly how to go about it. Through him we watch the lives of Fleur Pillager, a beautiful young woman believed by other villagers to have supernatural powers or at least be capable of black magic. Fleur clings to the old ways and her belief in her own power will not allow her to adapt. The other main narrator is Pauline, a Métis, who renounces her Aboriginal heritage and claims to be white when she finally enters the convent. She is a very troubled woman, at odds with her own sexuality and concerned with intense self-mortification in her vocation in an effort to obliterate her own doubts. She hates Fleur, and through her own actions, at least partly causes Fleur's downfall. Some of these characters reappear in Erdich's later novels. She follows several themes. How by this time many of the Aboriginal people had a strong admixture of European, mainly French blood, and the tribal system was virtually breaking down. How clan feuds within the tribe and the Reservation accelerated the breakup of tribal lands and how some conspired with the European interlopers to hasten the breakup. Also shows how some were willing to adapt, or at least accepted the fact that they had no future unless they adapted. This book reminds me a lot of Margaret Laurence's Madawaska, set in Manitoba. (11/Sep/1991).

Erdrich, L. 2009

The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories 1978-2008. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, USA x + 496 pp.
AEU HSS PS 3555 R285 R44 Thirty-six short stories. Most are set in North Dakota, in and around the town of Argus and its region. Many feature Chippewa or Ojibwe people, often from the Nanapush or Kashpaw families. Several are stories or contain characters that later found their way into longer novels, such as The Beet Queen. Some stories feature first or second generation immigrant families of Polish, German or Scandinavian descent. A few feature Métis characters, often with strong French background. Many of the characters are flawed or self-destructive. Many of the families and relationships are dysfunctional. Winter and the harsh climate of North Dakota and the plains are ever present in these stories. A few are set in nearby Minnesota, while a very few have an eastern US locale. Erdrich is a very good writer and these stories are strongly evocative of place and distinctive cultures. (14/Dec/2009).

Gallaher, B. 2008

The Frog Lake Massacre. TouchWood Editions, Surrey, BC 246 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8563 A424 F76 The Frog Lake Massacre took place on April 2 1885 in central Alberta near the Saskatchewan border. It was a manifestation of the unrest in wstern Canada, which culminated in the Second Riel Rebellion. Events at Frog Lake are told from the perspective of Caleb Caine or, as he calls himself, Jack Strong, a young man from the west coast who has travelled to the interior for adventure and to take part in the "Indian Wars." After a winter trading among the Cree, he finds himself sympathetic to their plight. The fictional account follows the historical events closely. The tale is written simply and is a very quick read. (25/Aug/2009).

Govier, K. 1987

Between Men. Penguin Books 312 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8557 O98 B565 Two stories in one. First Suzanne Vail, a history prof at a University in Calgary, whose personal life is a complex mix of problems both personal and professional. Part of her research has to do with the brutal killing of an Aboriginal woman, Rosalie New Grass, in Calgary in 1880s when the town was still wild and justice was difficult to obtain. The man who killed her, Jumbo Fisk, got 14 years in prison for manslaughter not murder. The crime resulted from a revolting male challenge gone wrong causing the woman's death. The second story is the recreation of this incident and trial by Suzanne based on her research. In many ways, she identifies with Rosalie and needs to find out about Rosalie's death before she can make progress with her own life. Eventually, Suzanne decides to have some kind of relationship with her ex-husband, Ace, which involves a child as an affirmation of life and a kind of antidote to the death of Rosalie. (16/Oct/1988).

Haley, S. 1987

Getting Married in Buffalo Jump. E. P. Dutton, New York, USA 276 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8558 A355 G394 Set in southern Alberta, concerns the unconventional romance of Sophia, a kindergarten teacher, daughter of a widowed homesteader, and Alexander Bresnyarchuk, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. Sophia agrees to marry him after a marriage proposal old-style, which is mainly a deal about their farms first. So she decides to find out more about him and untangles a convoluted web of relationships between the local Indian band, despised by everyone, and the Ukrainian community, despised by the other EuroCanadians. (02/Dec/1988).

