This story of pioneer life in Carlton County in the mid 1800s to 1983 is full of nostalgia and reminiscences. But it is true to the hard lives of the brave Irish Methodists who escaped the Irish potato famine to start a new life in the Ottawa valley and in that sense can be considered as historical fiction. The local scenes with farms around Fitzroy Harbour, Diamond Church, and city life in the Glebe are easy to relate to for any locals. The innovation of using italics to convey the long musings and innermost thoughts of the characters and their conversations is a bit unusual.
Long nebulous musings about the meaning of faith, grace, life and death, and self-doubt, emotional greetings with much hugging and kissing, nostalgia, tears, pubic displays of affection and inability to come to terms with death are very foreign to me, having been raised in a family where such emotionality was absolutely taboo. And the physiologic reactions to those emotions are exaggerated and unrealistic.
Loaned to me by a friend of the author, I cannot recommend this book.
2/5
The Passionate Reader 