Dollybirdby Anne LazurkoPublished by Shadowpaw Press RepriseReview by Madonna Hamel$24.99 ISBN 9781989398586 Dollybird is one of the few novels I’ve read more than once. I’m thrilled to see it re-released. It is always interesting to see how a second read strikes one after a few years have passed. The first time I read it I was sitting on the edge of my chair, anxious for the future of Moira, a young woman who was forced to leave her home in Newfoundland after becoming pregnant out of wedlock in 1906. A homestead officer finds her a job in Saskatchewan as a live-in housekeeper for a man looking for a “dollybird”. Lazurko’s novel gives us glimpses into the life of a woman compromised by culture, time and place, and by poverty of both means and mercy. Lazurko does it with the word “dollybird”. A dollybird can mean a sweet young thing, but in the day of the novel’s setting, it also meant, ambiguously, a housekeeper and/or a prostitute. The novel looks at how a woman can slide from one role into another, especially when finding herself in an isolated community where she may be the only woman for miles. I remember the…

Unsettledby Dawn MorganPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$24.95 ISBN 9780889778573 Subtitled A Reckoning in the Great Plains, Unsettled is a labour of love that, like all true reckonings, took a long time to take shape. The book revolves around four “lost anchor” events and the author Dawn Morgan’s urge to reconcile herself to them: the death of an old rancher who was gored by a bull bison named King, the death of King himself, the subsequent death of her father by suicide, and the disappearance of Assiniboine who once inhabited the land her ancestors settled. Morgan is a deft handler of the English language. She can weave disparate sources together to create connection and meaning where none was previously evident. In her heart-wrenching, sometimes comic, mostly conciliatory, search for release from her haunting past she introduces us to the poetry of Andrew Suknaski, examines the papers of the Palliser Expedition, dips into the diaries of Métis guide Peter Erasmus, detours into country-western lyrics, then veers into the writings of German philosopher Theodor Adorno. She reflects on Hemingway’s take on bullfighting, the life of Spanish gauchos, and Kafka’s novel “Amerika.” Reading Unsettled is a lot like being a…

From Left to Rightby Dale EislerPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$34.95 (pb)ISBN 9780889778641 In his book From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation, Dale Eisler helps us take a clear-eyed look at the province as the world economy shifted from post-industrial to global and the province’s population moved from farms to cities. Case in point: In 1971, 47% of Saskatchewan’s population lived on farms. By 2016 the the number was down to 16%. Eisler begins by attempting to define “populism” because , he says “the role of prairie populism is key to understanding the province’s values, economy and culture as a whole.” “For populism to ignite,” he writes, “two things are needed: something or someone to focus their anger and alienation on, and somebody who articulates their emotions in compelling and emotional language.” In engaging language Eisler describes the many faces of “populism” and how, over the decades, its meaning has changed to embrace both liberal and conservative voices. He is also quick to point to papa Trudeau’s cavalier disregard of the prairies when he asked, in 1969, “Why should I sell your wheat?” The off-handed comment aimed at a people who were losing their…

Kayās Nōhcīn, I Come from a Long Time Backby Marie Louise RockthunderEdited by Jean L. Okimasis and Arok WolvengreyPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$24.95 (pb)ISBN 9780880778368 Collected over a quarter of a century, Mary Louise Rockthunder’s oral history put to paper is a national treasure. It is also a journey through space and time. And languages. A testament to the power of fidelity to timeless truths embedded in oral history, the editors of these stories write that “Mary Louise’s memory for her past is so detailed and precise that it was as if she stored her diaries in her mind.” Mary Louise Rockthunder (nee Bangs) was an Elder of Cree, Saulteaux and Nakoda descent, born in 1913 and raised and married at Piapot First Nation. Her stories, filled with humour and told with humility, are a testament to her rootedness, to her kinship with the land over time. She speaks in Cree, despite how some people tell her her English is fine. “Some don’t understand it right when English is spoken” she says, when relating her way of being in the world. “These white people, “she says, “what they really like is money.” But, she says, advising her grandchildren,…

Carrying the Burden of Peaceby Sam McKegneyPublished by University of Regina PressReviewed by Madonna Hamel$34.95 ISBN 9780889777934 From the first sentence of his book, Carrying the Burden of Peace, author Sam McKegney poses questions big enough for all of us to embrace, questions asking for new ways to scrutinize our world: “Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honour song?” he asks. Can it “celebrate rather pathologize”? How do we hold institutions accountable and yet still “validate and affirm” the people who need validating and affirming? How do we entertain change without “fixing new terms of engagement”? His most pressing question: “Can an examination of Indigenous masculinities be an embodied enterprise?” Makes me think: If it can’t we are all doomed, because nowhere in the wider culture have I found a people more effective at embodiment – through humour, creativity, eros, and spirit – than Indigenous communities. The title of McKegney’s book comes from the Kanien’keha:ka word for “warrior”, which when translated, reads: “those who carry the burden of peace.” (This gives me pause, once again, to consider what we lose and have lost, intentionally and unintentionally, in translation.) McKegney quotes activist and artist Ellen Gabriel, who says:…

