Review of Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles

Simon the Fiddler
by

Paulette Jiles 

A fictional exploration of the upheaval in lives and society right after the American Civil War in Texas after a disastrous and unnecessary battle in the last days of it, perpetrated on battle-weary soldiers by a glory-seeking officer. Also a love story wherein dispossessed young people triumph over poverty, indentured servitude, an in-house predator, not to mention much time and distance spent apart. Bonus, this is a tribute to musicians and the authenticity of the tunes they played and the instruments they had on hand is a treat to behold. It begs for a soundtrack. An audio recording of this book would be a huge hit!

A “victory” aka end of hostilities banquet is organized after the quick and bloody battle, and former soldiers known or suspected of being musicians are rounded up to form a 'scratch band' from both sides of the conflict. They’ve been wandering around since the battle, trying not to starve or bleed to death or catch yellow fever or be asked for their discharge papers by the Union soldiers. One such soldier is a slight youth known as Simon the Fiddler, already an accomplished musician whose biggest concern is the safety of his violin in its case. Simon has a temper and a chip on his shoulder because his father’s whereabouts are unknown and parentage in that society is a major concern. “Who are your people?” meaning what sort of upstanding citizens or worthless batch of landless ne’er-do-wells do you hail from? Simon wants land and to this end he plans to save the money he can make playing music. To this he has added winning the hand of Doris Aherne, the Irish indentured servant of the vainglorious and predatory officer who caused this last unnecessary battle. Simon is a goal-oriented fellow, you might say, an officially fatherless and desperate young man with a mighty will to succeed.

Here, as always within the novels written by award-winning writer Paulette Jiles, are truly marvelous characters, depicted in writing so engaging, so embedded in that particular time and place, another masterful combination of eye and ear and language. The descriptions of the odours alone are so apt you will walk the resinous rough-lumbered docks of Galveston and avoid the pungent fellows being tossed out of the bars in Houston. Spanish music and food and language mix with new world English alike. We can feel the desperation as these starving musicians scrabble to find more work and to find the doctor “on his exhausted horse” with pain-killers to ease their afflicted friend’s painful departure. The dialogue and the action are laced with deadpan humour as in the early example where Simon is hidden from army conscripts in an ice-house, covered with sawdust and left to ‘chill’ for hours.

The plot roars and simmers with yearning and menace. The chapter with the musicians journeying out to a notorious bandit’s family wedding is a nail-biter because the musicians know they could end up being what we’d call collateral damage should hostilities break out but Simon wants the lucrative pay promised to them. Meanwhile Doris, his beloved, on whom he has fixed his hopes for matrimony, is cleverly using the small arsenal of weapons available to her to fend off the predatory officer. The lot of indentured servants is only one step away from actual slavery and not nearly as much is written about it. They are at the mercy of a family and Doris is not placed with a happy family. The modern-day parallel would be nannies, hoping for permanent citizenship. The only time Doris can leave this bleak house is to accompany her only friend to the market to shop for food and to go to houses to teach piano lessons or accompany travelling musicians for a concert. I think you can see where this might lead…

A rip-roaring historical romance written by a brilliant storyteller and apparently a veteran penny whistle player in a ‘browngrass band’ in Texas!

Review of Sea Trial: Sailing After My Father by Brian Harvey

Review of Sea Trial: Sailing After My Father by Brian Harvey

This is my choice for Father's Day this year, the perfect gift for a lighthouse keeper who loves boats, also the former owner of a sailboat, who appreciates fine writing, shares a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour with the author and whose own father was a lawyer. It's also going into the birthday stack for our son, who has sailed the VanIsle Race, the circumnavigation of Vancouver Island twice on Icon, and who worked as a sail-maker and boat rigger for seven years. He also raced sailboats, mono and double-hulls, in Canada, Europe and the US, before getting his mechanical engineering degree to add to his diploma and has now secured his dream job with a naval architect! So if doctors, lawyers, engine mechanics, sports or commercial fishing experience and sailboats figure large in your life, consider this father and son gift recommendation.

