Five Little Indians
by Michelle Good
Harper Perennial (2020)

Michelle Good reminds me of my grandfather and the time when storytellers spun words into magic. Five Little Indians is a curl up book. Residential school survivors, fresh and innocent to the horrors of living in a big city, are woven into a compelling tale. The characters, already Isolated and torn from their natal families, these children became masters of survival while at residential school; but life in the cloistered church school could hardly prepare them for life on the tough Vancouver streets. Their ages vary somewhat from 16 to early 20s when they are ‘dropped’ into their new lives. Naïve to the difficult conundrum of living alone, and under employed in Vancouver, each one is confronted with the bias of the colonial world. Good unfolds a tapestry that illustrates how these young adults limp through the
new challenges. Below is an introduction to some of the characters Good creates with an enticing quote.

Maisie
“I sat in front of the vanity mirror, looking at the reflection, this stranger. I looked close into my own eyes and saw a truth there I knew I would never be rid of.” pg 76

Kenny and Lucy
“Not a day without fear. Through it all, she had relied on Kenny. Not just for his encouraging notes and shy smiles, but because he ran and ran and ran. He would not let them beat him. And he believed in her. He even told her so. He was not as hollow then as he was now.“ pg 106

Clara and Mariah
Clara stiffened, the familiar rage rushing through her veins. “Pray? You mean talk to myself and imagine some guy in the sky will make it all better?” pg 193

Howie
“You have no idea what that man did to me and a whole lot of other boys. He deserved what he got and a whole lot more. Where was the law then when he was beating us, breaking bones and other, even worse things?” pg 16

Some escape, some die, and others survive despite the agony of their recurring nightmares they all live as best they can. Good creates compelling and convincingly real scenarios. Her characters desire to be regular men and women whose lives are not driven by their past, nor compelled and unchangeable. They shoulder each other to get beyond the camaraderie of nightmares. Though Good’s dialogue style has been commented on, it fits, it all fits so well as to be believable. Good’s book does not depend on sympathy or misery, it harkens to hope and healing. Even to an awakening. Like Maisie, take a good look in the mirror, you just might see truth staring back at you.

This book is a compelling read and highly recommended.

Shelley McAneeley ponders art in its many forms. You can enjoy some of her poems in Drifting Like a Metaphor, edited by Micheline Maylor, and available through Frontenac House.

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Watershed by Doreen Vanderstoop
Freehand Books (2020)
ISBN: 9781988298597

The dystopia in Doreen Vanderstoop’s Watershed is one worryingly reasonable: it’s 2058, no one has enough water, and being a farmer is rough—even rougher than usual. While corporations are looking to pipe out what H2O Alberta has left for a profit, Willa Van Bruggen and her husband are barely keeping their cattle-turned-goat farm alive amidst never-ending dust storms and disease—all while their son Daniel, who betrayed Willa for the city, attempts to make some high-level change. Vanderstoop’s writing is strongest when it centers on Willa, her difficulties understanding her son, her white-knuckle grasp on her late father’s property, and, eventually, her encroaching madness. When it comes to the dystopian setting itself, however, the writing dips into a classic sci-fi mishap: overabundant exposition from characters who narrate like historians.

Take, for example, Daniel’s first scenes walking through the Calgary of 2058. The narrator, in limited third-person perspective, describes everything as Daniel sees it—including street names, the writing on signs, the types of garbage by his feet, the names of the buildings he passes, and etcetera. Or take chapter 6, which begins with “Dan sat down at the back-corner table of the nearly deserted Starbucks at Crowfoot Centre in northwest Calgary.” The back corner might establish Daniel’s character, and the near-empty Starbucks sets the scene and the ambience; the Crowfoot Centre and northwest Calgary, on the other hand, are irrelevant details, especially to a non-Calgarian reader.

In contrasting then Calgary and now Calgary, Watershed strikes for the hearts of real-life inhabitants who know the city’s landmarks themselves. The Palliser hotel, once extravagant, now houses the homeless. The Olympic Plaza, made for winter sports, now sits abandoned and pointless in the dust. The problem with these otherwise-powerful details, however, comes from the delivery. From the perspective of Daniel, the narrator stacks exposition upon the reader in long bursts that interrupt the flow of the plot and seem unjustified coming from a character who would have no reason to take note. In chapter 3, there are 11 references to different streets and locations, most of which are irrelevant to the plot and all of which had no place in the character’s mind at that moment. In chapter 10, the reader gets a full explanation of the current products in Calgary grocers, where they’re from, and why farmers changed from potatoes to less “thirsty” crops—all because Daniel’s landlord looks malnourished.

