Kate's Ring

Written by Donna Grassby

Red Deer Press

978-0-88995-567-7

276 pp.

Ages 11-15

October 2018

Thirteen-year-old Kate might wish for a ring just as her best friend has–Grace has an heirloom opal ring from her grandmother–but Kate's Ring is bigger than a child's dream to possess something special. That's because Kate's ring is not one of gold or silver but rather one of people and place.

It's the 1920s and Kate lives with her five younger siblings–Michael, David, Lily, Colin and Sarah–and her parents in Whitney Pier on Cape Breton. Though her story begins on a happy note with Poppa taking her out of school on her birthday to join him on his bread deliveries, Kate's story is not one filled with childhood joys. Mamma has consumption and is weak and often resting, while Poppa has started drinking and rarely at home. Sadly, the responsibilities for children and house fall to Kate, who begins to fall behind in school.  While there is family around, including Mamma's mother and siblings, there is much strife especially from Aunt Flora who constantly berates Poppa about his drinking and Mamma who always forgives him his ways and despises her sister's interference.  With Poppa unable to keep a job, he decides to get one logging on the mountain in Margaree, where his parents, Aigneis and Hector, live on a farm without electricity or indoor plumbing. Mamma is thrilled to go, though Aunt Flora convinces her to allow Kate to stay with her and Uncle Will to finish her school year, as on the mountain only Lily and David would be going to school.

For about three months, Kate experiences what it is like to have guardians who take care of her. They feed her, clothe her, love her and worry about her safety. Though her family is never far from her thoughts, she enjoys a real Christmas of family warmth. Then Aigneis insists that Kate join the rest of her family on the mountain as they need her help and her mother misses her.

While her mother promises her that Kate will return to school and not end up in service, Kate wonders how her mother can make such a promise, especially with Mamma feeling worse and praying to never leave the mountain. Though Kate appreciates some aspects of her new life, like learning skills like carding and spinning fleece as well as participating in a céilidh, she is more than ready to return to Whitney Pier when Mamma starts coughing up blood and collapses.

Though Aunt Flora continues to pass along money and food to the family via Kate, things are not much better with Mamma in the hospital. Unfortunately, things go from bad to worse and the family Kate has always known fractures with one tragedy after another. How the family will survive and in what configuration is only resolved through Donna Grassby's poignant storytelling, both heartbreaking and hopeful.

Kate's Ring is not a story of lightness and familial comfort. There are moments of joy, like when Kate's Aunt Flo and Uncle Will gift her with a pair of snowshoes or when she learns how to spin yarn, but Kate's life is more about responsibilities and chores and getting by. Sadly this probably has been the lot of many children whose families have had to deal with illness and financial woes, especially with parents who could not be there for their children because of their own troubles. Still Kate accepts her responsibilities for her siblings and her family without much fuss; instead she just does what is expected and necessary while holding onto a sliver of faith that things will right themselves. Even the  book's cover upholds the idea that sometimes, even when you feel like you're a long way out from the safety of shore, there's more rain to come.

Setting Kate's Ring in 1920s Cape Breton, Donna Grassby makes sure young readers see that childhood was not always about play and school. Sometimes it was whatever was needed to help the family out. And by contrasting life in towns and in rural areas, where you might or might not have electricity and plumbing, where travel happened by horse, car and train, and not all children were fortunate enough to go to school, Donna Grassby embeds that story of loss and hardship in families of different shapes. It's family created, sustained and reconfigured that makes Kate's Ring real for the time and for now.

Taking a Chance on Love

Written by Mary Razzell
Ronsdale Press
978-1-55380-455-0
156 pp.
Ages 14+
February 2016

Taking a Chance on Love was still to become a jazz standard, having only been released a few years earlier in 1940, but it perfectly exemplies the summer of 1944 for seventeen-year-old Meg when boys and affairs of the heart seem to abound for her and everyone.

