Wayne GradyReseñas

I still prefer [b:The Hidden Life of Trees|28256439|The Hidden Life of Trees What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World|Peter Wohlleben|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1464281905l/28256439._SX50_.jpg|48295241] because it is both (a) a bit more focused on botany and (b) has much more depth to the information it imparts. But for a quicker version of insights into trees and the environment they create and depend upon, Suzuki's book is really good.

I was given this book as a gift. I was pleased to see that it was written by a Canadian author and by one that had not read before. The book was somewhat of a disappointment to me. It is told from two points of view - the father Harry and his 20-year-old daughter Daphne. Each point of view was told from a different time frame. Even though the time difference was only a few months, I found it confusing and difficult to follow. More than once I had to go back and read the chapter page which had the date on it. I also found that I couldn't relate to or sympathize with either point of view. Wayne Grady did a fairly good job of portraying the hitches and misunderstandings that can occur in familial relationships. He also does a good job of displaying what goes on in the mind of an addict. But the story just didn't come together for me. Even the ending was confusing even though it resolved most of the outstanding issues. My 3-star rating isa bit of a stretch because, for me, most of the book was 2-stars. But there were enough little gems in the book to bring it up to a hopeful 3 stars. I did enjoy the close looks at Vancouver and Toronto. These were two of the most self-absorbed characters that I've ever come across in fiction. It was with a feeling of relief that I closed the covers on this book.

Having read and enjoyed Wayne Grady’s previous novels (Emancipation Day and Up From Freedom), I certainly wanted to read his latest. It did not disappoint.

The book focuses on a father-daughter relationship. Harry Bowes moves to Toronto from the small town of White Falls (“on the Madawaska River, between Ottawa and Peterborough”) to take a teaching job; he leaves behind his wife and ten-year-old daughter Daphne. He never lives in White Falls again because his marriage ends in divorce and he eventually remarries. He remains in contact with Daphne, visiting her and having her visit him, but their connection is eroded.

Daphne feels abandoned by her father, and the loving young girl is replaced by a hostile young woman who seems determined to totally destroy her relationship with Harry; she physically distances herself from him and limits contact with him. Then she abandons her studies and begins self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. A crisis brings them together physically, but will they be able to bridge the emotional distance?

I found myself frustrated with Harry. He is supposed to be the adult, but he does not behave as one. He doesn’t give much thought to how his move from home will affect his daughter. He doesn’t even tell her that he’s leaving; he just assumes she will be alright: “The relationship and trust and companionship he had built up with her over the years would ripen.” Later, when it’s obvious that Daphne is not doing well, he has to be pushed to make more than a cursory effort to contact her. Rather than reach out to find out exactly what Daphne is doing, he imagines best-case scenarios, “picturing her in a bright, cheerful apartment, with hardwood floors and tall windows that let in plenty of sunlight. . . . Food in the refrigerator, healthful food, smoked salmon, Boston lettuce, and a jar of real capers . . . and a small wine rack with bottles of a clear Okanagan sauvignon blanc.” Harry is so right when he comments on his passivity: “’I think I may just have been doing what was easiest for me.’”

I sometimes found myself equally frustrated with Daphne. Her behaviour as a child is understandable; she feels abandoned by her father with whom she had a close bond. She looks for affection and attention elsewhere. As a young adult, however, she makes choices that seem to be intended to punish her father because she cannot forgive him, even when those same choices destroy her own life. She is so focused on what she sees as her father’s betrayal that she continues to blame him and wallow in self-pity when, in fact, she bears responsibility for her actions. It takes a long time for her to admit that maybe her father’s leaving was “more a mistake than a premeditated desertion.”

The novel provides a dual perspective; the reader sees both Harry and Daphne’s points of view. It is so realistic to read Harry saying, “’Daphne isn’t always there. She’s always somewhere else’” and later, when he argues, “’I was always there for you’” have Daphne counter with “’Always there, never here.’”
In Daphne’s chapters, when she is facing a personal crisis and resorts to drugs again and again, she refers to herself in the second person. This approach is somewhat disorienting but very effectively shows the chaos in her life.

