sannna

Excellent Story

Reviewed: 2017-12-18

I love Eden Robinson's books. This one, while slow to start, turns into a wild ride. I love the mix of traditional legends and contemporary life blended together. I've been wanting a story that some how incorporates indigenous stories, characters, legends, spirituality into a story based in today. Robinson's other book Monkey Beach has quite a bit of this in it too. The narration bugs me though. The story is set on the west coast of Canada. The characters are mostly indigenous people from up and down the pacific coast, which happens to be exactly my background (indigenous from the PNW) when one of the grandmothers was narrated having a Newfie accent (east coast of Canada for those unaware) it irked me. Then when the neighbour, who is from Northern British Columbia, speaks in a Eastern European accent it just added to my annoyance. The pronunciation of place names was also annoying. I don't think these things would annoy me so hard if I didn't know people who are so much like the characters and if I wasn't so familiar with the places in the book.

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