Join us this afternoon from 3:00 – 5:00 pm Pacific time for this Virtual Launch.
I’ll be introducing one of my favourite gods during the Open Mic Event (starting around 4:15)
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A Yukon camping getaway in December with a Newfoundland dog and a wolf-dog tells you how much Casey and Eric need a break alone together. Eric Dalton is the Sheriff of Rockton, a Yukon town of two hundred rebellious refugees and Casey Duncan is the detective. There is one more law officer in this town, Sheriff Will Anders, who’s holding down the fort while his friends escape for two days. Literally. Rockton is a fort in the wilderness, complete with walls and gates. People have to apply to live in Rockton and everyone accepted is there escaping something life-threatening, be they perpetrator or victim or both.
Casey and Eric met in book one, cohabited in book two, and now, in book five, they’ve settled into a marriage. So, as couples do at this stage in their relationship, they’re contemplating what comes next. Children. However, Casey was beaten so badly by a gang of men when she was a teenager, she isn’t sure she can conceive or carry a baby to term. This obsession with parenthood and babies is a theme that gets triggered in the first scene and carries through to the end.
Eric has gone hunting with the wolf-dog and Casey wakes up alone in the woods. Well, alone except for Storm, her bouncy one-hundred-and-forty pound Newfoundland dog who is now sixteen months old and learning to track. Casey and Storm go to collect wood for the fire, and Casey hears something. A baby crying. Except there’s nothing anywhere but a heap of snow in the middle of the clearing. A trained homicide detective, Casey is immediately suspicious, then she begins to dig. What she uncovers is bizarre and heartbreaking: a murdered woman with an infant beneath her jacket clutched to her chest. The rest of the book is a chase to discover murderer and motive.
The baby is tiny, a month old at best—a winter baby—born in a time of hardship. She’s healthy though, despite being buried alive in the snow, freezing and dehydrated. Someone’s been nursing her, though not the dead woman, who Casey quickly discovers is a wildling with tattoos.
This story delves into life in the various communities outside Rockton, each with its own morals, rules, and cultures. Besides the folks who live in the First and Second Settlements, there are traders and tribes of hostiles roaming the woods. And as Casey pursues the killer, we meet representatives from all these communities.
Would you ever contemplate living alone in the woods? Some people do. Maryanne, a professor who was once Rockton’s biologist, left the town of two hundred to live with another woman and their partners in the woods: a doctor, a wilderness guide, an eco-builder, and a biologist. They had plans and hopes and wilderness experience until the hostiles attacked, killed the men, and took the women.
Maryanne, who Casey meets and brings back to Rockton, explains that the hostiles also have rules. Sex must be consensual and women choose partners as necessary protectors. Women are not allowed to bear children, so if they get pregnant, it’s terminated. Rape is forbidden. The female shaman conducts rituals and makes the teas: two types … one that creates a state of “tranquil unreality” and another for special occasions that ramps everyone up into a “wild, primal frenzy.”
A complexity of this story is that Eric and his brother Jacob were born to settlers. When his parents left him alone to go trading, Sheriff Dalton and his wife took him to Rockton and “adopted” him without his parents’ consent. Eric’s background naturally affects the way he lives. He was too young to remember but still wonders about his real parents.
Much crime fiction is plot-driven—follow the clues, solve the murder—but in this book more than in her other four novels, Armstrong balances plot and character development. Casey grows with every encounter and reveals more of her hidden personality. Throughout the book, we are privy to several different types of relationships. People come to the Yukon to escape the south but bring their problems and prejudices with them.
As usual, Kelley Armstrong delivers a tense, suspenseful mystery, with her characteristically clean, tight prose. With so many eccentric suspects, Casey is kept guessing and second-guessing right until the big reveal. In the end, Casey and Eric get their quiet moment alone, and it’s time to contemplate love and families and what they want next. This series could go on forever. Let’s hope it does.
As reviewed in The Ottawa of Books, April 2020
As I was working on my writing course this afternoon, I came across this letter I wrote to my mom on Valentine’s Day 2003. She wasn’t well. Dementia and strokes had taken their toll and I hoped to trigger good memories for her. In doing so, I triggered my own.