These issues in Watershed seem to appear most often when the narrator becomes distanced or dishonestly representational of the point-of-view characters. Conversely, moments in which the narrator is closest to the current character is where Watershed succeeds—and where Vanderstoop writes her most efficient lines. In characterizing Willa, Vanderstoop uses clever imagery and metaphors; for example, “Willa strained the bad news from the pile of innocuous facts. Picking nits from a mink, her father would have said.” Later, in the juxtaposition of assisted suicide with the euthanizing of a horse, Vanderstoop weaves desperation in-between the vivid sights and smells in a room full of death. In fact, Vanderstoop excels in near-all moments of literal confinement within the novel: whether it’s the room of a dying man, the office of an inflated executive, or the cell used after the novel’s late thriller twist, these moments of intimacy bring a tender honesty to characters that might otherwise have been left in the dystopian dust.

Watershed is written by a Calgarian for Calgarians. For some, this may be its primary selling point, and such readers will likely be happy with what they find. For others—non-Calgarians or impatient sci-fi fans, especially—the exposition and straying focus may hinder an otherwise tender and honest experience.

Vincent Potter is a Calgarian writer and editor. Since graduating from Mount Royal University’s English program, he fills his time with freelance editing and writing poetry next to his guinea pigs.

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by

A Handbook for Beautiful People
Jennifer Spruit
Inanna Publications (2017)
ISBN: 978-1-77133-441-9

A Handbook for Beautiful People by former Calgarian Jennifer Spruit is a gentle love letter to the imperfect and broken set against the backdrop of the 2013 floods. A compelling and complicated story of making impossible choices and finding grace, Spruit’s characters are at times quirky and original, at times desperate and violent, but always filled with fierce love for one another.

Marla, a young woman with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, is a free-spirited, often flighty soul, with a strong voice and a murky past that she battles to keep hidden from her emotionally-distant boyfriend, Liam. A hallmark of Marla’s FASD is her struggle to stay focused on following through on attaining even the smallest goal. Marla is late for work, forgets to return from breaks, and is easily diverted from her duties. But she knows for sure that she loves Liam, and that she is good for him, even if he sometimes seems embarrassed and overwhelmed by her.

Liam is a straight-laced music teacher who desperately wishes for a career as a musician, but his future as a professional cellist is hampered by an increasing ache in his hands. He loves Marla, but her over-the-top-ness and fun-seeking is sometimes more than he can take.

Liam also despises Dani, Marla’s housemate and best friend since the “old days” when the two women clung to each other, turning to prostitution to survive. Now, Dani is weighed down by an addiction she supports by selling sexual favours from her basement suite. Dani hates Liam, too, with his judgmental looks and expectations, and would like nothing more for him to disappear from Marla’s life.

Marla is managing both relationships as best she can when two things happen: one, she gets pregnant, and two, her deaf brother, Gavin, returns from out east after years away. Gavin communicates through a combination of lip-reading, signing, and writing in a notebook – which means he often misses the context and intent of a conversation. He is a keen observer, a preacher of clean living and honesty. He writes his most secret thoughts in his journal, the cover of which bears the inspiration for the title of the novel.

Spruit has chosen to make Marla and Gavin narrators, each alternating a section to tell the story as only they can – Marla, who hangs her emotions and needs out for everyone to see, and Gavin, who is introverted and silent, keeps everything locked up, closed inside his Handbook.

Now pregnant, Marla’s well-intentioned good-heartedness is still derailed by her inability to hold onto her thoughts long enough to follow through on what needs to be done, and what needs to be done is “what’s best.” Best for her baby, but also best for her. Marla holds an image in her mind of what being a good mother means. She and Liam will be the loving, safe family that she herself never had. They will provide a home, and sanctuary.

Then Marla and Liam break up and Marla is set adrift. Gavin and Dani collide in a violent confrontation that changes everything.

Set against the backdrop of the oncoming Calgary flood, each character begins to flounder under the expectations and limitations they face. Lies are told and compounded, people are hurt, and boundaries erode until the ties that connect all these disparate, desperate lives together snap under. Rising flood waters amplify the increasingly difficult and complicated choices Marla must make for her baby. Liam has left her, her brother is having a breakdown, and her drug-addicted best friend is jealous and acting out. Marla struggles to simplify choices and relationships, to distill them down to what’s best.

