23. Mennonites Don't Dance by Darcie Friesen Hossack

Hossack describes the Mennonite characters and world in great detail but does not focus on the interplay between the Mennonite community and the secular community.  I think this separation serves to present the characters as people first and Mennonite second.  It allows the reader to connect more with the characters as individuals rather than as a community of people.  I think this makes it easier to identify with them and not make assumptions based on what we know or think we know about the Mennonite community.  For myself, while reading, I quite often forgot that this was a specific group of people and most often saw them as families with issues rather than as a collection of people from a specific background.

The church and discussions of faith are often noticeably absent from Hossack’s stories.  This was quite different from what I expected when reading stories about Mennonite culture.  Before reading the stories I had thought I would actually become immersed in the culture via the book.  But that expectation was quickly forgotten as I began reading.

I enjoyed reading this book.  The first few stories were favourites, but I am not sure if the latter ones were not as appealing because of the sadness  throughout the book or if, had I not read them all in one sitting, if others would have been as enjoyable as well.  My favourites were Ashes and Luna. Ashes: A beautiful story of the exquisite pain found in life and the healing connections common ground can bring to people. Luna: The story showed the power words have, their ability to grow slowly and silently inside a person from childhood to adulthood.  How those word, if the poisoning kind, can one day invade conscious thought and wreak havoc on one's life.  I choose to view the removal of the moth at the end of the story as a different sort of chrysalis - one where Jonah is able to transform from the negativity gifted by his father to the type of man, husband and father he dreamed of being.

Overall it was refreshing, though often painful, to see the truth of life in these stories, uncluttered by material things and the noise of modern culture.  The stories showed what it was to be striped bare toe  the essence of what it is to be human, and that we are not very different from each other.  I saw distant echoes of  my own life in these stories.  Sometimes it was the heartbreak or not getting that toy you so desperately wanted, other times the tightening in the chest when you realize the harsh connection  of the  sweet animal in front of you to the dinner you had last night, and still other times that desperate need to leave, travel, explore and experience something, anything but instead must remain where you are.  Each story was a smooth read, crisp and clean.

17. Shelter by Frances Greenslade

                                                                              

The story of two sisters, Maggie and Jenny, and their quest to find out what happened to their mother who left them to billet in Williams Lake, a small town in British Columbia, and never came back. Set in the 1960s and 70s in the wilds of the Chilcotin, where it's still possible to lose yourself, the novel explores the attachment we have to our mothers, and the expectation we hold that they will always be our mothers, and nothing more.                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                             

I picked up this Canadian book as part of the Evergreen program.  I am glad it was nominated because I would not have given it a second glance otherwise.  That would have been my loss.  Frances Greenslade has delivered a poignant and touching story of loss, survival and family.

Excerpt:

Jenny was the one who asked me to write all this down. She wanted me to sort it for her, string it out, bead by bead, an official story, like a rosary she could repeat and count on. But I started writing it for her, too. For Mom, or Irene as other people would call her, since she abandoned a long time ago whatever “Mom” once meant to her.            
Even now there was no stopping the guilt that rose up when we thought of her. We did not try to look for our mother. She was gone, like a cat who goes out the back door one night and doesn’t return, and you don’t know if a coyote got her or a hawk or if she sickened somewhere and couldn’t make it home. We let time pass, we waited, trusting her, because she had always been the best of mothers. She’s the mother, that’s what we said to each other, or we did in the beginning. I don’t know who started it.
That’s not true. It was me. Jenny said, “We should look for her.” I said, “She’s the mother.” When I said it, I didn’t know the power those few words would take on in our lives. They had the sound of truth, loaded and untouchable. But they became an anchor that dragged us back from our most honest impulses.
We waited for her to come to get us and she never did.
There was no sign that this would happen. I know people always look for signs. That way they can say, we’re not the type of people things like that happen to, as if we were, as if we should have seen it coming. But there were no signs. Nothing except my worry, which I think I was born with, if you can be born a worrier—Jenny thinks you can.

