What We Buried

Written by Kate A. Boorman

Henry Holt and Company

978-1-250-19167-0

320 pp.

Ages 14-18

February 2019

You created your reality; live with it. (pg. 260)

But the realities that have been created for eighteen-year-old Jory Brewer and his sixteen-year-old sister Lavinia (Liv) are only minimally their own doing. Jory, born with Moebius syndrome, has several paralyzed craniofacial nerves which affect his appearance, his speech and his eating. He may choose to say very little and be more socially withdrawn but how others respond to him is not on him. He'd had one corrective surgery as a child and doctors had recommended further intervention but his parents didn't think it was a good investment. On the other hand, what they thought was a good investment was putting Liv on the child beauty pageant circuit, including a stint on Darling Divas, the reality TV show about pageants and their contestants. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of that career, Liv is now suing her parents for "irreparable and lasting harm." (pg. 11)

On the day of the trial, their parents disappear from the courthouse. Liv returns to the house, for the first time in months, ostensibly to help Jory but more to learn what has happened to their parents whom she believes Jory is helping. When she thinks she knows where they've gone, the two siblings head out to an old cabin their mother had inherited and which their father had always wanted to sell. But in a chilling road trip during which the two are haunted by fleeting visions, possible déjà vu, recurrent memories and danger, Liv and Jory transform from squabbling sibs to something unexpected.

And there it was–an uncanny sense of temporality. Like my reaction to what was happening–the focus of my attention–was a better measure of time than the minutes clicking over on the digital clock.  Everything was beginning to feel malleable and unfixed, like if I looked hard enough at the road illuminated by our headlights, I'd see beyond it, or behind it, or something. (pg. 103)

Kate A. Boorman has written a thriller that is equal parts plot and character in which both are significant and extraordinary. As the reader struggles to sort out the plot including what happened to the teens' parents, how the repeating news story on the radio is important, and what is real and either supernatural or illusion, Jory and Liv are exploring who they were, who they are and who they want to be.

Book jacket of What We Buried by Kate A. Boorman

The front cover of What We Buried may look like the story is about Liv and her perceptions but the back cover reveals that Jory's perspective is just as important. It's the way the two siblings see things about themselves, each other, their parents and the outside world and how it sees them that makes What We Buried intense and emotional.

You know the saying "Seeing is believing"? It's a problem, when you think about it. I mean, it's reasonable for people to want proof before they accept something they've been told. I do. I'm a fan of logic and demonstrable facts. But the idea inherent: that you can believe what you see? That's majorly flawed, because people usually have no idea what they're looking at. It's why people think my sister is a lovely, tragic victim. It's why they so often assume I can't tie my own shoes. (pg. 6)

The contrast of reality and illusion is a complex one in What We Buried and that's because Kate A. Boorman draws us in but doesn't join us for the journey. It's up to the reader to determine what might be real and what might be memory or what might be something else entirely. See if you can see beyond the masks of Liv's beauty and Jory's disorder and look deeper into their stories to find what may be buried, both literally and figuratively.

Road Signs That Say West

Written by Sylvia Gunnery
Pajama Press
978-1-77278-023-9
216 pp.
Ages 12+
May 2017

Three sisters. One road trip.  No regrets?

When their parents go off on their European holiday, 19-year-old Hanna convinces her sisters Megan, 17, and Claire, 15, to head west on a summer road trip from Nova Scotia to Vancouver.  But the Three Sisters' Road Trip, with multiple stops at roadside attractions, camping and hostelling and the meeting of new friends, becomes more of an unloading of secret baggage and a clash of personalities than a sisterly bonding experience.

From their photo at the statue of Glooscap, to Montreal where their clubbing leads to Megan's hospital visit and her wrist in a sling, Hanna directs, Claire worries and Megan remonstrates her sisters.  Meeting a group travelling from PEI, Hanna accepts an invitation to a wedding they're attending in North Bay.  Onto Marathon and the Terry Fox memorial, the girls pick up the hitchhiking teen named Bear with his beagle Jake and end up driving them all the way to Pinawa, Manitoba to the home of his aunt and uncle where he intends to help out since his cousin Lenny joined the armed forces.  Bear and Megan make a connection but around that swirls unrest with a man sexually harassing Hanna and the fears Bear's uncle has about his son's safety.

Manitoba leads to Saskatchewan and Alberta where they meet a flutist-busker named Charley who encourages Hanna in her song-writing as healing for Claire's grief before the three head to BC where their road trip takes a sudden turn from which the three sisters may or may not find their way back.

