The Curiosity Cabinet

Written and illustrated by Ian Wallace

Groundwood Books

978-1-55498-922-5

36 pp.

Ages 5+

September 2017

See Canada from inside Ian Wallace's The Curiosity Cabinet, a book and cupboard filled with mementoes of each province and territory.  From Ian Wallace's dedication,

Dear Canada,

Thanks for the

countless adventures

logged in my red

Converse All Stars.

                        I.W.

to the rich endpapers detailing mugs of pens and T-shirts, a NWT license plate and a child's painting of a duck, The Curiosity Cabinet represents the accumulation of gifts, purchases and experiences Ian Wallace has received, made or had visiting communities across Canada.  They may be his curiosities but they are of our country and tell a story far greater than the totality of their numbers.

One day I realized that this vast land was a nation of families and diverse neighborhoods, and that I had left a piece of myself in each one – and they in me.

From The Curiosity Cabinet by Ian Wallace

Except for an introduction and four pages of illustrator's notes, which identify all the curiosities and the province or territory depicted, there is no text on the double-page spreads representing each region.  From his home province of Ontario represented by tamarack geese gifted from Attawapiskat and Moose Factory, and the sparrow carving for the launch of The Sparrow's Song (Groundwood, 1976) to the snow globe illuminating a reading at the Owen Sound Public Library circa 1978, Ian Wallace reveals his travels, his books and his memories of visits. 

From The Curiosity Cabinet by Ian Wallace

The illustration for Alberta honours the native land of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Nova Scotia's salutes the people of the sea and his book Boys of the Deeps (Groundwood, 1999) and Yukon's illustration celebrates the aurora borealis, the work of Robert Service and Ted Harrison, and Jan Andrew's story Very Last First Time (Groundwood, 1985) which Ian Wallace illustrated. Sadly this memory page is all the more poignant for the losses of Ted Harrison in 2015 and Jan Andrews just over a week ago.

Ian Wallace has chosen to illustrate exclusively in the subtle graphite that produces both an eeriness and an emotional distance.  It is like seeing a museum display, highly appropriate for a book titled The Curiosity Cabinet.  Still there is an intimacy because of the content of the cabinet, as each memento has a very personal attachment to the author/illustrator.  With each item and illustration, Ian Wallace remembers and celebrates the people and places of our Canada, as they have touched him. While reminding us of the plethora of books he has written and illustrated, The Curiosity Cabinet is a relevant and gratifying way to celebrate Canada 150.

From The Curiosity Cabinet by Ian Wallace

All the Things We Leave Behind

Written by Riel Nason

Goose Lane Editions

978-0-864-920416

240 pp.

Ages 14+

September 2016

There are so many incidents that can stand out small and don’t seem like anything at the time but end up meaning so much.  There are so many tiny twists in a life that you can never know the ultimate significance of. (pg. 80)

As teen Violet Davis looks back through her copious memories of incidents with her older brother Bliss and their parents, she now seems to see the significance of them with respect to his disappearance from their lives after graduation from high school.  There were all the signs of a wanderlust for moving beyond their small town of Riverbend and Hawkshaw, New Brunswick, for travel, for adventure.  There was also the darkness in Bliss that may have been triggered when the two first discovered the Department of Transportation’s gruesome boneyard of deer and moose road kills, perhaps Bliss’s “first proof of unhappy endings” (pg. 116) but this melancholy could not be repressed.

It seemed that every bad memory, in fact only bad memories, bubbled up in his brain.  His entire perspective changed and every thought he had was permeated and tainted, shifted and reinterpreted in a negative way. (pg. 116)

Now it’s the summer of 1977 and Violet’s parents are ostensibly on vacation, but really in search of  any evidence of Bliss’s travels.  And Violet has been left in charge of the family business, officially known as Charles J. Davis & Son Antiques but known locally and by all travellers as The Purple Barn, a roadside attraction and store brimming with crafty twig furniture and quilts and antiques and collectibles.

For Violet, the summer is more than just working at The Purple Barn, and keeping the busybody employee Mrs. Quinn in check; it’s also a time of hanging with her boyfriend Dean and best friend Jill and her boyfriend Johnny.  While her brother’s disappearance is always foremost in her mind, as she rethinks what she should have and could have done to keep him from leaving them behind, Violet is forced to struggle with two unrelated issues.  First, she must negotiate the purchase of the contents of the renowned Vaughn cottage, a grand home deserted after the drowning of the owners' grandson. Secondly, Violet is haunted by a white buck that no one else seems to see.  Is it Speckles, a piebald deer Bliss befriended years earlier,  or an apparition that is part of the rumoured ghost herd of the boneyard?

Riel Nason’s first book, multi-award winning The Town That Drowned (Goose Lane Editions, 2011), was a deeply moving examination of a small town dealing with its impending demise by deliberate flooding.  That community, Haventon, is now a memory in All the Things We Leave Behind, both as place and experience, but only one of many things left behind when people move, or die, or disappear.  Those things can be like the goods that The Purple Barn sells from estates or deserted houses, or the mementoes set to be bequeathed to family upon a grandmother’s death.  Or they can be people, like Violet, left behind when a brother goes exploring, or when someone dies.  It can even be the bones of the dead or their ghosts remaining to haunt people’s thoughts and dreams and nightmares.  The concept of things, including people, being left behind is a monumental one but one that Riel Nason addresses with sensitivity and completeness, understanding the nature of memories and mementoes as powerful beyond reason.

Having a reminder, a souvenir, to help you remember is great, but I think the best memories are through a special door in your mind that you can open without a key. (pg. 105)

Riel Nason’s writing, both intricate and profound in addressing the nature of loss and memory, does not dwell on grief, though the boneyard and the tragic deaths of the animals and people in the book are disturbing.  But, All the Things We Leave Behind is bigger and better than just that, instead becoming a souvenir in itself, one of  weighty contemplation and yearning for a past remembered and a future unlocked.  Even with the tragedies that unfold in All the Things We Leave Behind, there is a lightness and brightness in the darkness, and acknowledgement by Riel Nason that all the things we leave behind, tangible and intangible, become powerful tributes in their own ways.