King, T. 1990

Medicine River. Viking, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 261 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8561 I456 M489 Medicine River is a fictional town in southern Alberta that sounds a lot like Fort Macleod. Will is a half-Native man, a photographer by training, who returns to the town after his mother dies, to open his own business. Although he is alone, with no immediate family, Will observes the events in the town with a wry and gentle humour. His filter to the world is provided by Harlen Bigbear, a distant relative, who is a real wheeler-dealer, knows everyone and everything that is going on in the town, and is always trying to engineer social situations. He just loves meddling in people's lives and is an inveterate gossip, but withal likeable. In between incidents in town and the nearby Reserve, Will narrates and thinks about events in his own childhood, growing up in a poor household, fatherless, and his relationships with his mother, a woman of strong character, and his brother James. (05/Dec/1991).

King, T. 1993

Green Grass, Running Water. HarperCollins, New York, USA 431 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8561 I456 G795 Set in Medicine River country in southern Alberta, the story mainly concerns Lionel, a nearing middle-age Blackfoot man who doesn't have the courage top step out of his Native world and yet can't be fully absorbed in it. He doesn't really know what he wants until events make up his mind for him and, still protesting freely, he returns to the Reserve and his roots. At the same time, there is a subsidiary story about four elderly Indians, who may or may not be mythological characters, accompanied by Coyote, travel to the Reserve to set things right. They do this by calling up an earthquake to weaken a dam that has blocked the Reserve's river and is slowly killing the cottonwoods and the river itself (a reference to the Oldman Dam?). Full implementation of the dam has been blocked by Eli, Lionel's uncle, who used to be a professor at a university back east but who came back to the Reserve. He stopped the dam construction by a mix of legal action and stubbornness, by refusing to leave the cabin his mother built which is right down valley from the dam. When the cabin is washed away and Eli killed during the dam breach, Lionel's family start rebuilding it and we know that he will move into it and continue the fight, even though he doesn't really know why. The story is funny in places, though it is black humour, and the writing is streaked through with an undertone of bitterness, and is very scathing about the effects of Christianity on Aboriginal culture. (16/Aug/1997).

Kroetsch, R. 1999

Badlands. Originally published in 1975. Stoddart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 230 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8521 R72 B14 William Dawe leads an expedition to the Red Deer River valley in 1916 and floats down the river on a roughly-constructed raft, looking for dinosaur bones. He dreams of becoming famous from his discoveries, like Barnum Brown and the Sternbergs. He spends almost all his life in the field, returning home to Ontario just a couple of days a year, to visit his pro forma wife. Anna, his daughter, is born 11 years after that 1916 expedition. The tale is told in two voices. Dawe's, as reconstructed by Anna from his field notes. And Anna herself at the age of 45 (in 1972). She decides to go visit the Badlands for herself, ten years after his death, to try to understand her father and make peace with his spirit. This is not a straightforward narrative but is complex and convoluted. Some sources for the story are obvious. Dawe has a hunchbach; so did G. M. Dawson. And the rafting voyage is also out of dinosaur hunting legend. The book is difficult to read but certainly conjours up time and place very well and weaves real histrorical events with imaginative recreations. (25/Mar/2008).

Macomber, D. 2001

Buffalo Valley. Mira, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada 250 pp.
Buffalo Valley is a small town in North Dakota. When a huge retail store, Value-X, plans to establish an outlet on land at the edge of town, the townsfolks band together to try and keep the store out. The town has struggled for years but has finally started to get going again, thanks to some innovative ideas from local business people (like making pasta from their wheat instead of selling the grain on the depressed world market). They know that Value-X will kill the town. The best way of keeping the store out, the women decide, is to persuade the absentee landowner not to sell the land to the developer. Easier said than done, when the asking price is so high. Into this town arrives a man called Vaughn Kyle, fresh out of the army and newly hired by Value-X. He's here to visit an old friend of his parents, Hassie Knight, who runs the pharmacy, and to scope out the town for the company. But once in the town, he meets Carrie Hendrickson, falls in love, and decides to stay, marry Carrie and open a feed store. (27/Jun/2004).