It's evident from the onset that Hanna and Claire have back stories that affect their current interactions with others and between the sisters, though there's a lot more story to how the three became who they are than is ever told.  Hanna had gone to university but had left mid-term to take on an au pair position in Italy from which her parents had to involve lawyers to extricate her safely.  Though involved in scandalous circumstances beyond her control, Hanna parcels out little bits about it to her sisters, and still manages to keep mum about that of which she is most ashamed or embarrassed.  Claire is dealing with the recent suicide of her boyfriend Matt's best friend and still coming to terms with what Caleb had done.  Worried about leaving Matt behind and trying to resolve Caleb's death in her own mind leads Claire to contemplate depression and her own grief.  Megan is given no back story, except for having given up a summer job and anticipating starting university and continuing with her swimming.  Sadly, she is continuously vilified by her bossy and self-centred older sister and complacent younger sister for her cautious, more rational approach.  And, even though Sylvia Gunnery has written Road Signs That Say West from third-person omniscient point of view, critical commentary about Megan, the "grouchy complainer" (pg. 128) skews the narration for me.

The road trip scenario is an irresistible plot line, forcing the three sisters to interact (haven't we all been trapped in cars with those we may or may not like?) while they experience life and meet new people of all backgrounds and take in the diversity of places that make up Canada.  Roads Signs That Say West could be a travel commentary of places east to west (I found myself looking up information about Glooscap, Weyburn, and more) but it's really a story of family, a real family, of siblings with secrets, weaknesses, strengths and ambitions that they may or may not share.  The baggage that the girls take with them is far greater than their back stories and drives them to behave in complex and justifiable ways.  Though I would have preferred if Megan had been developed more as a character and not delivered as a scapegoat, especially since middle children are more often cooperative team players than embittered sulkers, young adult readers will appreciate the three different personalities Sylvia Gunnery has created as well as her story which takes the three to new places in their relationships within a colourful national landscape.

Freedom's Just Another Word

by Caroline Stellings

Second Story Press

978-1-77260-011-7

232 pp.

Ages 12+

September 2016

From the title (taken from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”) to her unexpected stop in Saskatoon in 1970 and the journey Easy Merritt takes to meet up with her idol, Janis Joplin is the soundtrack for Caroline Stellings’ latest young adult novel, Freedom’s Just Another Word.  And what a soundtrack it is: earthy, guttural, soulful and rich with the blues.

But when she sang–oh, when she sang–that tempered-in-a-forge voice of hers was like a flame in this burned-out world.  You ’d have to be stone deaf or a cadaver not to be electrified by her; she could sound as smooth as the Southern Comfort that dribbled from the corners of her mouth, or as gritty as sandpaper.  And the way she clutched every stanza like it was her last made me shake with anticipation. (pg. 1)

Though her name might suggest otherwise, growing up half-black–the product of her black father’s affair with a white prostitute named Wendy Wood–in Saskatoon has not been comfortable for Easy (Louisiana) Merritt.   She may be good at car mechanics like her father but she wants to sing the blues, and the two venues in town, Saskatoon Blues and The Beehive are not willing to give her a chance.  So Easy saves her money from working at the garage and singing in front of the liquor store, playing her accordion and frottoir, for the chance to get out.  Her break comes after a fortuitous meeting with the great Janis Joplin when the Festival Express train stops for a booze run in Saskatoon and Easy helps the singer get a bottle of her much-loved Southern Comfort liqueur and earns an invitation to meet up with her in Austin, Texas the following week.  So, Easy begins her pilgrimage, accompanying two nuns, the upbeat Sister Beatrice and the sour postulant Marsha, whom she’d assisted in purchasing a used car, on their journey to a mission in Albuquerque from which Easy could head to Texas.

Like any road trip, Easy’s is a mixture of highs and lows, and more so in 1970 when the civil rights movement is struggling to get a foothold in both Canada and the US, and an eighteen-year-old girl of black and white parentage isn’t always tolerated, much less accepted.  And travelling the famous Route 66, a.k.a. The Mother Road, a road in the process of being retired for the faster, more direct I-40, foreshadows some mother issues with which Easy must grapple to understand herself and others better, if she is to make a success of herself.

Like her Geoffrey Bilson Award-nominated book The Manager (Cape Breton University Press, 2013), Freedom’s Just Another Word is a story based in the 1970s, a time often disregarded in much historical fiction.  But it’s an important time of change, with respect to civil rights and opportunities for women, and Caroline Stellings composes a story that is both embedded in the time yet universal in its themes of acceptance, tolerance, and family.  By taking Easy on a journey both spatially from Saskatoon to Albuquerque and Texas and back, and emotionally as she struggles with acknowledgement of her own family’s secrets and story, Caroline Stellings creates an alluring, cross-country excursion of the soul and heart which ends with finding enlightenment, sometimes closer to home than you might expect.