This is not to say the book, which is so well-written it was nominated for Canada's Governor-General's Award for non-fiction in 2019, is an adventurous larky sort of boat story. Far from it. It is a heart-breaker for those many sons who grew up with perfectionist, proud, fiercely intelligent fathers, the kind of fellow who thinks he's naturally topnotch at everything else in life, like sailing, because he's a neurosurgeon. Relationships come second to patients. Nurses are told what to do. Truth and justice will prevail in a legal suit which is delivered to the neurosurgeon's door ten years after he retired...and this is the legal case which the author is reading, in alternating chapters as he sails a boat called Vera around Vancouver Island with his long-suffering (there is no other kind of wife for a sailor, so perhaps I'm hearing the author's voice in my head, chiding me for being redundant) but feisty and armed with as much navigational knowledge as her husband. He seems to make the final decisions, based on "sailing all his life", about tackling potential horror shows like Dodds Narrows and the Nawhitti Bar and rounding Cape Scott and the much-feared Brooks Peninsula, not to mention the shoaling waters off Estevan Point. Thankfully, there is much love and respect for the patience and skill and hard work shared by the couple and their invincible schnauzer dog on board and the humour is absolutely wonderful, leavening the tragedy which is unfolding as the trial transcripts and other supporting evidence is revealed. The father refused to speak about any of this with his son while alive but deftly written and for this reading, convincing conversations do occur on board...

A brilliant book which deserves to join the pantheon of great sea-going books. Kudos to ECW Press for a handsome cover and design for this original trade paperback. I feel like a bookseller or publisher's sales rep again when I read a great book like this, somewhat evangelical, but there are good reads and there are great, outstanding reads and this is one of the latter, hence the five stars.

Review of Milkman by Anna Burns

 

This book is why I read fiction. It's a challenging read but stick with it if you are interested in learning how individuals respond psychologically to an essentially insane environment like Belfast in the 1970's at the height of the 'Troubles'. The narrator escapes as best she can by reading only 17th, 18th and 19th century novels and is stubborn about doing her reading while walking to and from her courses and her job, head down, desperate to be oblivious and unnoticed. But this odd behaviour puts her "beyond the pale" which is the term applied not to Jewish farming settlements behind palings (fences) in Russia. Here it means she has joined other mentally ill suspects in the hard-scrabble Catholic neighbourhood who cannot be persuaded to stop their obsessive activities. And who decides what's normal when people (and family pets, erstwhile watch-dogs, which was particularly heart-rending to animal lovers like me) are being blown up and shot and otherwise murdered by the dozens every year?

The rosary-clacking under-educated pious women of course, colossal gossips, the lot of them, who watch everyone else, speculate as to motives and judge mightily, whose own pinched and constrained lives inevitably lead to malicious envy should another girl or woman shine (shining being the term for people who persist in believing in the beauty of sunsets, in being kind and helpful and brave as well in the face of the self-appointed renouncers and the paramilitary). Burns' great gift is to gabble away in that interior monologue which is so particularly Irish, with that over-the-top wonderful use of the English language, to reel us in and get us onside, fuming along with her about the curse of the gossips and then to show us these same women, fed-up with the deadly forays of the renouncers and the enemy paramilitary both murdering unarmed bystanders and taking to the streets beating the lids of pots and pans with kitchen spoons, shaming them outside their clubhouses or their guard posts.

The feeling of being trapped in this neighbourhood, of being watched and evaluated, of sibling rivalry and maternal disapproval, of being associated with your family for good and for ill, is exacerbated for our narrator when she attracts the unwelcome attentions of a man in a white van, the titular Milkman who is not the real milkman at all. This stalker is determined to make her, an 18 year old, his girlfriend. He knows almost everything about her daily activities and makes sure she knows he knows. The tension ratchets up to almost unbearable levels. Her response to this additional insanity in her life is to numb herself, to become expressionless. She guards her facial expressions as much as she guards her private thoughts from the intrusive watchers in her world, but they have immediately noticed the Milkman and begin fabricating a whole new life for her. It never stops, the gossip, which changes how others treat her but she is desperate to keep this persistent suitor at bay.

The insights of this terrified teenager, her often humorous observations of people's behaviour (gift-wrapping potatoes for a beau), despite the bleak political situation, and the brilliant use of language, structure and pacing makes this book an incredibly rewarding reading experience. She takes big risks with her writing strategies, eg. to eschew names for all her characters except one near-mythic beautiful woman who joined the nunnery, and to assign them roles instead (almost-boyfriend, real milkman, the wee sisters, tablet girl) which will predictably trigger a chorus of wails from those readers whose heads hurt if things are too different, too unpredictable. But for everyone who loves truly original writing, with enough menace to keep the pages flapping, this book is hugely rewarding.

Review of The Cut-Out Girl (Random House: 2018) by Caroline Woodward

This book opened my eyes to the horrific experience of Jews, and especially Jewish children, in World War II Holland. We have all read The Diary of Anne Frank but this book puts the context of Occupied Holland into place, the big picture, the role of the churches, the police, informers, and the resistance.

