Moon of the Crusted Snow

Finished October 22

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

This is the first book in The Whitesky Saga, a post-apocalyptic series and is set in a small Anishinaabe community in Canada's north. It is approaching winter and the small community first experiences the loss of their internet service and then the loss of communications with the outside world. They don't know what is going on, what caused these outages, or how widespread the situation is. They learn a bit more when two members of the community who have been away at college manage to return, and by then, the leaders of the community have already begun plans to conserve what they have and to ensure everyone in the community is taken care of.

When new visitors arrive, the community has to decide how much to trust them, and how to include them in their plan. This novel takes place over that winter, and we see the situation as it affects children, elders, and those who didn't learn the skills of survival from the elders. We also see couples come together and couples come apart under the stress. Families take on new roles, and people spend their time in different ways, some adjusting better than others. 

This is an interesting tale, of a group of people that already have a strong sense of community, one that most communities today no longer have. It makes one start wondering how the rest of the world is dealing with similar issues and how one would respond in these circumstances.

The author is Anishinaabe himself and that brings authenticity to the book that affects how I read it. Scary, sad, and yet somehow hopeful. 

The Vanishing Place

Finished October 21

The Vanishing Place by Zoe Rankin

This suspense novel moves from the present to the past, as a young girl appears in a small New Zealand town covered in blood. She made an initial statement, giving her name as Anya, but hasn't talked further, and this statement causes the local police officer to contact Effie, who now lives in Scotland. Effie grew up in New Zealand, living deep in the bush with her parents and two siblings. When her fourth sibling is born unexpectedly, her parents are unprepared and her mother dies in childbirth. Effie takes on the care of her new brother, who they call Four. Her father is distraught and disappears for some time, returning with a woman Effie has met before briefly. As we gradually learn of Effie's past and her connection to this small town and the man who called her to return, we also deal with the present, the strange, quiet young girl who looks very much like Effie did as a child.

Returning to New Zealand awakens memories in Effie, memories both good and bad. The bad ones are of terror, terror for her family still out in the bush and what the presence of Anya means. She knows that she must return to find out, but the return to the home she grew up in brings her to a nearly empty cabin. Someone lies dead on the floor, and there are signs of confinement, but no possessions to show that anyone has been there lately besides the body. 

As Effie tries to get closer to Anya, and learn what she can from the traumatized girl, we also learn about the trauma that caused Effie to leave. 

This is a story that has more than one moment of suspense, and lots of unexpected situations and plot elements. I could hardly put it down. 

I liked Effie and could understand her choices. I also liked Anya and could understand why she was so wary of the people who tried to help, even though she'd run to them. This is a complex tale, with trauma across generations. Highly recommended. 

Clear

Finished August 8

Clear by Carys Davies

This historical novel is set in 1843, which is the year when about one-third of the ministers in Scotland rebelled against the patronage system whereby landowners would confer the position of minister in their parish or on their estates. This breakaway group was known as the new Free Church, and the ministers had to leave their homes (the manses the ministers lived in) and their church buildings and start from scratch. At first many held services in the open, with their parishioners asked to give what they could towards renting or building a new place for services and supplying an income for the ministers to live on. 

This was also towards the end of the period of Clearances, which had begun in the mid-eighteenth century. The Clearances consisted of landowners forcibly removing whole communities of the rural poor from their homes and livelihoods to make way for crops, cattle, and sheep, which would be managed centrally by the landowner. The landowner could then call on these desperate people for labour during the busier seasons and the people would be forced to make do with smaller, less fertile pieces of land, and piecemeal work. Some died, some went to larger industrialized cities, and many emigrated to North America or Australia. As the author notes in the afterward, when the potato blight began in 1846, these people still in Scotland began to starve. 

One of the three main characters here is John Ferguson, a minister that has chosen the Free Church, and is struggling to find money for a place for his parishioners to worship. He is middle-aged, well-read, curious, and recently married. Another character is Mary, his wife. She is also middle-aged, and had given up on ever marrying until chance brought the two of them together at a lecture. They are very much in love, and had spent money on two items that showed this. For Mary, it is a wedding ring that was important to her, and for John it is a calotype picture of Mary that he can take with him when he is away from her. John had made his decision to resign his living in Edinburgh a few months after their marriage.

The third central character is Ivar, a man living alone on a remote island near the edge of the Hebrides. Years before a storm had taken most of the young men on the island when they were fishing. There were two families, and one had left soon after. Ivar's mother, sister, and grandmother left a few years later for a new life, but he refused to leave, staying with his small horse, Pegi, his cow, his sheep, and his chickens. He made a living for himself, but barely survives, and spends his time when he isn't out on the land spinning yarn and knitting. 