Meese, E. 2009

A Magpie's Smile. NeWest Press, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 353 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8626 E36 M36 Set in Calgary in 1977, oil boom times when the city is rapidly expanding and attracting new residents from all across Canada, especially the east. Bodies start turning up, clubbed to death and then scalped. The job of solving the crimes is given to detective John Jacob (aka Jake) Fry. He's recently divorced and prone to anger but, unlike most of the other characters, he's a longtime Calgarian, who has been on the force for twenty years. There are enough scattered clues through the text so that it's obvious who the killer is from early on. Unfortunately, this book is really poorly constructed. The characters speak in long strings of profanities, all are dysfunctional, and they all hate Calgary. Meese spends far too long describing minor characters, only to have them disappear. And he repeats phrases constantly. I think he's trying to write a "noir" novel but it just comes across as artificial and irritating. "He did not respect Strahan. He did not like Strahan. He could barely stand the sight of Strahan" (p. 218). We get it, OK. Especially after we've been told the same thing in the same words numerous times before. In a particularly egregious example (pp. 56-57), we read about the killing of one victim. After describing his sensations as he dies ending with "He felt nothing," Meese goes on for another paragraph describing all the subsequent sensations and actions that the victim did not feel. Meese seems to have forgotten the novelist's dictum that you should show not tell and spends far too much time telling us in detail about places and people that have only tangential relevance to the story. The characters are wooden and all so dislikeable that it's difficult to care what happens to them. However, the Calgary setting is interesting, with the Glenbow Museum as a particularly important locale. (22/Aug/2009).

Mitchell, W. O. 1981

How I Spent My Summer Holidays. Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, Canada 224 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8525 I89 H84 Loss of innocence in 1920s on the Saskatchewan prairies. Young Hugh, aged 13 years, spends his time playing with friends out on the prairie, getting into scrapes and swimming in the river. This all turns darker though when he and his friend Peter find an escaped mental home patient, Bill, in their "cave" dug out in the prairie. King Motherwell, a one-time worker at the mental home, tells them to hide Bill, realizing that he is shell-shocked from WWI. But tragedy strikes when Hugh finds King's wife, Bella, beaten to death in the cave and Bill missing. The search is on for Bill, who is eventually found in spring, drowned and dead. King is tried for murdering Bill, but the irony is that Bill died in a fit, of natural causes, and King actually killed Bella because he found out that she had been "fooling around." The prairie scene is highly evocative but the story is rather trite and not particularly memorable. (17/Feb/1982).

Mitchell, W. O. 1984

Since Daisy Creek. Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 277 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8525 I89 S62 The story concerns Colin Dobbs, a Professor of English at a Canadian university, who has been mauled by a bear during a hunt. (03/Mar/1985).

Mitchell, W. O. 1990

Roses are Difficult Here. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 325 pp .
AEU HSS PS 8525 I89 R816 Set in a foothills town in the 1950s, a fictionalized version of High River, Alberta, where Mitchell grew up. The story revolves around the town's newspaper editor, Matt Stanley, who befriends a visiting academic, Dr June Melquist. She stays in the town for six months, visiting people and doing interviews. When she leaves town and publishes her book the townsfolk are horrified and hurt by her harsh judgements. She finds the town narrow-minded, bigoted, and racist, backward in its educational standards and literacy rate, and devoid of any real culture. She condemns the professional men as cowards who have opted out, afraid of the challenges of the big city. (21/Jan/1992).

Mitchell, W. O. 1993

Who Has Seen the Wind. Originally published 1947. Stoddart, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada 293 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8525 I89 W6 Set in a small town in prairie Saskatchewan in 1930s, during the Depression, tells of the childhood years of Brian O'Connal. Although not at the forefront, the Prairie is there as a main character in the tale, the land beyond the town is an always-felt presence. The story doesn't romanticise small-town life. The narrow-mindedness and bigotry, exemplified by Mrs Abercrombie, are there, as are peculiar characters and oddities, such as Saint Sammy and the Bens. Young Ben is the spirit of the prairie incarnate, untrammelled, unreachable, unteachable. (02/Mar/1997).