When the flood comes, each character is pushed to his or her limits – the baby arrives, along with the most heartbreaking choice a new mother can make. Should she keep the baby? Marla must rely on her optimism and faith to make the best decision she can for her child.

A Handbook for Beautiful people is sad, yet filled with grace and forgiveness. The characters are funny, kind and, at times all too human and enchantingly infuriating. They are always looking to be better, to try harder and to reach higher in spite of the difficult circumstances they face.

In A Handbook for Beautiful People, Jennifer Spruit has written a vibrant, original story that, in the end, leaves the reader more aware of and more empathetic to those who struggle to live and thrive on the margins of society.

Kim McCullough is a writer and teacher from Calgary, AB. She is the author of the novel Clearwater. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals including The New Quarterly, Room, FreeFall Magazine, and Grain. Kim is currently working on a collection of essays about education.

The post Review of Jennifer Spruit’s “A Handbook for Beautiful People.” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

by Sarah Butson

An Honest Woman
by JoAnn McCaig
Thistledown Press (2019)
ISBN 978-1-77187-178-5

JoAnn McCaig’s second novel, An Honest Woman, is not your average read. If you are looking for a linear story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, you won’t be finding it in this beautifully-crafted piece of metafiction. Its structure is layered like an onion and tells several stories about a middle- aged single mother writer with an erotic fantasy who writes about a middle-aged single mother who writes erotic fantasy about a middle-aged single mother writer. But wait. There is so much more. 

I knew nothing about metafiction when I began to read. Partway through I got the gist of it. Brilliant, I thought, to write with the insertion of self as author inside the creation of characters’ personas and circumstances, commenting on the actual process of story-writing. Quite aside from enjoying the read, that for me was exciting new learning.

The onion layering was also a new experience in my reading fiction. I needed to flip a few times back and forth between the Table of Contents at the beginning, and the Cast and, for those readers more inclined to arty visuals, the clever (and hilarious) A Sort of Map on the back pages that clarify interrelatedness and the various narrators’ fantasies. If you
are confused, each narrator reminds you to go back and take a look. And there are plenty of thoughtfully-placed footnotes and asides to guide us, so warmly addressed by the narrators as, Dear Readers. 

But beyond the meticulous crafting of structure and my “aha moment” of getting it, I realized that I had slipped effortlessly into the world of fantasy, seduced as I was by McCaig’s gorgeous wordsmithery: “I sleep late—bless this lake and its lush silence—” (19) and 

Dusk deepens, darkens, and the swallows give way to the flutter of bats, hunting mosquitoes, …. I shift in my chair, … let my legs relax, knees out. And something begins to happen. I let go, feel the muscles stretch and become … receptive, somehow. … The lap of water on the shoreline. Birds call, the horses amble down to the bay for an evening drink. Soon, the owls. (41) 

Such poetic imagery makes it easy to negotiate the vigorous structural gymnastics. 

The novel’s language is also pithy and understated … “And I didn’t come on to him at all either, not really. Well, I touched him, used his name, made some comments (okay guarded ones) to the effect that I thought he was cool. But no. I was way too cautious. I wish I could have told him how beautiful he is” (59). The writing is honest, funny, and heart- wrenching. 

Another reason I was smitten with An Honest Woman is that McCaig’s writing reveals a keen awareness about the interiority of women ‘of a certain age’, the inner machinations of erotic fantasy, and the struggle with Victorian vestiges of western, post-Freudian, postmodern, post-second-wave-feminist morality about contemporary sexual fantasy. On page 202 for example, a famous Canadian literati chastises the narrator, Janet Mair, for writing a scene involving consensual bondage: “I would never, ever, use the abuse of sexual power as a literary device” (202). Mair, anticipating the moral disapproval behind the reprimand, calmly replies, “… millions of women fantasize about extreme sexual power and domination. Different sides of the same coin, don’t you think?” (203). A few passages later, Mair responds to a fifties-something woman’s characterization of her own sexual fantasy as her ‘Inner Beloved’ with knee-smacking wit: “… fuck my inner beloved. I just wanna get laid” (215). 

Unlike the female characters of Anais Nin, written almost 100 years ago, I felt deeply invested in each of An Honest Woman’s female narrators, their projections and intricate mental meanderings. In a passage I found both liberating and bittersweet, a male professor leers and comments that Morag (in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners) is “a very lusty woman” (221). And as Mair walks away, she thinks, “No. No, he’s wrong, that’s not it at all, She’s not lusty. She’s normal. It’s what I’ve always loved about her. The frankness of her desire” (221). Indeed, an honest woman. 