Desperate for money, John accepts a favour from his brother-in-law and goes to work for a landowner. One of the tasks that has been given to him is to go to the island Ivar lives on and give him the notice of clearance. He is provided with documents, some scant help with the language Ivar speaks, food, and a pistol in case of trouble. A ship drops him off and will return for him in a few weeks. But John falls in an accident soon after landing on the island and it is Ivar who finds him, and some of his drenched possessions, and takes him in and cares for him. We see how the two form a relationship, a friendship, and how John learns his language gradually as he recovers his strength and decides how he can deliver the news he has been sent to deliver. 

After he has been gone a while, Mary worries about his safety after hearing stories of some of the more violent encounters during the Clearances, and sets out after him. 

The book description gives us these basic elements of the plot, but the way that Davies puts it all together is beautiful. There are many surprises, delights, and disappointments, but the characters here are so wonderfully drawn that I found it hard to leave the story. The book is short, but not fast-paced and the language is lovely. 

In the afterward Davies explains what she based Ivar's language on, and how she came to the idea for the book, which are related. 

The Unicorn

Finished September 23

The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch

This strange and eerie novel is set in a remote part of a country that may be Ireland, although it isn't clearly stated. Marion Taylor has answered an advertisement for a governess following an amicable but painful breakup. She is nearing 30 and unsure of whether her future holds a marriage or not. Part of why she found the advertisement appealing is the name of the home she is going to: Gaze Castle. But as the book opens, she finds that it is quite far from the nearest railway station and remote even from neighbours. She has uneasy feelings almost right away, fighting the urge to flee as she is driven to the home. 

The home is a rather ordinary, yet large house, not a castle, and she also soon finds that she hasn't been engaged to teach children, but rather to teach and be a companion for a woman similar in age to herself. There are other mysterious elements to the place, and she finds the roles of many of the other people there unclear. The woman she will work for is Hannah Crean-Smith, a woman who seems delicate in health, and never leaves the premises. The man who collected her, Gerald Scottow seems to be in charge, and may even be under orders to limit the activities and visitors to Mrs. Crean-Smith. 

She also finds that the husband of her employer is alive, but was injured badly in an incident that seems unclear on the cliffs near the house. One possibility is that his wife may have tried to kill him after being found in an act of infidelity. The chauffeur is Jamesie Evercreech, but he is also some sort of distant relative of Hannah's as is his sister Violet. Violet Evercreech seems to act as a housekeeper, with numerous "black maids with casts in their eyes and incomprehensible accents" that she seems to direct. There is also Denis Nolan, a man who seems to deal with animals as well as other unexpected tasks. 

The nearest neighbour is a recluse, an older man named Max Lejour and in the summer his daughter Alice and son Pip come to visit, as does a family friend Effingham Cooper. 

As Marion becomes more and more confused and unsettled by the atmosphere of the place, she thinks that she must make some sort of plan to free Hannah from this imprisonment. 

This is a story that relies on the geography and remoteness of the location, the odd characters, and the sense of foreboding that comes on Marion after encounters with certain people or elements. 

A book that draws you in, so that you need to know how things unfold. Murdoch is a master storyteller. 

Ragged Lake

Finished April 30

Ragged Lake by Ron Corbett

Taking place in a fiction place up in the Territories in northern Canada, this book is the first in a series featuring detective Frank Yakabuski. Frank is from the north, but went away for a while and spent some time doing undercover work related to motorcycle gangs in Montreal. He's been back in the north a few years and is considered a seasoned officer. 

Ragged Lake is very remote, with no roads in or out and only a weekly train service, mostly for supplies to a fishing and hunting camp located there. It was once a more bustling place, with a paper plants and a variety of other small businesses that supported the people that worked there. 

When a young tree-marker working in the area checks out a cabin built from scraps, he finds murder victims and immediately heads to the resort to report it using their phone. 

Frank is sent out with a couple of guys to assist with the investigation. It is winter and with the train not scheduled for a few days, he and his officers travel via the rail line by snowmobile, a trip that takes more than one day. 

They find that the report is accurate and that they have a crime on their hands, but there are more questions that come to Frank. Why are these people in the cabin there? Why have the chosen this place to build a home in? Who can he trust? are some of them. 

As we, alongside Frank and in a narrative that is separate and told partly through a written record, discover the connection of these people to this place and its history, the story of the indigenous people who have lived in the area, 

We get a sense of Frank and his character and his past in this introduction to the series. We also get a strong sense of one of the victims here, a young indigenous woman who has had bad luck again and again despite her own strength. 

This made me want to read more of this series.