Mitchell, W. O. 2001

The Vanishing Point. Originally published 1973. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 398 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8525 I89 V3 Carlyle is a damaged human being. Having survived an unhappy childhood, he has lost his wife and child to sickness. He becomes a teacher at the school on the Paradise Valley Reserve, in the Alberta foothills, south of Shelby (= Calgary). The time is sometime in the late 1950s or perhaps early 1960s. A few years later, Carlyle takes on the job of Indian Agent at the Reserve, negotiating with the government on the Stonys' behalf, and trying to drill what he feels is a needed sense of duty and responsibility into the people on the Reserve. Carlyle is frustrated by the poverty and disease he sees among the people, though he feels that much of it is induced by fecklessness and a "live for the moment" attitude. His hopes for the future of the group are focussed on Victoria Rider, his star pupil. She finishes school and goes to learn to be a nurse in Shelby. Carlyle hopes that she will come back to the Reserve and help her people. But when he goes to visit the nurses' school to find out how she is getting on, he finds that she has disappeared, run away. Frantic with worry, filled with fears about what could happen to an attractive Native girl on the streets of the city, Carlyle searches for her. But Victoria has fled because she is pregnant and doesn't want to face him or her family. She is brought back to the Reserve by Archie Nicotine, a wily band councillor. Carlyle realises that his feelings for Victoria are more than those of a teacher. As the novel closes, we see him contemplating a new life with her, with all the complications that will impose. This is written very much from the "outsider looking in" perspective and supposedly is based on Mitchell's own experiences during a year (1953) teaching at the Eden Valley Reserve in southwestern Alberta. (02/Apr/2005).

North, S. 2003

Bones to Pick. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 288 pp.
The narrator is Phoebe Fairfax, a camera-person for a TV station in Calgary. She is sent to film the opening of an exhibit at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. The exhibit features hominid bones from Africa, thought to be from a new species. The bones' finder, Dr Graham Maxwell, was originally from Alberta, but has lived in Africa for many years. Filled with bombast and arrogance, he manages to infuriate almost everyone he meets, though he is also a powerful advocate and speaker for palaeoanthropology. So when he is found dead at the Museum and the bones are missing, there are a lot of suspects, from unhappy members of his team, to former student colleagues that he annoyed many years' ago. The solution turns out to be quite mundane but along the way we meet an interesting cast of characters, and spend some hilarious moments with them. My favourite character is Professor Woodward, an elderly University of Calgary professor, a former micropalaeontologist who is doing an experiment in "de-evolution" by living rough in the bush of the forest reserve near Phoebe's house. He finds his main difficulty with "de-evolving" is the boredom, since he misses his books and movies! Written in a quirky, witty style, this is a good read. (19/May/2005).

Powe, B. A. 1983

The Aberhart Summer. Lester and Orpen Dennys, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 215 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8566 O95 A74 A memory of Edmonton and rural Alberta in 1935, the year that Aberhart and his Social Credit Party were bringing promises of prosperity and an end to the Depression. Doug Sayers and his friends Norm and Babe Roothe, aged 15, are enjoying the summer until one weekend when Babe goes into a neighbour's barn and hangs himself. Doug is haunted by the death of his friend and does not find out why he did this until 10 years' later at the end of WWII when he meets accidentally in a military hospital another friend from those days. The friend reveals that Babe was really killed by the jealous father of his girlfriend. Now in the 1980s, his mother has just died in the old house in Edmonton, and Doug has gone back to clear out the place and thus is reliving these old incidents. He remembers also Babe's older brother, Albert, a passionate disciple of Social Credit, who gets himself elected to the Provincial Government in the election of 1935. Politics and personal lives are inextricably mixed. (23/Oct/1984).

Schroeder, A. 1986

Dust-Ship Glory. Doubleday Canada Ltd, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 215 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8569 C55 D97 Based on a true story, tells the tale of Tom Sukanen, a dour Finlander, who started to build a large ocean-going vessel on his farm in Manybones, Saskatchewan, during the "Dirty Thirties." His antagonism and antisocial behaviour anger and alienate his neighbours, to the extent that they eventually have him committed to a mental institution. There he retreats into catatonia and dies a couple of years later. A picture of prairie society in the 1930s, rigid hierarchic and intolerant, with no real empathy for those who are different. (11/Dec/1986).