There are two aspects which I particularly enjoyed. As a former English teacher, I loved the many literary allusions. Shakespeare is quoted often, but W. B. Yeats and Walter Raleigh and Matt Cohen and Robertson Davies and Edna O’Brien and Siri Hustvedt and others are referenced. Though White Falls is fictional, I grew up in the Madawaska Valley so references to “the Madawaska Valley accent” and “Madawaska Grunge” made me smile, as did mentions of Pembroke and Foymount.
The father-daughter relationship is portrayed so realistically that readers who are fathers or daughters will be inspired to examine their own relationships. The novel reminds us that love requires “So much forgiveness . . . so much overlooking of hurt, so much emphasis on intentionality” and that love has many shapes. Such a though-provoking book should be read.

Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).

We used to call trees 'timber'

But this story shows a life as intense as a human's. Suzuki and Grady make this a highly accessible science narrative. Some may wish to skim the technical and breathe in the poetical. Dendrophilics and ecologists will get a fine intro to forest processes and fully engage with the lifespan of a single Douglas fir.

Read for book club.

I have mixed feelings about this one. It wasn't a particularly difficult read and the depictions of the realities of slavery, while terrible, did not dwell on the details of the brutalities inflicted. However, there were an awful lot of characters, many many place names and names of rivers etc, and although I liked Moody, it was a vague sort of liking. If I hadn't needed to finish it for book club, I could have walked away from the story at any point.

The chapters about Sarah and Leasom's trial were quite suspenseful, but the rest just plodded on. It did make me think, but it could have been a lot shorter and more tightly plotted and had the same effect.

Virgil Moody decides that he never wants to own slaves like his father so while he is visiting his father's plantation he meets Annie, a defiant slave. He decides to take her away with him convinced he is rescuing her from a life of brutality. He finds out she is pregnant and decides to raise the child as his own son. What follows is an often painful and thoughtful journey through Virgil's trying to make up for the past.
I found the novel hard to read at times and very thought provoking but in the end I was glad I read it. The key issue throughout the novel is the question as to how do we make peace with the past and our own sins, and how can we be sure that we are doing the right thing?

The author's personal history first drew me to this novel: at the age of 47, seemingly white Canadian Wayne Grady discovered that he had African ancestry. Grady incorporates some of that family history into this novel: an Indiana court case about two mixed-race ancestors that has a surprising outcome and that highlights the ridiculousness of racism and categorization. His main character is the fictional Virgil Moody, a planter's son whose relationships with three different women over the course of the story help him overcome his own racial prejudices. I thought this novel got stronger as it went on. The court case is riveting - painful, yes, but it rings true.

Virgil Moody “vowed he would never own slaves, never be like his father” but when he left home “he’d taken Annie [a house slave] from his father’s plantation.” Moody discovered that Annie was pregnant but he comes to think of her and her son Lucas as his family. This family is broken apart when Lucas falls in love with a slave belonging to their neighbour and flees with her. Virgil sets out to find him, enroute encountering people with differing attitudes to slavery. Eventually, he finds himself in Freedom, Indiana, where he meets Tamsey and her family who are trying to escape the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Though Virgil is searching for Lucas, his journey is very much a journey of self-discovery. At the beginning he fails to understand that his actions make him complicit in slavery. He claims to abhor slavery, but he fights on the side of Texas in the Mexican-American War knowing that “Texans were fighting for slavery.” He convinces himself that he saved Annie from his father’s cruelty but he never asked her if she wanted to come with him. He claims that he knows Annie stayed with him because she wanted to “’because she didn’t leave’.” Virgil thinks “of Annie as his wife and Lucas as their son” but “Annie hadn’t been as comfortable with that as he was [because] the consequences for her were far greater than they were for him.” Virgil tells Lucas, “’I always raised you like a son’” but Lucas points out, “’Did you? Wouldn’t you have sent your son to school?’” At one point, Annie asks Virgil to talk to Lucas but Virgil replies, “’He’s your son’” and she responds with “’But he your slave!’” And Virgil never actually frees them!

