TEEN TALE NAVIGATES SURVIVOR GUILT
In Beverly Brenna’s latest young adult novel, Fox Magic (Red Deer Press, $11.95), life for three young teen girls in a small Saskatchewan town had become “just a duplicate day in a long straight line of days, standing like dominoes, waiting until one of them falls and knocks down the others.” That’s why the sun hesitates on the horizon — who wants to go into that day? So, without much life experience they came “to the conclusion that life in this town was impossible.”
They make a suicide pact, gather in the forest in their best clothes, eat their favourite snacks, then Chance, the protagonist of this story and with a name meant for metaphor, bolts and runs. The other two girls go ahead with their design and Chance is the survivor. She spends the first part of this short novel calling herself a chicken, convinced she doesn’t deserve to live. Her friends had the guts to go through with it; why not her?
And there’s plenty of motivation. Her parents had recently split and are now back together — on a knife edge — for her sake. And there’s no shortage of encouragers at school, what with verbal threats in the hallway and bullying notes stuffed daily into her desk. She doesn’t want to eat, go to school or see her counsellor. No kidding.
With help from a father who’s just winging it the best he can, and some solid encouragement from a fox she encounters — with a name that’s too good to spoil here — Chance works at believing in herself again. Brenna, who has a great deal of experience with young protagonists who can use all the help they can get, finds believable ways of re-integrating Chance into her own life, and, importantly, showing her that being a young teenager is hard for everyone, not just the ones who think they got a bad deal.
The black and white illustrations by Miriam Korner have a lurid, almost grotesque, feel to them, mirroring the psychology of a self-doomed young teenager. They fit the story perfectly.
Speaking of doom, Regina writer Marlis Wesseler is back on the stands with a new novel, The Last Chance Ladies’ Book Club (Signature Editions, $16.95). The story takes place in a retirement/ nursing home called Pleasant Manor in a small town relatively handy to both Prince Albert and Saskatoon. Four women, principal among them Eleanor Sawchuck, have been reading books on the nature of evil.
One of the women’s daughters gets them a book written by a woman who suffered horrible abuse at the hands of her father, and then killed herself. Now that man, aged considerably since the book’s publication, is moving into the manor. The women are beside themselves about what, and how, to do anything. Do the police know? Was he ever charged? Should they confront him? Slip notes under his door? On top of that, a demented woman’s granddaughter whose mother is too sick with alcoholism to care much starts hanging
around the home. Could she be a target? Talk about a discussion on the nature of evil.
Wesseler doesn’t rush her story, watching the seasons and their flowers, calmly observing these women’s lives as they deal with encroaching mortality. In fact, readers could be forgiven for wondering if they’ve given up on their local abuser completely. But that’s really what the book’s about. From her almost insipid title to the dully pleasant name of the home, Wesseler constructs a story in which her characters lull themselves into a state of complacency about the evil right next door. Yes, they should do something, but what about cards at eight? And what can they do, anyway?
Then the child goes missing. Wesseler avoids easy answers, finding both the banal and the shocking in their little dose of evil. It’s a patient examination of how ordinary people respond to evil in their midst.
And since we’re struggling with how to deal with evil, we should take a master class with Sleuth: Gail Bowen on Writing Mysteries (U of R Press, $18.95), in which Regina’s doyen of the mystery novel takes us through some basic steps to writing said novel.
Much as some readers might be hoping for a magic formula to send them off to the holy grail of a great mystery, what Bowen has to say is pretty much what you’d expect of a hard-working author of 17 Joanne Kilbourn mysteries, retired English prof, wife, mother, and grandmother: writing — any writing — is hard work, and here are some practical tips to help you on your way.
She gives a list of novelist’s tools (theme, narrative perspective, etc.) and quotes a former professor who asks, “What do I hope to achieve with this piece of writing?” She talks of writing involving three distinct processes: prewriting, writing, and editing. Yes, you just sit and think, sometimes, or read, or get out and see the world. As Bowen says, none of the great encounters she’s had with other human beings — read, good material — came from being shut up in her office.
She also talks, valuably, of getting your facts straight — one mistake can turn off a reader — and of taking on social issues such as poverty, racism, child prostitution, and the like. Readers of her mysteries can attest to her commitment to these concerns. She talks about characterization, plot, style, all with plenty of quotations from other writers and many junkets into her own published mysteries. This is how I did it, is what she says. She even provides an email address for advice on how to get published.
There are no easy answers here, but plenty of practical advice and great suggestions.