The very fact that 80% of Holland's Jews were murdered, more than any other European country including Germany and Austria, is staggering. The vulnerability and loneliness of children whose parents had to do the hardest possible thing, give them away to save their lives because they knew they'd likely lose their own lives sooner than later, is in some ways, even worse than the stories of Barnardo children, many of whom were orphans living in poverty, not a loving extended and immediate family. Most of these children were ripped from loving homes and hidden in claustrophobic attics and cellars and rooms which were glorified cupboards. They were taken away by incredibly courageous Dutch people who relied on their trusted networks of fellow university students or Dutch Socialist Party (somewhat like the Labour Party in the UK or the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner to the New Democratic Party in Canada) members or their professional associations to help with transportation and hiding places. Informers were everywhere and were being paid the princely sum of 7.50 guilders per Jewish person to bring them to the attention of the Dutch police.

The story is beautifully written by a professor of English literature at Oxford, Dutch by birth, whose own family hid Jewish children and adults during the war, as many farmers did. Farmers could grow food and could manage to feed people even as their supplies were regularly ransacked by the German army. The structure of the book may challenge people who need a straightforward linear sort of book but for me, it greatly enriched the story. I learned about Lien, a beautiful and bright child, who was spirited away when she was eight years old. Her education is interrupted, her hiding places and friendships and personal growth stop and start and block and blossom. She learned to numb herself after crying many, many tears because she missed her mother and father so much. The book follows Lien's journey, from catching tadpoles in the stream with another little boy to being over-worked and underfed by an awful family and even worse. The ending is hard-won and happy, I can say without it being a spoiler, because this is not escapist fare. Keep reading!

Lien's chapters are interspersed with chapters about the author's method of conducting research, going to all the buildings and all the villages where Lien was hidden. Other chapters detail the role of the "blindly co-operative Jewish Council" who handed over their register of all Dutch Jews and their addresses to the Nazis and of the Dutch Reformed Church who sat on their hands and were utterly complicit with the Nazis whereas the Catholic Church made a public statement to all their church-goers decrying the rounding up and transportation of Dutch Jews including many who were actually among the congregations as they'd switched over a century earlier. So, history, research and Lien's story are woven together to create this book and it is hard reading (my mother was Dutch) but the humanity shines through. Lien becomes a wonderful human being, despite it all, a lesson to us all.

Mountain Blues (NeWest: 2018) by Sean Arthur Joyce

“Well, I’m a reporter just new in town. Looking for work.”

So begins Roy Breen’s introduction to life in a small village in the West Kootenays, to the love of his life, to witnessing inspired community resistance to centralized decision-making and, fortuitously for them all, his new employer. While covering stories of all descriptions for the Mountain Echo, Roy Breen recovers from a hectic fifteen years as a Vancouver reporter. He’d paid his journalistic dues there only to be shunted away from a City Hall beat promotion by a lesser-paid cub reporter, no thanks to a change in ownership in the leaner, meaner millennium. Fed-up with this corporate treatment, Breen quits and heads to the British Columbia Interior where he was born and raised.

He and his cat spend some quality camping time roaming through four of B.C.’s six mountain chains before ending up in an old silver-mining village beside a glacier-fed lake, remarkably resembling New Denver merged with Silverton. The lyrical valley and village descriptions will make many readers want to quit their own stuffy, city-trapped jobs and move there themselves.

The Mountain Echo, moreover, still pays its writers and actually employs a proofreader and fact checker, which along with reference librarians, have been dismissed by metro dailies in Vancouver and elsewhere. But then the odds of running into the main antagonists at the previous evening’s meeting en route to the village Post Office is much higher in El Dorado as well and the new reporter in town has to tread carefully and tactfully.

The first major issue is the shocking announcement that the El Dorado Hospital will be shut down within weeks. Vans arrive, in a startling display of efficiency from the centralized health authority, to remove vital X-ray equipment. But the villagers are resourceful veterans of blockade lines and have organized a telephone tree which loops around the communities dependent on the emergency ward, the doctors, the extended care wing for bedridden elders and volunteers arrive by the dozens and stay there round the clock.