Though I end the letter by promising to come and see her that summer, it didn’t happen. She passed over on May 1, 2003, Beltaine, and so this ended up being a kind of farewell.
I do hope someone read it to her. We loved the same things, her and I. I hope she closed her eyes and traveled with me among the trees and flowers and bygone seasons. I hope for a moment she relived the beauteous times of her life on our farm in Pickering.
My Dearest Mom:
It is St. Valentine’s Day. My daughter is almost twenty, and you are in your ninetieth year. I float somewhere in between, still feeling like a young woman, but when I look into the department store mirror I see someone unrecognizable. I wonder if I will ever feel my age. This is a kind of limbo. I am beyond childbearing, yet I often feel like a child. And, of course, I am. I am your child and will always be. I find you in a country garden, in a warm jar of preserved peaches, in a well-worn novel, in a nonsense rhyme, and a giggle.
Do you know that I remember all the trees and flowers from our farm? On the roadside, a tangle of tiger lilies swelled each spring, and beside them hovered a chokecherry bush. Dixie Road was hidden by a hedge of cedars that grew into an impenetrable wooden wall over the years. At the front door snug against the blue cement steps was your rockery—a murmuring mass of blooms: purply blue delphiniums, giant hot pink peonies swarming with ants, crimson gladiolas, and fuzzy, buttery irises towered over the blossoming ground creepers.
In the backyard, a weeping willow tickled my rosy cheeks, the arm of an old apple tree held my makeshift steel trapeze, and Manitoba maples multiplied each year when the wind unleashed their keys. It was a topsy-turvy world, as I swung on my trapeze hanging by my knees, and sometimes by my ankles. Beside my playhouse and the old outhouse, the lilac garden marked the border into the vegetable fields. The north side was a hubbub of rhubarb, and the south side a soft plethora of yellow primroses, and deep blue Sweet William. I remember them all. Do you?
The orchard was a place to lie and drift in the misty veils of clouds that shifted shapes and whispered words. I wrote poems there, beneath the old apricot tree where a Baltimore oriole had been seduced by the coral blossoms and built a silken nest that swayed like a stocking from its branches. A tiny cherry tree clung to life amidst several pear trees and my favourite apples, a half snow-half something that I’ve never been able to find again.
Was spring your favourite season as it was mine? The first shoots burst through the mud and snow, creeks swelled their banks and called to me and my rubber boots. Bees raced to pollinate the blossoms like eager young boys darting this way and that throughout the gardens. Purple violets and lily of the valley burst through the emerald grass and all the earth awoke.
Summer was sewn up by rows of potatoes, peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, and carrots all demanding attention. A long row of raspberries enticed Bootsie who loved to nibble them off the branches. And what you did with that harvest.
One wall in the damp stony cellar was lined with shelves of preserves: jars of pinky red tomatoes, bright orange peaches, green chunky relishes, bread and butter pickles. How did you ever manage? And then it was pear-picking time and ladders were set up in the orchard so baskets of succulent green pears could be sent off to Richardson’s IGA in Pickering Village. It was a miraculous place to grow up, akin to the earth, listening to the winds, the insects, the birds, the trees and flowers. It lives in my memory. Can you remember it too?
Now there must be snow on the ground in Pickering, crusting the earth, and ice-encased branches tapping against the windows begging for release. I hated winter. I hated the cold, the trudging, the attempts at tobogganing in the back fields and skating at William’s pond by myself. I tried to like it. But I hated it. My frozen toes, numb in damp snow boots, would itch like crazy when I finally warmed them. The upper tips of my ears threatened to break off, and they too would itch when they finally thawed. The only things I really loved were the gigantic icicles that clung from roof corners, and the feathery paintings by Jack Frost on our living room windows. I hibernated, like the rest of the earth’s creatures, and came alive again in spring.
Winter was the reason I moved to B.C. Here, there is only a long, long autumn followed by a long, long spring. Here I am awake all year long, hiking in the rainforest and along the ocean. Here I do not freeze and itch for months at a time.