Though Meg is still quite innocent and naïve about her feelings towards boys, her best friend, Amy Miller, is anything but.  Amy is well aware of them, easily flirting with the wealthy Robert Pryce whose extramarital activities involve several married women, including Amy’s own mother, and setting her sights on any man who could give her a good life.  Meg notices a lot and sometimes knows enough to be wary but can’t always put the big picture together, unfortunately accused by Amy of being jealous  when she attempts to share those feelings.  With her own mother deeply entrenched in the staunch ideas of what being a woman entails i.e., not continuing one’s education but marrying instead, and her father and older brother Sam away at war, Meg has to navigate these treacherous waters as best she can.

From Doug Thompson, a soldier pen pal, to seventeen-year-old Glen Pryce, wealthy half-brother of Robert Pryce, and 22-year-old Bruce Hanson, the emotionally- and physically-scarred Navy son of her employer at Hanson’s Guest House, Meg has no shortage of young men who can help her learn how to handle how she feels.  Sadly, as with coming-of-age for all of us, Meg endures many sweet and bitter moments as she tries to uncover this.

It made me curious, excited, with strong, unexpected yearnings.  But I also felt uneasy, not really ready to know any more about this new world. (pg. 94)

Taking a Chance on Love may be rich in the landscape of 1940s British Columbia, with the war, TB, medical practices, the expectations for women, and the music and clothes, but it could be any teen girl’s story as she delves into first relationships with boys and tries to find herself while opening herself up to the possibilities of finding someone to love.  With some marriages falling apart and others forged because of war, Taking a Chance on Love takes place in a tenous and strengthening time.  It’s a time that is both sweet and enlightening, temporarilty transporting readers to an era when love wasn’t dependent on social media and digital technology but more on self-discovery and resolve.

Oscar Lives Next Door

A story inspired by Oscar Peterson's childhood

by Bonnie Farmer

Illustrated by Marie Lafrance

Owlkids Books

978-1-77147-104-6

Ages 4-8

September 2015

Canadian jazz lovers will all know pianist Oscar Peterson very well.  But with Oscar Lives Next Door, author Bonnie Farmer and illustrator Marie Lafrance will introduce younger readers to the legendary musician and his musical beginnings while providing a glimpse into a less-than-famous life-changing event that sent the young Oscar to the piano.

Told from the perspective of Mildred, the little girl who lives next door to Oscar in the predominantly black community of Little Burgundy in Montreal, Oscar Lives Next Door focuses on the musical family of brothers and sisters of which Oscar is but the trumpet player.  Yes, the trumpet player.  And as much as she is Oscar’s playmate running the streets of Little Burgundy, Mildred sees Oscar as a magician of music.

He blows a few notes and, like magic, a turbaned genie curls out of the trumpet’s mouth and floats above the telephone wires. (pg. 13)

Then Oscar’s red handkerchief, a common accessory of horn players, which was usually flying out from the boy’s pocket, is drawn lying useless on the ground. Oscar is ill with tuberculosis and hospitalized, and the music, the play with Mildred, and even the talking stops for Oscar. It is only after a year’s hospitalization and his return home that Oscar tries to find the magic again,  first taking apart his trumpet and then looking within the family piano.

Oscar sits at the piano.  His fingers pause over the keys for a moment before playing.  When they finally touch the keyboard, it sounds like rolling thunder. (pg. 29)

While Oscar Lives Next Door is a fictionalized story, his love of the trumpet, his life-threatening illness (the same illness from which his brother dies), and his subsequent though temporary lack of speech were all key events in Oscar Peterson’s life, helping to create the pianist he became and for which the world loved him.  Bonnie Farmer gets the right tone of reality and fiction by creating a neighbourhood friend who experiences Oscar’s musicality–sometimes to the chagrin of her hard-working, sleep-deprived father–and is there to offer a child’s perspective on his music and his illness.