We are introduced to the many and varied forms of peaceful resistance from individual hunger strikes to protest “crawls”, yes, not walks but crawls which are more commonplace in religious approaches by supplicants near cathedrals in South America, on their knees as they cross stony plazas. We go behind the scenes to understand how difficult it is for a level-headed co-ordinator to deal with highly individualistic types who threaten violence and sabotage and would thereby threaten the credibility of the entire protest. We also understand more about the conflict and ethical considerations of our reporter-narrator who has always tilted to the side of the underdogs and been reprimanded for it in the big city daily. But here he puts a writerly foot wrong once and is hollered at most profanely by the normally level-headed organizer herself, a statuesque beauty who is a natural leader in the community. We also get to meet the public relations bureaucrat from the regional health authority who must deliver the bad news about the hospital closure and he, as you might suspect, gets his comeuppance soon enough.

Throughout it all, Sean Arthur Joyce uses a light, deft touch for topics that could be heavily righteous slogging. His characters are completely 3-D and his dialogue is a delight to ‘hear’ as it is so realistic in its rhythms, which sets each distinct character apart from the next, no easy feat. The humour is gentle and tolerant and reminds us that when we live in a small community, the most sound advice would be: Let your words be gentle in case they come back to bite you. For a journalist, this means striving for fairness, depth and objectivity and not ‘piling on’ the blame in this era of rushing to often-violent judgement, propelled by self-serving, vindictive and ultimately irresponsible tweets.

The love story which unfolds is also a delight and we readers cheer on the middle-aged lonely hearts who are instantly attracted and find each other to be excellent company in the midst of the strife afflicting the villagers. The cafes in El Dorado serve great coffee, even if the wait-staff tend to editorialize the hapless new reporter’s latest efforts, and the mountain water is sublimely pure, the basis for all great coffee, lest we forget. Pack your bags and head for the West Kootenay mountains, especially the Valhalla Range, a copy of the big-hearted Mountain Blues nearby, best read aloud by kindred spirits en route, especially those in need of that special blend of glorious wilderness and resolutely alive, no-nonsense, ‘stand up to protect it or lose it forever’, community that beckons within its pages.

On Gratitude: a Thanksgiving blog

Dahlias, Lennard Island Lightstation, October 2018. Truth & Beauty...

Seamus Woodward-George explains a finer point of physics to mystified parents

Molly Brown, sea-dog and CEO of Lennard Island Lightstation

Jeff George, photographer and principal lightkeeper documenting the Big Storm of 2018 which tossed logs onto our helipad

A wonderful collaboration with artist Carol Evans resulted in this book, published by the great folks at Harbour Publishing, September 2018

Carol Evans and I,  aka long-lost sisters, enjoy morning coffee in Salt Spring Island mugs! Photo by the good-natured Bryn King, book tour driver, feedback provider, all-round roadie, computer whiz and paparazzi!

On Gratitude                                                                                        By Caroline Woodward

When your doctor beams at you before saying a word and you know she is relieved not to be the bearer of bad news. And that my world will not be turned upside down. Some day it will be but today will not be that day. I feel every healthy cell instantly flooded with some internal bath of sweet relief. My always reliable blood pressure is even better than usual. More kudos, more mutual smiles. I float down the clinic hallway and rejoin the colour and noise and glowing lights of the world outside, stepping lightly off a low-lying cloud, a suspended fogbound world of my most dire imaginings.

Gratitude, a word derived from the French, first used in written English in the 15th century, meaning thankfulness and a warm sense of appreciation for kindness received and a desire to do something in return. OED

I am also proud, happy and grateful for perseverance all around when our child, who is no longer a boy but a grown man and a genuinely good soul, flies to a Norwegian island near the Arctic Circle for a physics course. It’s an eight day blitz but Map Boy aka Mister 3-D is flying with this rare opportunity. He’s like us and loves to travel. Unlike his math-challenged parents, he is also keen on robots which he designs with a team of brilliant students at the University of Saskatchewan and this year as well, they will be making a small satellite to fulfill a Canada Space Agency contract, one of five awarded to Canadian universities. If you’d asked me twenty years ago what this little boy might create, might become, I cannot imagine what I’d have said. A carpenter or a chef maybe? Even before he went to kindergarten, he loved making things, from stirring big batches of muffins with me to inventing elaborate castles and moats with sand and water with his dad. Entirely on his own, he enjoyed making series of vertical tunnels using empty toilet paper rolls which he’d tape to my office door. Then he’d climb up on a chair and send a ping pong ball accurately zig-zagging from the top to the bottom of the door through all his ‘tunnels’ and out onto the carpet. He was three and a half years old then, I think. But I would have hoped he’d still be a good person most of all, no matter what, a good and kind person, and despite the usual, and more than usual, life challenges he’s faced. So I have intense gratitude for all our patience and perseverance and what Buddhists call metha or loving kindness as both parents and child problem-solved and supported each other in our best efforts. My gratitude also goes out to the teachers who understood and whose helpful awareness and professional skills made all the difference.