I don’t miss Ontario, but I do miss you, Mom. And I wish that I could be with you, especially now that you’re not well. You must remember to eat and drink as much as you can. Please. Water is our life force. So you must drink even when you don’t feel like it.
And in the summer I will come. I promise.
I love you … now and forever. Wendy
This novel is my literary pick for 2019. I rarely buy fiction, especially hardcover novels, but this one jumped off the shelf at my local Indie bookstore, and when a book claims you like that, you have to take it home. Besides, the black, silver and hot pink cover had me spellbound. I read it twice, cover to cover, back to back. First, to find out what happens to our feisty Métis hero, Joan of Arcand, and then again to savour the poetic brilliance of Dimaline’s writing.
“If her heart was a song, someone smashed the bass drum and pulled all the strings off the guitar. Notes fell like hail, plinking into the soft basket of her guts.” This is Joan when she sees her lost husband, Victor Boucher, sitting in an old green chair on the stage at a revivalist tent in a Walmart parking lot in Orillia, Ontario. She’s been searching for him for eleven months and six days—since they had words and he stalked off into the woods. Only this man wearing Victor’s skin and speaking with Victor’s voice isn’t Victor. He’s Reverend Eugene Wolff.
Then Joan meets Thomas Heiser. In his blue suit with his gold watch, gold eyes, and too-white skin, Heiser is a resource development specialist who runs the Ministry of the New Redemption. Like those who’ve come before him, Heiser is intent on taking coveted land from the First People by using the mission system. If the resource companies can convert the traditional people, it’s so much easier to take their lands, build a pipeline, dig a mine. Somehow, this creepy stalker, in his daffodil-yellow tie, has stolen Victor, memories and all, and is using him as a frontman to undermine his own people.
Then the unthinkable happens. As in “Little Red Riding Hood” Joan’s grandmother, Mere, is killed by a wolfish creature, a rogarou.
At night, the rogarou wanders the roads. He is the threat mothers use to keep their children in line. To warn their girls to stay home. To keep their boys on the right path. Pronounced in Michif as rogarou, it’s derived from the French loup garou. Wolf Man. “A dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig.” A shape-shifting monster, the rogarou comes to hunt, though he’s not quite the European werewolf. For one thing, you don’t become a rogarou simply because you get bit. It’s far more complex than that. And this wolf can dance.
As genres go, Empire of Wild could be labelled urban fantasy. It fulfills expectations. It’s contemporary, thrilling, sexy, mysterious, mythical. But I prefer the term mythic fiction. Like Joan of Arc, our Joan is a tenacious warrior of French Catholic descent, but it is her Métis Elders, Mere and Ajean, who steep her in medicine.
Carrying a ground-up salt bone for protection, Joan ventures into the Empire of Wild to slay the rogarou who’s killed Mere. And she’s determined to reclaim her husband from the creature.
Joan’s sidekick and protector is her chubby, bespectacled, twelve-year-old nephew, Zeus. This young sweetheart believes his Aunt Joan is his soulmate because he makes her happy. Zeus is always there for Joan even as she’s sponging her grandmother’s blood off the rocks. And when she leaves Mere’s trailer taking only a deck of playing cards tied with red ribbon, a bundle of sage, and her Swiss Army knife, Zeus joins Joan in her mission to bring Victor home.
Like her hero, Cherie Dimaline is brave and fearless, pouring history, politics, and religion into her cauldron, then stirring with a branch of magic realism and terror. This is an Indigenous story told by an Indigenous storyteller. Close relationships bonded by blood, work, and land. Family. Sweetgrass. Tobacco smoke. Cherie Dimaline is from the Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario where this story is set. It’s evident in the bones, pores, and flesh of the landscape, and in the wildly beating hearts of the people whose territory the rogarou stalks.
After a jaw-clenching climax full of surprises, we’re left with a non-traditional but hopeful epilogue. You’ll have to read it to find out what that means. Mind: you may never go out in the woods again.
As reviewed in The Ottawa Review of Books, February 2020
If you think there are no great Canadian authors, explore past editions.