The Garden of Eden

Finished August 31

The Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala

This book takes place mostly in 1993, with the character Lannie having experiences as early as 1984. This is when Lannie arrived as a volunteer in Ethiopia. She was deeply affected by the news of Ethiopian famine and was determined to find a way to help there. Without medical or other specialized training, she found a church willing to send her for her reporting on what was happening. Lannie makes herself useful in whatever way she can, picking up knowledge as she goes. 

When she was a young child, she was dumped on her uncle Barney and aunt Iris by her father, Howard, Barney's older half-brother following the death of her mother. Her younger siblings, Dillon and Misty, were left with another relative in Calgary.

Lannie had lived in Chinook, Saskatchewan, and her aunt and uncle had a farm just outside town. Despite the love they had for her, Lannie always felt out of place. 

In 1993 in Chinook, Iris is spurred to leave the town to search for Lannie who has been gone for a decade, with letters petering out soon after she left. The impetus to search for Lannie is a sudden, unexpected loss of her own. Iris thinks about her own ties to the land, living on the farm that her mother and grandmother lived on before her. She has often thought about the indigenous people who lived there before them, protecting the signs they left behind, and spending time in the remaining wild coulee that is part of her property.

The book is separated into three sections: Seeding, Growing, and Harvesting, and there are overarching themes of drought, and land use and conservation.

Both women are also searching for love and belonging, and both have dreams that take them into the past and the future. They also feel a sense of a woman guiding them in these dreams. 

I really enjoyed seeing their experiences, even the difficult ones, and seeing them grow as they realized that their strength was within them, and they needed to love themselves first. A moving story that shows the commonalities across cultures. 

Peace River Country

Finished July 7
Peace River Country by Ralph Allen

I picked this up thinking it was about the northwest part of Alberta that my parents grew up in, but the title of the book is more about a goal for the characters. Most of the story takes place in southern Saskatchewan.
As the novel opens, Bea Sondern and her two children Harold and Kathleen are on a train, about to live the town of Dobie. Harold knows they are running away, but the younger Kathleen seems more nonchalant, ready for the next stage of their lives. They talk about what they'll do for a living when they get to their destination, the Peace River Country, and what kind of place it is. Their destination is one that sounds wonderful to people dealing with the drought of the prairies. They talk about the wonderful names of the towns in the Peace River Country, and of the weather. They left Regina in 1933 for Dobie, and now four years later their next stop is Elevator, another small Saskatchewan town. Each town is a step closer to their dream destination.
As the conductor comes to take their tickets, they recognize the long-serving CPR man Chatsworth. He knows their situation and tries to be helpful without looking like he is offering charity. As they reach Elevator, where Chatsworth lives, he offers a room in his own home to them, without first consulting his wife and daughter.
Bea is a hard worker and is quick to find something that she can do to earn a living, whether it is taking in laundry, or cleaning, or doing piecework. Even when sometimes it was clear that she wasn't very good at these things, she still persisted in trying her best.
So what are they running from. They are running from Chris Sondern, Bea's husband and Harold and Kathleen's father. Chris is a good man, well-meaning and intelligent, but he has a weakness for drink, and his alcoholism is an illness that won't let him go. Bea tried to stay, until she couldn't. Now, when, for whatever reason, Chris follows them, even though he knows himself that he shouldn't, they must move on.
We see inside Bea, her love for her husband that still lives, her love for her children, and for the children she didn't have, but wanted. We see her hope for a better future. We see her plans and her preparations.
We see inside Chris, see his knowledge that he isn't good for his family in the state he is in, though he longs for them. We see how he met Bea back in the twenties when he was newly promoted to second teller and she was a waitress in a diner. We see how they married even though he earned less than the minimum amount the bank set for its employees to marry and so he lost his job, and we see how his fall began.
We see inside Harold, his worry and fear of being hopeful. How he longs to be accepted, but doesn't really believe that he will be. How he feels himself an outsider.
This isn't a happy book, but it is an interesting one, a story of its time, of how choices can lead in directions that are unexpected. The story is told subtly, with hints and thoughts and feelings.

The Road is How

Finished August 6
The Road is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire, and Soul by Trevor Herriot

This book is the story of a journey, both physical and mental. It all starts with Herriot falling from a ladder doing home repairs. Reading a book during his recovery, he is convinced that he needs to do a journey in the form of a long walk. A native friend of his tells him that walking is a good idea, but that he needs to first go sit on a hill while fasting and figure out why he wants to go for a walk.
Herriot does this, and comes out of it with a few things. One is his imbalance in terms of personal relationships. He wants to understand his high level of desire, finding meaning in the relationship between a man and a woman in his own life, and grow up in terms of relationships. Second is that he wants to reawaken his spiritual side, and go with purpose toward what comes next in his life. Third is that he needed to look inside himself to things that needed changing. After thinking about it, and recognizing his strong connection with nature, especially with birdlife, he determines to walk from his home in Regina to his cabin about forty miles east of the city.
He knows he will have a make a few detours from a straight path, but he will go as straight as he can, along roads, road allowances, and fence lines. Along the way he notices his surroundings, the subtle changes in landscape, the animals, birds, and people he encounters. He also reflects, on his relationship with his wife Karen, on his strong sexual desires, on his feelings toward women generally, on the birds and their environment that he has advocated for, on his male bonding experiences, on his connections with nature.
At times I found his musings too nebulous to be meaningful to me as a reader, but this is his story, and he needs to express himself in the way that makes sense to him. His journey is interesting, and he does seem to get something from it, and that is what really matters.