Gradually, Virgil comes to realize that he could have done more. When Annie and Lucas have to stay in steerage, “suffocated below on straw mats and were fed gruel,” aboard a steamer while he “slept comfortably in his cabin, on clean sheets and in fresh air,” he counts himself “virtuous for having noticed [Annie’s] anger, thinking she would appreciate the difference between his concern and the other passengers’ lack of it. Annie and Lucas were more to him than slaves: wasn’t he a fine chap? . . . But what could he have done? More.” Virgil comes to see his selfishness, to see that he had blindly assumed “that doing what was good for him was good for everyone else concerned.” He admits “He was only generous when it suited him. He transported fugitives only because he thought they might help him find Lucas. And he didn’t even want to find Lucas for Lucas’s sake, but for his own. For forgiveness.”

It is Tamsey who forces Virgil “to admit to himself what he was. A white man in a world that was increasingly determined by the consequences of slavery. It was time for him to stop acting surprised and indignant whenever anyone suggested to him that the reason he hadn’t freed Annie or Lucas was that he had liked it that their relationship was based on ownership, that that was the way he’d been raised, and, hate it though he professed he did, it was the relationship he understood and felt most comfortable with.” Then, when given an opportunity, he sets out to redeem himself.

The concept of freedom is examined in the novel. Virgil tells Lucas, “’You [and your mother] always been free here” but obviously Anne and Lucas don’t feel that way. A man Virgil encounters tells him “’our Northern states are proud of the fact that their constitutions do not allow slavery. No, the workers on these industrious projects are free blacks – a designation that usually signifies a man is free from slavery, but that here has come to mean also a man who works for free. Or for wages so low that he can’t afford to do anything about his situation.” Even freed slaves with “free papers” fear fugitive catchers, especially with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act: “’I show our papers to catchers, you think they leave us alone?’” And Virgil can never be truly free of his past.
Set between May 1848 and November 1850, the novel examines racial turmoil in the United States at that time, a turmoil that erupted in the American Civil War a decade later. But the novel is relevant to today. Virgil’s father taught him that “’Nothing is forgiven . . . Some things are forgotten, but damn few. And nothing is every forgiven’” and Virgil realizes that “his father had been right, that forgiveness meant wiping the record clean and that could never happen.” Slavery cannot be wiped clean and so not truly forgiven but perhaps, as one character says, “’It not too late to seek a better world’”?

There is a trial towards the end of the novel that has a twist I never expected but is apparently based on an actual case involving the author’s great-great-grandparents. It emphasizes that the terms “black” and “white” are in many ways meaningless and only labels which can be used/misused to serve one’s purposes. Can any of us really call ourselves one or the other?

This is an excellent novel which I highly recommend. It has a compelling plot and a complex character who learns much about the world and himself. The book will leave readers asking questions about their own behaviour.

Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).

Jack Lewis is from Windsor, Ontario, a border town across the St. Clair river from Detroit, Michigan. Borders are regularly crossed in Windsor — over to Detroit to partake of the jazz clubs and from The Settlement over to the whiter parts of town. Jack’s real name is Jackson. That’s what his mother calls him. His father, William Henry, hardly knows what to call him, a boy so light he might just be white. And white is just what Jack thinks of himself as. So much so that he spends a fair portion of his self-narrative in a losing game of white washing. But how can he white wash his father? He can’t. So he’s got to go where no one has any inkling of the mixing that occurs, sometimes, in Windsor. Newfoundland.

In Newfoundland, during WWII, Jack takes up with Vivian. She loves him for his charm, his good looks (like Frank Sinatra), and for his music (he sings and plays trombone in a band). Vivian isn’t entirely certain Jack is all that he says he is, or rather isn’t, since he is not forthcoming about his origins. But she loves him enough to marry him anyway. Once the war ends, the navy sends Jack and Vivian back to Jack’s home town. Surely Vivian is due for a bit of eye opening. But will Jack’s own eyes and heart be opened as well?