Be sure to take note of Marie Lafrance’s touching illustrations which transport the reader to the working-class neighbourhoods of Little Burgundy and adjacent Saint-Henri of the 1930s.  With the easily-identifiable Union Church and the train tracks, smokestacks and cars, trucks and horse-drawn carts, Little Burgundy comes alive and becomes the playground and home of Oscar and Millie and a character in its own.  Marie Lafrance, whose artwork has graced numerous youngCanLit classics (including The Tweedles Go Online and The Tweedles Go Electric reviewed here on CanLit for LittleCanadians) conveys a time and place when children could play safely on the streets, when music streamed the air, and life was full, following the seasons and the workings of fathers.  What a treat it would’ve been to have Oscar live next door.

The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Nicki Haddon Mystery

by Caroline Stellings

Second Story Press

978-1-927583-63-0

152 pp.

Ages 12-16

March, 2015

I'm so sorry that I missed Caroline Stellings' first Nicki Haddon mystery, The Scratch on the Ming Vase (Second Story Press, 2013), but now that I've enjoyed The Secret of the Golden Flower, I'll go back and learn how this young kung-fu champion and spy-in-training found herself on an action-packed trajectory in aid of international security.

In The Secret of the Golden Flower, sixteen-year-old Nicki Haddon arrives in London, England with her handler and former family butler Fenwick to further her training with the British Secret Intelligence Service.  But, whilst Fenwick is summoned away to Buckingham Palace, Nicki heads to Fenwick's sister Emma's place where she will board.  Though her 40-something punker band mates, Dawn and Anika, and Anika's 18-year-old son Sid, are welcoming, Emma is less than kind and keeps Nicki en garde, just as the teen is about a flower vendor at the airport who was taking photos of her or with a friend of Sid's named Todd Bead, a heroin addict and gang member who had been stalking Nicki though he comes to warn Sid about the cops coming.

But Sid is arrested, ending up in Limehouse Prison, an unhealthy place for someone suffering from respiratory illness, such as the tuberculosis rampant in London's East End, and Nikki tries to unravel the connections between a major heroin syndicate, a series of lectures at the Natural History Museum, an old book Queen Victoria's grandsons had in their possession, and the involvement of Todd, Sid, one of Nicki's intelligence instructors, and others.

The subplots of The Secret of the Golden Flower are like petals of the titular flower: not dense and overwhelming but loosely overlapping, fragile and tender but foreshadowing something more powerful, even dangerous.  In fact, Caroline Stellings' Nicki Haddon is not unlike the flower itself, seemingly small and pretty, even delicate, perhaps a little vulnerable because of the secrecy of her heritage and adoption from China, but not one with whom you would mess, if you were wise.  Nicki is a teen with her own issues which help build her compassion for others, even heroin addicts and gang members such as Todd.

Their only option in life was to join a gang and learn to steal and use violence to try to get some control over their lives. (pg. 117)

I prefer Nicki to so many of the strong female protagonists of trendy YA lit. She is never over-the-top.  Sure, her being recruited as a spy for British Intelligence may seem unrealistic at first glance, but it never seems so in The Secret of the Golden Flower, and I suspect it is similar in The Scratch on the Ming Vase.  She just happens to be a clever and talented martial artist, with the right stuff to insinuate herself into situations in which she can problem-solve the mysteries within. And for those of you who wonder how she is able to manage all this with her family–e.g., don't her parents wonder what she's up to?–you'll need to read the books to see how seamlessly Caroline Stellings is able to integrate all these aspects of Nicki's life.

I've become quite impressed with the depth and diversity of Caroline Stellings' writing, from The Secret of the Golden Flower to her previous books including The Contest (Second Story Press, 2009), The Manager (Cape Breton University Press, 2013) and Gypsy's Fortune (Peanut Butter Press, 2014).  Whether it be picture books, historical fiction, middle grade fiction or action-mystery, I think Caroline Stellings will be on the CanLit for LittleCanadians lit radar from now on.