Alone in the Classroom

Finished August 21
Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
This is a novel that crosses several time periods, told by Anne.
The earliest time is 1929, in a small town in Saskatchewan, where Connie Flood is a young teacher. The new principal, Parley Burns, unsettles many in the community. Connie finds his attentions unwelcome, while another teacher is drawn to him. Burns starts a dramatic club that puts on a play, and singles out a particular girl with tragic results. Connie takes a young man with a learning disability under her wing for special tutoring.
A few years later, in another town near Ottawa, Connie, now a journalist encounters Burns again when she is working on a story around a young girl who went missing. While in town she boards with Anne's grandmother, and her younger brother eventually marries Anne's mother.
As Anne looks back on the events that occurred in her and Connie's lives we see the patterns, and the parallels. One of the patterns is threes: principal, student, teacher; grandmother, mother, daughter; aunt, niece, lover; mentor, teacher, student. Another is the influence of older male on younger female. We see the results of obsessive love on people's lives. We also see how events early in a person's life can stay with them throughout the rest of their lives. This is a book about relationships, emotions, and impulses.
A good read.

Stories from the Prairies

Finished March 7
Stories from the Prairies by Marie Anne McLean
This audiobook is part of the StorySave series, voices of Canada's storytellers. Marie Anne McLean grew up in Manitoba and the stories here are her own creation. They fall into three types
The first set of stories is set in the fictional small town of Thumbprint, Saskatchewan. McLean's interest in small town Saskatchewan began with her brother's experiences as an RCMP officer there. The stories capture various ideas and are vignettes of small town life. The second set of stories are World War II stories based on the experiences of McLean's father, Jack, and his fellow soldiers from D-Day to reunions. The third set of stories are family stories from McLean's family from her grandparents, to her parents, to her brother.
McLean tells a good story and makes them come alive. She is hesitant in spots as she looks for the right word or phrase, but the stories are well put-together and interesting.

Confession

Finished February 2
Confession by Lee Gowan
This Canadian novel is a sad one. Young Dwight Froese has lived a difficult life in small town Saskatchewan, with an engaging  but slightly mad young mother and an abusive older father. When he finds his mother's dead body, he is sure his father killed her and challenges him to a duel. He ends up killing his father. Later he is told that his father didn't kill his mother and that her death was an accident.
Dwight spends some time in a mental institution and is taken under the wing of a prominent local doctor, who is also the father of the girl that Dwight has had a crush on since second grade. As Dwight finds a new and different relationship with God, he also eventually finds a new purpose to his life that is unfortunately mired in the past.
Sad, poignant, and very readable.

Saskatchewan Fiction

Finished September 2
Cool Water by Dianne Warren
Except for the prologue, which is historical, this book takes place within a period of just over 24 hours. Set in the small town of Juliet, near Swift Current, this book follows several people from town through their day. From the escape of a horse from its trailer in the wee hours one morning to camping in the sand dunes in the wee hours of the morning of the next day, this book follows the events in people's lives. Some are mundane, some life-changing, but all have their own resonance here.
We have the horse owner, off to start a new life and hoping to make a good first impression. A young man, now on his own, trying to find his identity and place. A couple on the brink of financial disaster struggling through their life, yet finding comfort in each other and their family. Their eldest son, learning about his dreams for the future. A well-off, but distant middle-aged couple facing a different life-changing event than they thought they were. A middle-aged man and his widowed sister-in-law finding that life goes on in unexpected ways.
The characters here, whether major or minor all have their own voice and feel authentic. And the landscape of Saskatchewan, in the sand hills, has its own role here as well. This is a book to savour and enjoy.

Canadian Memoir

Finished November 4
Small Beneath the Sky: a prairie memoir by Lorna Crozier
This memoir had me enthralled from the first page. The imagery is some of the best I've ever read and she intersperses memoir segments with impressions on nature and her prairie surroundings.
Her memoir is open and honest and she doesn't try to gloss over the difficult times. She has gained permissions from some people she grew up with to tell their stories and has changed the names of others. Her family life was not easy and she talks about the role family dynamics played in not only her life, but that of her immediate family as well.
The writing is lyrical and flowing and her writing brings her world to life.
This is one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time, and I highly recommend it.