Our thoughtful son gave me a Tim Horton’s card with a $25 credit at the start of a book tour in 2010. I still had a car then and drove hundred of kilometres to the Kootenays and the Shuswap/Okanagan, Vancouver, Victoria and Vancouver Island giving public readings and signing my books in bookstores. I had not had a trade book published since 1993 and this was the re-start of my stalled writing career with a novel I’d laboured over for the better part of twelve years in-between motherhood, renovating a circa 1900 building, opening and operating The Motherlode with my husband, a village book and toy store, busily serving on local and provincial boards and councils, teaching creative writing classes and workshops, and singing in a wonderful choir. I loved all the things I was learning and working with all sorts of bright and talented people but I despaired of ever having enough time and focus to complete the novel satisfactorily.

On tour, I live on coffee and water and apples and almonds in my car, in-between actual meals once I reach my destination. I still have that Timmy’s card my son gave me and before every book tour I make sure I have it with me, topped up and ready to pay for my large double/singles to go. Other book tour rituals pertain as well. I am grateful for the cheerful nature, lively conversation and amazing hair styling skills of Jessica Taylor at Salty Dolls in Tofino who transforms my shaggy mop into a chic hairdo before I head out to meet the public, feeling much more well-groomed and therefore, perky! I used to buy new shoes whenever I published a new book but I’ve let that ritual celebration go by the wayside. My thriftier self advises me to wait until I actually earn royalties worth spending on nifty boots or red shoes. If I ever win a real prize (nine nominations and no joy yet but who’s counting?) I’ll buy extravagant flannelette sheets AND fabulous boots and shoes, guilt-free.

But here’s the wonderful part of getting a book published after years of rewriting and coming up with fictional characters and plots and all the rest of it: meeting old friends and new readers who come out to wish me well. Some of them bring flowers or home-grown tomatoes or home-made preserves. My favourite people in this world all have that twinkle, that sense of fun and Jessica possesses that twinkle. She plays banjo, sings harmony and writes songs for her bluegrass band, Little Saturday, among other adventures in music and travel.

It may sound odd, but it won’t to many readers who work at building all kinds of things, from organizations to buildings to books, but when a project is completed, nobody is more relieved and grateful than the builder. We feel we have earned hard-won integrity in our own eyes at last by actually finishing the project (our close relatives and those patient souls who share a life with us are mightily relieved as well) and we may even allow ourselves a rest after completing this complex and challenging task. But no, rest comes later because we have to hit the road to promote the project in the case of a book or keep scheduling meetings and including bright minds and energetic do-ers, if we are building an organization to improve lives in our communities like my good friend, writer Rita Moir does with her group, building beautiful homes for seniors in rural British Columbia.

The other wonderful thing that happens when a book goes out into the world is hearing from readers, those lovely people who send me emails thanks to finding me on Facebook or finding my website, designed by Doug Cook, web wizard at Digicom. I am a reader first, a writer second and I have written less than five letters to authors to say what I liked about their books and how they were important to me in some way. Every single author responded warmly as do I when I receive a personal letter. This is not to say there aren’t the usual trolls and poison pens out there but they are immature cowards who rely on anonymity or some form of protective camouflage to spew their toxic envy. As another friend says, if the haters are out to get you, you must be doing something right. So I’m grateful to have a few of those sad sacks waddling around as well to remind me of that fact!

Finally, since this is a Thanksgiving-inspired blog, I am thankful for my family, far away in Australia, Europe and the UK, and our son on Andoya, an island near the Arctic Circle in Norway and especially my husband, and our dog. Mustn’t forget the dog, who adores us on a daily basis, … and anyone else who arrives on our island as well, let’s be honest! My 93 year old mother is, thanks largely to my sister’s ongoing work, settled in a beautiful assisted living home now after a fairly hectic move but the outcome was worth all the bother and hard labour. I am also blessed with friends from all over the world and the only way to keep them is to communicate so I am grateful, hugely grateful, for the internet which allows me to stay in touch with them and to work with editors and send out my book reviews to BC Bookworld and articles to Harrowsmith and other publications. This was truly the deal-breaker for a modern lighthouse keeper and thanks to my clever and persistent husband, we have installed a satellite dish on this green rock in the North Pacific which allows me to work, to share what I think and hope and dream in print.