I like that this book has it's own soundtrack.  It's compiled of songs that I grew up with and as I read Shelter, they brought the story closer to my being.  Here is the Shelter "soundtrack" listed by the author:

Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond

I Feel the Earth Move by Carole King

I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher

Goodnight Irene by Leadbelly

I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee by Conway Twitty

Crocodile Rock by Elton John

Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin

Heartaches By the Number by Ray Price

Dreamer by Supertramp

Bloody Well Right by Supertramp

Break on Through to the Other Side by The Doors

White Room by Cream

Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree by Tony Orlando and Dawn

A Horse with No Name by America

I'll Tell Me Ma (traditional)

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra (An Irish Lullaby) by Bing Crosby

I've Been Everywhere by Hank Snow

SPOILERS AHEAD ...

Discussion question: What do you think made Irene leave? What emotion ruled her actions? Do you think she planned to return?
I think that Irene would have returned to the girls.  Whether or not she would have stayed, or taken them with her I don't really know.  
I think her leaving occurred because she was lost to herself at that point and unsure of what would happen.  She almost returned to herself at sixteen, pregnant by Emil and unsure of how she and the child would survive.  I wonder if she was attempting a do-over, a chance to try again with Emil and have it turn out better.   Lost as she was emotionally, I can see how trying to explain her circumstance and relationship with Emil to her daughters could be beyond her ability at the time.
I can't help but wonder if Irene leaving the girls with the Edwards felt more like intended abandonment because of the time that passed before Maggie discovered what happened to her.  
I do wonder if she ever let Emil know he had a daughter from their first relationship.  I can't imagine him not at least looking her up, seeking out that connection, after losing Irene and the baby.  Then again, with a small town like they were in, I wonder if he ever came back to the boat and heard of Jenny and that Irene had married.  Had he known all along that Jenny was his?  If so, did he stay away because Patrick was now her father?

16. Under the Afghan Sun by Mellissa Fung

In October 2008, Mellissa Fung, a reporter for CBC’s The National, was leaving a refugee camp outside of Kabul when she was kidnapped by armed men. She was forced to hike for several hours through the mountains until they reached a village; there, the kidnappers pushed her towards a hole in the ground. “No,” she said. “I am not going down there.”

For more than a month, Fung lived in that hole, which was barely tall enough to stand up in, nursing her injuries, praying and writing in a notebook. Under an Afghan Sky is the gripping tale of Fung’s days in captivity, surviving on cookies and juice, from the “grab” to her eventual release.

I read this book without having any background on the story or the author.   I am glad I did, as I was able to  - as much as a book will allow -take this journey with her.

I understood why she would be writing to specific people in her journal as well as keeping a diary during her detainment but was surprised to find I was eager to read more of the notes Paul was writing to her as well.   It was a great detail to have those brief glimpses into what was happening to him and her friends and family as they waited for news and for the negotiations to continue.  For  me, it punctuated her isolation from all that she knew.  As a reader I was grabbing fast to Paul's updates and worry for Melissa and at the same time realizing how hungry she was for that same contact.

I found the beginning and end of this memoir riveting and tense.  The middle was long, sometimes boring and I quickly grew impatient with it.  For this story, I think that worked wonderfully as it brought the reader into the experience of Melissa and the long, long wait she experienced.  I think she did a good job of describing the events , the feeling that time had stalled, and her constant attempts to connect with her captors.  That connection is so important as it was the only thing she really had any amount of control over and it was the one thing she could do to humanize herself to her captors.  It reminded me of my criminology classes and the strategy of making captors see their victims as humans, individuals and not as symbols of what they hate as it is much more difficult to harm or kill someone whom you see as a person.  Her  journaling of Canadian experiences such as the Canuks games, the Terry Fox run and the election achieved a similar effect for me as a reader.  These topics and others allowed me to connect with her as the protagonist and care more about her story.

Melissa's descriptions of her captors followed her emotional journey...factual and straightforward at the beginning, then empathetic and inquisitive as she gently manoeuvred herself into their daily lives, and finally reflective and understanding of their world.

I am not sure if it is Melissa's personality, reporter training  or her specific experience, but I found her approach in the book of providing relevant details and conveying the fear, stress and frustrations she felt to be very matter of fact.  I think I expected a bit more intensity of emotion in the story, but then again, that could also have been a survival tactic.  Don't break down - don't appear weak - don't give them any reason to hurt you.  Overall, I was impressed with her handling of the ordeal.  I would have liked a paragraph or two about how her friends and family fared and about her return to Canada after she was released.  How did the experience affect her shortly after gaining freedom?  How is she now?  The lack of that distanced her again from me.  Perhaps it has more to do with maintaining her standing as an objective journalist or want for privacy...but she did choose to write this memoir and it felt unfinished to me.