Stenson, F. 1988

Last One Home. NeWest Press, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 158 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8569 T373 L349 Set in southwest Alberta, somewhere near Pincher Creek. Gabriel, a Métis man, is called back to the family ranch by news that his father is sick. A recent graduate from Engineering at University of Calgary, he thinks he has left his past behind him but finds out that this is not the case when he has to decide how to deal with his family responsibilities. (14/Oct/1992).

Stenson, F. 2004

Lightning. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, British Columbia 431 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8569 T373 L54 This is an excellent read. The novel tells the life story of Doc Windham, a cowboy. He grew up in Texas, the son of a drunk, and came to Canada in 1881, driving a huge herd of cattle from Montana to Alberta to form the basis of the herd at the Cochrane Ranch. The story is told in two parallel streams. First, the story of the cattle drive and the following couple of years when Doc decides to stay in Alberta. The earlier stream starts in 1867 when Doc was a young man. He was taken by his Uncle Jack, a Civil War veteran, on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Here, in the small town of Dillon, his uncle is hanged by vigilantes for killing a brutal miner who was terrorizing a young girl. That girl, Pearly, became Doc's companion. She made money playing pool and a couple of years later, in order to protect her, Doc takes part in a vigilante attack on Ivan Overcross, a brutal and probably psychopathic man, But Doc's gunshot doesn't kill Overcross and for the next 15 years he is haunted by the thought that Overcross is hunting for him to kill him. Pearly, unable to cope with the complexity of the situation, takes herself off, an event that Doc finds devastating. He spends much of the next 15 years looking for her and hoping to find her again. The two stories come together when Overcross catches up with Doc at a ranch in the Crowsnest valley. In the climactic scene, Doc's life is saved by a young cowboy, Jim, he has befriended. This time, Doc sees a future free from fear with his new companion, Esther Prieston, the wife of an ignorant and arrogant rancher, Victor, who was Doc's employer. I enjoyed the mix of historical and fictional events. This novel has many memorable characters and scenes. (31/Dec/2006).

Sweatman, M. 2001

When Alice Lay Down With Peter. Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 459 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8569 W37 W43 Set in the Red River Valley, just south of Winnipeg. It traces four generations of a family seen through the eyes of Blondie, who lives for over a century. Her parents, the Alice and Peter of the title, came to Canada from Orkney and Scotland in the 1860s. Alice followed Peter, living for many years as a man. They participated in the first Riel Rebellion and Alice takes part in the firing squad that executes Thomas Scott, an event that haunts the family into the next century. Alice and Peter settle on some land by the Red River, which they acquired from a Cree man. Their nearest neighbours are Métis, Marie and her son Eli, a buffalo hunter. When the Métis are driven out in the aftermath of the Rebellion, Alice and Peter have the land to themselves. Here, Blondie grows up, dreaming of Eli. He returns eventually and, after an interlude when Blondie goes off, disguised as a man, to fight in the Boer War, they produce a daughter, Helen. She is attracted to convention in the form of Richard Anderson, son of a wealthy Winnipeg businessman. Their marriage does not last. Helen cannot deny the call of her heritage and she sets off, disguised as a man, to ride the rails as a hobo, witnessing the social unrest and rioting of the Depression era. Returning home, Helen meets Bill, a monk who abandons his vows for a life of contemplation on the family's land. Their daughter, Dianna, becomes an artist, taking her inspiration from the plants and scenery around her home. As the tale ends, modernity, in the shape of foreclosure on debt engineered by Richard, makes the future of the property look precarious. Dianna's daughter, another Helen, is a toddler. And the River, a constant background presence, may be a greater threat to the land than development. (28/Jun/2003).

Ursell, G. 1984

Perdue or How the West Was Lost. Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 198 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8571 R89 P43 An allegorical tale of the settling of the west of Canada, seen through the eyes of Perdue, a son of the first settler. Perdue does not age but continues to live and watch the events of the last century, safe in a sort of suspended prairie paradise. (07/Oct/1984).

Valgardson, W. D. 1980

Gentle Sinners. Oberon Press, Canada 213 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8572 A39 G33 Story of growing up in a small Manitoba town during the Depression. Bobby, renamed Eric, runs away from his harsh Bible-thumping parents and goes back to the family farm and his uncle Sigurd. There he learns about his roots and begins to learn responsibility and self-reliance. Absolutely superb, good portrait of characters and tensions and troubles that afflict even small-town life. (09/May/1981).