Penned by McCaig’s respective narrators as fiction with a following of peri-menopausal women, the novel’s audience ought to extend farther and be read by a younger crowd. Banished for centuries to the sexual dust bin, women at the intersection of fertility and waning of hormones are not likely to write, let alone admit to, erotic stuff. After all, “What could be more repulsive, more absurd, than a horny old woman?” (213) Ouch. Today, sadly, still true. But listen up, youthful reader, embedded in these pages are inspiring messages about what awaits as you approach the middle years and beyond. You’ll find them freeing and empowering if you shoo away those internal and external morality police, whatever gender they may be. In spite of this culture’s collective fear of aging, our bodies do not betray us. Writing truth about our changing selves and how we interpret our sexual yearning and fantasy is an act of courage. 

Overall, I love a damn good piece of work that provokes me to learn about new ways of writing and reading something as complex as metafiction. And all the more if it’s full of ribald wit, sex, interiority, and the ability to laugh at and with oneself. You, dear reader, will care about McCaig’s struggling characters. Her ability to write them with an eye for detail and introspection is beyond par. Read it. You’ll see. 

Sarah Butson is living her dream in her mountain home west of Calgary. When she’s not communing with the trees and moose, she’s skiing and even writing. This is her first book review.

The post Review of JoAnn McCaig’s “An Honest Woman” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

by Skylar Kay

Corridor Nine
by Sophie Stocking
Thistledown Press (2019)
ISBN 9781771871815

Sophie Stocking’s Corridor Nine is a story of life, death, family, and rebirth. To begin, the novel places a reader in a disorienting space. Questions I asked myself included: where am I? What are these people? Why does this three-year old’s body (Fabian) have a large penis, and why do I have to imagine this? The structure of the novel does not immediately alleviate the confusion, as two storylines weave and intersect throughout. The story of Bernie is grounded in reality—recognizable to any Calgarian especially—while the other plotline follows the afterlife of her father, Fabian. These two storylines twirl around one another to slowly reveal more and more about the past, and the characters themselves in a well-orchestrated manner. However, due to the jumps from scene to scene and place to place, dialogue can be confusing, as exemplified on page 173 where there are several lines of dialogue before it becomes clear that Bernie is talking to her husband.

I was wary at first of the narrator introducing all four of Bernie’s children, but the four of them are all well-developed and serve a purpose in the story, especially the seemingly moody and distant teenager, Eben, and the too-eager-to-be-an-adult, Lola. One character that left me wanting more development was Bernie’s husband, Peter. Although he is a fairly major part of several scenes and the novel as a whole, his main function seems to be a voice of exposition for Bernie, often talking about her past with her father and children. However, I felt Peter as a character himself was distilled to someone who is bad at making food for the kids and worked a lot—nothing more and nothing less. I also would have liked to see more of Bernie’s artistry. The novel mentions her studio and some artistic endeavors throughout the novel, but it is not until the very end that we see Bernie produce art in detail. Even mentioning art she did that the family had around the house would have satisfied, but the lack just left me wanting more. Other than that, Bernie is a fun character to follow, and I was always rooting for her.

The storyline that follows Bernie is very much grounded in Calgary. Road names such as Crowchild and Shaganappi helped me imagine the scenes vividly. Even the weather was very Calgarian, as the narrator describes how the weather would “feel like summer” by midday on one page, only to have the year’s first snowfall come nine pages later. As someone who has lived in Calgary their whole life, this was not too distracting for me, but even I have a note or two in a couple margins where I ask: “what season is it?” The weather and place names would be familiar for people in Calgary, and it would help draw in that readership. I am unsure how these factors of setting would affect someone who is not familiar with the city and its rhythms, however, and I fear they may be alienating.

Overall, the book was quite an enjoyable read. The seriousness of Fabian’s relationship with Bernie, as well as his death, is paired nicely with some well-timed humour to ground the reader in something less grim. Bernie’s life as a wife and mother are also engaging, and while she gets a tad manic and stressed at times (perhaps ‘a tad’ is an understatement), she is always relatable, and the humour of certain scenes helped me to stay interested, involved, and invested in her story.

Skylar Kay is a recent Mount Royal graduate with a degree in English. She is interested in haiku and plans to pursue an M.A in Japanese Literature. She is a prose editor for FreeFall Magazine.

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