 

Book Review of Sustenance: Writers From BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food

A version of this review first appeared in the spring 2018 issue of the quarterly magazine, BC Bookworld and is reprinted here with permission. A great book to browse, graze or devour!


Book Review of Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food
Edited and with a Foreword by Rachel Rose
Published by Anvil Press
978-1-77214-101-6   $25 large trade paperback

Let me begin by putting on my bookseller’s hat and asking the key question: who will reach for this book?

Gardeners who sigh happily over the new batch of seed catalogues arriving in late January, cooks who read cookbooks like other people immerse themselves in books of short stories, amateur and professional chefs, readers and writers of compressed, powerful poetry and prose, those who appreciate photography and will discover Derek Fu’s gorgeous work…and that’s just for starters.

There are 151 tidbits to savour from writers who live in Vancouver, where Poet Laureate Rachel Rose envisioned this highly collaborative book, and from elsewhere around the world. There are contributions from nationally renowned poets like Lorna Crozier, John Pass and Susan Musgrave, nearly-anonymous librarians who write like angels, celebrated chefs like Karen Barnaby, Meeru Dhalwala, Vikram Vij and Frank Pabst, thoughtful children and wise elders, some speaking Arabic and Cree. There are farmers, beekeepers, fishers and backyard gardeners, First Nations, Metis, refugees and members of their welcome committees.

As Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver from 2014-2017, Rachel Rose wanted a community project which offered another world view than the muttering and braying about walls to keep out the Other, meaning Muslims, Mexicans, and desperate refugees the world over. Rose had already spent years volunteering with Burmese families in Surrey, shopping for food, shampooing hair, attending graduations, weddings and funerals. Her genuine Canadian hospitality imbues this book project too because the money raised by sales, as well as every single writer’s honorarium, is donated to the BC Farmer’s Market Nutrition Coupon Program so that low-income families will have access to fresh, locally-grown food.

So as well as bringing so many wonderful writers together at the ‘table’ of Sustenance,  the book itself is a gift that keeps on giving, the Poet Laureate’s inspired “love letter to the city.”

The selected writings, as you’d expect from an editor and writer of her stature with award-winning work published internationally and an abiding focus on human rights, is unfailingly eloquent. This is not a book written by or for people scampering off to find the trending mustard de jour. As well as thoughtful, we have hilarious (Jane Silcott’s ‘Cooking Class & Marriage Lessons’ and Karen Barnaby’s ‘Blackberry Fever’), heart-breaking (Sophia Karasouli-Milobar’s ‘Fava Bean Stew’ and Elizabeth Ross’ ‘Milky Way’), sensual (Jeff Steudel’s ‘Recipe’), life-affirming (Brian Brett’s ‘I Want to Serve Food to Strangers’) and carnivorous, although I would also cross-file it under hilarious (kjmunro’s ‘hungry in Tofino’).

The voices are as diverse as the forms— interviews, memoirs, recipes, both literal and figurative, prose and poems of all kinds, some as paeans to moose meat, bees, bread, beer, tomatoes, rice, beloved grandmothers, salmon, maple syrup, elk heart and fresh berries. The writers tackle subjects as difficult as anorexia, obesity, starvation, sugar, animal deaths, and allergies, real and possibly, imposed (see the delightful, plaintive essay, ‘Check the Ingredients!’ by Charles Dickens Grade 6 student, Ayla Maxwell).

What makes this book important and substantial to me begins with the obvious, universal fact: we all must eat to survive. Secondly, food is served on a platter of emotional connections to people, place and experience, the things that really matter to each of us therefore,  the writing packs a visceral wallop. To sum up, food, sustenance, is intensely personal as well as political (read Billeh Nickerson’s smart, incisive poem ‘A Baker’s Dozen: 13 Vancouver Food (In)Securities’).

The final words, amid the cornucopia of offerings at this banquet for humanity, goes to ten year old collaborators, Bodhi Cutler and Gus Jackson, who both attend Charles Dickens Elementary School in Vancouver. ‘Every Dish is Unique’ is their short, sweet and perfectly apt essay which sums up Sustenance.

‘Every dish is unique because every Vancouverite makes it a tiny bit different. We all have our styles and our ingredients, our suppliers and our equipment. There are restaurants who will probably make great pasta with the best calamari. Your mom can make a great homemade meal she invented herself. No two meals taste the same because they are like humans, unique and great.’