Vanderhaeghe, G. 1989

Homesick. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 292 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8572 A54 H765 Set in Connaught, a small town in Saskatchewan in 1959. Alec Monkman is in his 70s and beginning to deteriorate. His daughter, Vera, and her 12 year-old son, Daniel, are coming back to live there. Vera left 17 years' previously, after her mother died, to escape Alec's domination and he has never seem Daniel. During the subsequent year, until the old man dies of stroke, the family feuds are played out. As in life, nothing is resolved; the book offers a snapshot of three lives and a picture of small town life. (17/Mar/1990).

Vanderhaeghe, G. 1996

The Englishman's Boy. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 333 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8572 A54 E5 A story that takes place at three times and places - southern Alberta in 1873, Hollywood in 1923, and Saskatoon in 1953. The common thread is Harry Vincent, would-be screen-writer, who is recalling his youth in Hollywood from old-age in Saskatoon. Back in the 1920s, he is commissioned by Chance, a megalomaniac movie studio owner who wants to make a great American epic, to track down an old cowboy, used occasionally as an extra in Westerns, named Shorty McAdoo. Chance feels that he may have stories to tell about the Old West that will make the basis for a movie. Vincent tracks down McAdoo, who eventually tells him about his witnessing of and role in the Cypress Hills massacre and in particular the murder of a young Assiniboine girl. When Chance hears this story, he is taken with it, but he changes it, for dramatic reasons, so that it is McAdoo that sets the fire that kills the girl. McAdoo finds out and is outraged, both at what he sees as Harry's betrayal and the corruption and distortion of the truth. In the climactic scene, his young companion, Wylie, who is mentally-challenged, shoots Chance at the movie's première. McAdoo disappears again and Harry returns to Saskatoon. The best parts of the tale are the accounts of McAdoo's life on the Prairies in the 1870s. Here he is known as "the Englishman's boy," because he was the servant of an Englishman, a would-be hunter, who died before reaching the Prairies. McAdoo is a drifter. He meets up with a band of wolfers and outcasts who head to the Cypress Hills in search of some stolen horses. The book is bracketted by the account of the theft of these horses by some Blackfoot(?) men who take them back to their camp, utterly unaware of the repercussions of their action. (09/Oct/1997).

Vanderhaeghe, G. 2002

The Last Crossing. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 393 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8572 A54 L37 Set in western interior Canada during the whisky trade era, the late nineteenth century. Concerns the three brothers of the wealthy British middle-class Gaunt family. One, Simon, has come to western Canada and then disappeared. Back in England, his father, Henry, sends his other two sons, Addington and Charles (Simon's twin), to try to find him. The story is told from various viewpoints, though Charles is the main character. Others become involved in the journey across the southern Alberta prairies: Jerry Potts, who is their guide, Lucy Stoveall, who is hunting for the men she believes killed her sister, Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran who wants Lucy to marry him, and Aloysius Dooley, a bar-keep who keeps an eye on Straw. This ill-assorted crew travel together, driven hither and yon by Addington's unpredictability and moodiness. This is finely written and evocative, with an almost dreamlike quality. (23/Oct/2003, 28/10/2005).

van Herk, A. 1978

Judith. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 190 pp.
AEU HSS PS 8572 A585 J92 A young Alberta woman, brought up on a pig farm near Stettler, rejects her parents' way of life and goes to live in Edmonton. She determines to return to the land out of guilt when her father dies, and so she starts up a pig farm of her own. The tale covers the first six months or so of her struggles to get the first litter of pigs bred successfully and her interaction with her neighbours and the local people. (15/Apr/1994).

Wiebe, A. 1984

The Salvation of Yasch Siemens. Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 176 pp.
AEU BARD PS 8573 I19 S3 Set in southern Manitoba near the US border in the 1960s. Concerns the growing up and courtships of Yasch Siemens. He belongs to a Mennonite community, all of German descent, who speak a dialect of English sprinkled with German words. The story is written in this dialect, which makes it hard to follow. (27/Sep/1984).