German Settlements In Saskatchewanby Alan B. AndersonPublished by Saskatchewan German Council Inc.Review by Madonna Hamel$20.00 ISBN 9780969401674 Growing up I heard stories about my grandmother’s job as the postmistress of Krupp and of the acres of sunflowers planted by German farmers surrounding my grandparent’s land just North of Fox Valley. When my sister and I went looking for Krupp we found no evidence of it, although someone speculated that a large feed bin was once the old post office. I could have used this meticulously researched history of the province’s settlements in my searches. It would have explained to me that many of the Russian-German settlements spanning an expansive territory bordered by Medicine Hat, Leader and Maple Creek, including my French-Canadian-Metis-Scottish-American grandparents farm, had changed their names after both world wars. When Leader became the “de facto centre of the settlements” in 1913 it was actually named Prussia. But during World War I the town name was changed along with street names like Berlin, Kaiser and Hamburg. No doubt Krupp suffered the same fate. Prelate was also a name I’d heard as a child. I knew there was a church there, just ten kilometres down the road from Leader, and…

The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mindby Mark AbleyPublished by University of Regina PressReviewed by Madonna Hamel$24.95 ISBN 9780889775817 There is nothing Mark Abley can’t write about. Whether its about smalltown Saskatchewan, threatened languages, imagined conversations with dead historical figures or ruminations on the English idiom, Abley is indeed able. As poet and editor and columnist he inspires confidence in writers and readers alike, so that every new release is billed as “long-awaited.” Books take as long as they take, you cannot rush a writer. And in the case of this newest book, a nonfiction reminiscence on his life with his father, Abley could not have written it a moment too soon. There is never a moment in The Organist when the reader does not feel the immense pressure and tension in the writer to be fair, honest and fearless in his depiction of his father. His mother reminds Abley that his father had “an artistic temperament,” as if that somehow justified his occasional tantrums and extreme behaviours, such as locking himself in the bathroom before an international flight. Or wishing aloud to a dinner party of relative strangers that someone assassinate Margaret Thatcher. “Harry Abley”, writes Abley about…

Cry Wolf: Inquest into the True Nature of a Predatorby Harold JohnsonReviewed by Madonna HamelPublished by University of Regina Press$16.95 ISBN 9780889777385 As with every topic Harold Johnson tackles, Cry Wolf is a book aimed at getting to the truth of the matter, because “the truth matters.” Johnson was the lawyer asked by the Carnegies, parents of Kenton Carnegie, a young geologist killed in a wolf attack in Northern Saskatchewan, to re-examine the coroner’s report. Johnson’s own disquieting encounters with wolves as a Saskatchewan trapline owner made him their perfect choice. Johnson is nothing if not thorough in his investigation. The book opens with a warning that “the writing depicts a violent death by wolf attack and discretion is advised”. At the same time, he makes it clear that “after twenty years of practice reviewing too many autopsy and crime scene photographs” his tolerance for the gruesome has not increased, but in fact diminished. “A sensitivity seems to have built up over the years.” Today he tells young lawyers “Don’t look at the pictures if you don’t have to.” If our species is going to survive, we will need accurate information about the environment, writes Johnson. We can’t be swayed…

Hell and Damnation: A Sinner’s Guide to Eternal Tormentby Marq de VilliersPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$24.95 ISBN 9780889775848 “Did you know,” I phoned my friend with urgent information, “there is a special hell reserved just for people who borrow books and never give them back?” “What are you getting at?” “I’m reviewing Marq de Villier’s book Hell and Damnation: A Sinner’s Guide to Eternal Torment,and in it he describes the thousands of hells depicted by everyone from Dante to Christopher Hitchens and in everything from the Bible to Chinese Buddhism, where it turns out the afterlife is divided into ten courts and one of those ten courts in called The Mirror of Sin-” “ Sin? Isn’t that a Christian concept?” “Oh no, Christians have no monopoly on ‘sin’. Nor, it turns out on ‘hell’. But let me get to the point: The Mirror of Hell allows you to look back at your wasted life, at all the things you could have done but didn’t. It also affords you a view of several courts where the unfortunate dead are pierced and flailed by their own failings, including everything from ‘lying about one’s age when getting married, complaining…

The Homesteadersby Sandra Rollings-MagnussonPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$39.95 ISBN 9780889775152 One day, while doing research for her master’s thesis on women and farming, author and professor Sandra Rollings-Magnusson was presented with a stack of questionnaires. Called ‘The Pioneer Questionnaires’, they were compiled and distributed in the 1950s and were still being returned in the 1970s by respondents born mostly between 1873 and 1924. She soon shifted her focus to culling, organizing and transcribing them into a book, determined to “give these people a voice” so they “would not be forgotten.” The result is not nostalgic hearsay but a collection of witness impact statements, verbatim responses to a series of questions divided into relevant categories, covering everything from what Canada’s first wave of immigrants ate and did for fun, to how they survived ill health, storms and isolation. These stories and anecdotes hold the kind of intimacy and immediacy that only direct experience can convey. The Homesteaders is replete with archival photos as well. Memories of immigrants escaping hardships in countries that included Russia, Germany, Poland, England, Norway and Switzerland are made more acute by imagery. As are recipes for pies and pot roasts made more mouthwatering…