Here is a interview with author Melissa Fung.

15. The Accident by Barclay Linwood

It’s the new normal at the Garber household in Connecticut: Glen, a contractor, has seen his business shaken by the housing crisis, and now his wife, Sheila, is taking a business course at night to increase her chances of landing a good-paying job.
But she should have been home by now.
Waiting for Sheila’s return, with their eight-year-old daughter sleeping soundly, Glen soon finds his worst fears confirmed: Sheila and two others have been killed in a car accident. Adding to the tragedy, the police claim Sheila was responsible.
Glen knows it’s impossible; he knew his wife and she would never do such a thing. When he investigates, Glen begins to uncover layers of lawlessness beneath the placid surface of their suburb, secret after dangerous secret behind the closed doors.
Propelled into a vortex of corruption and illegal activity, pursued by mysterious killers, and confronted by threats from neighbors he thought he knew, Glen must take his own desperate measures and go to terrifying new places in himself to avenge his wife and protect his child.

Even now I can't decide if I like this novel or not.  It definitely had a lot of potential, but I think the neat ending on all fronts took away from the appeal overall.  I read somewhere that this was like an episode of Desperate Housewives in regards to all the dealings between the neighbours.  It was that tone in the book that felt "off" to me especially given the exciting prologue and the first page where I was initially hooked with Glen saying, "If I'd known this was our last morning, I'd have rolled over in bed and held her. But of course, if it had been possible to know something like that--if I could have somehow seen into the future--I wouldn't have let go. And then things would have been different." (The Accident by Linwood Barclay)

The character that I found the most compelling was that of Sheila. Glen's character seemed a bit flat to me and really only seemed to have "life" when he was remembering conversations with his wife. Glen's character, to  me, seemed to be barely more than a vehicle to for the reader to follow and discover the story.  It was his memory of his late wife, his perceptions of the woman she was, her attitude towards others and her ability to cut to the chase, often with a wry humour that actually compelled me through the story.  Without her presence, I'm not sure that I would have really cared what happened to the other characters, even Kelly.  I wanted her to be an innocent party in the accident and I wanted to know that Glen's perception of her before the crash was accurate. With every discovery of her secret life, I hoped that she was ignorant of what was really going on. I rally enjoyed reading about their relationship and appreciated that it was not divulged all at once in some long narrative, but rather parcelled out in bits throughout the novel almost as though that was as much as Glen could bear to share about her at a time.

I still had some problems with how Sheila was written though.  If I recall correctly, she had studied some law and was presented as an intelligent, honest woman. While Glen seemed to think his wife was innocent  though misguided, I can't help but feel that she was much more aware of what she was doing.  I find it hard to believe that a relatively intelligent woman would not have seriously questioned the quality and liability risks of selling prescription medications out the back door before getting involved.  Had she started with selling purses or some other knock-off I would have found it more believable.  I also have to wonder if the story would have seemed more believable if she had, in fact, made a terrible decision and been responsible for the accident. At the end, all the plot points were wrapped up a little to neatly for me to really buy into it.

I didn't like how Sally ended up in the last chapters.  I felt the change from the sweet, helpful, almost family version to the heartless killer she was revealed as was not bridged well.  Even if her absence at Sheila's funeral had been played up a bit there may have been a hint of the difference in those personalities.  As it was written, I felt it came suddenly out of left field. I would have found it more believable if she had killed Theo in self defence or was truly distraught over the death of her father.

I did like the character of Fiona.  Straight shooting and unapologetic, I immediately wondered what had happened in her life to make her act that way.  She couldn't be all bad if she adored her granddaughter as she did. The tiny hope of redemption for the villains in the family is always fun in a book.   Her character was a nice contrast to Glen's and while her behaviour was often abhorrent, it had a strength and decisiveness I found lacking elsewhere in the book.

 I enjoyed the novel while I was reading it but found, when finished, I was rather unsatisfied with the episodic TV ending --everything wrapped up too nice and neat and explained.