This first novel had a long gestation. Some of that shows in how well-honed parts of it are. Some of it shows in a disjointedness in the narrative, as though disparate narrative tranches have been stitched together. Some of it shows in periodic heavy-handedness. Well, it’s a first novel and maybe that can be expected. Of course for many the relationship between the story and author’s personal history will supersede any consideration of the novel as fiction. But perhaps a work of non-fiction would have been more satisfying in that case.

I live in the city this book was set; I knew very little of the history it tells. I learned so much - a history lesson.I enjoyed this unique story. I never had any doubt about my heritage, now I see the dilemma of not understanding who you are and not embracing your heritage and the self doubt it can create.

lots of people i had never read. the book is in florida now.

This just didn't do it for me. I don't know if it was because I felt like there wasn't anything in the story I could relate to or if I just found the characters unlikeable... But not my cup of tea. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why I'm even keeping it....

This was a book that was recommended to me, and when I read that it was set around WWII and steeped in the jazz and be bop movement that was popular at that time, I just couldn't resist it. When I found out that it was also a book that made the 2013 Giller prize long list and was nominated a Globe and Mail Best Book, I knew I had to read it. The book is about much more than WWII and the big band and jazz era. It is a book about families, and father and son relationships. It's a book about Canada and how we differ from our neighbours to the south. But the more we're different from them, the more we are the same it appears. I did not realize that Canada had it's own civil rights movement even one hundred odd years after the American war between the States and Emancipation Day. Even today there are many people living in Canada who deal with race and cultural issues on a daily basis. We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to achieve true equality in this country. This book shows us the anguish of children and people trying to fit in, through the eyes of one little boy. This little boy is 18 when the story opens, but in flashbacks we see this confused little boy as he grew up in Windsor, Ontario. We see his anguish as he determines that he has to escape his family and home life in order to find a place where he might finally feel like he belonged. We see the family that he leaves behind as they struggle to come to terms with the needs of this their youngest child. A young girl from Newfoundland is drawn into this family drama because she meets and falls in love with Jack. When she goes with Jack to visit his family home in Windsor, Vivian comes face to face with a Jack she never knew existed. Her life is forever changed, and she must find the strength to deal with the new reality that has come to her life. This is a book that definitely made me stop and think. I enjoyed it very much.

This ensemble narrated book, based in the 40s and 50s really hit something inside of me, surprising me and pulling me in. Each character, given their own narrative had their own unique point of view of events that happened, giving a full fleshed out picture of what happens when someone might not be willing to accept who they are. It reflects the length we go to as people, to possibly escape our pasts, but inevitably some pieces of it end up engrained in our future.

It is easy to tell that this book, in some ways is autobiographical, and it is so well written that all of the characters become people to sympathize with. Whether it’s Jack, who really is a little boy lost, not matter what decisions he tries to make. Or Vivian who is so naive and yet one of the warmer characters in the novel. William Henry was the one who I felt the most sympathy for, as he made wrong decisions, left and right and didn’t quite know what to make of his son until it was far too late.

It was also a good, albeit sad reflection of racial relations in both the U.S and Canada which really fleshed out the realism in the book.

This book also made me fall in love with it because it is a Canadian novel, with settings so close to me, and the area I live in. It was simply a well written, well woven tale.

Good for:

Those who love a good historical book with a strong basis in reality.

Emancipation Day takes place during the 1930 and 1940's. While in the end I appreciated reading the story, I did find it to be a bit of a slog.

It's told in the third person , from three points of view, father William Henry, son Jack and Jack's wife Vivian. The biggest problem I had with the majority of the story is that I was unable to feel any sympathy towards two of the main characters, William Henry and Jack. That makes for a difficult read. None of the characters were well fleshed out.

What worked for me was that towards the end of the book I gained a much better idea of the struggle that the characters had with racial identity . It gave me a new understanding of racial identity, and for me, that made the book worth reading.

3.5 stars½

Jack Lewis, a Navy musician stationed in St. John’s, Nfld, during WWII, meets Vivian and marries her despite her family’s misgivings. After the war, they set off for Windsor, Ont., to meet Jack’s family before they decide where they will live. It is in Windsor that Vivian starts discovering that there is much Jack has not told her and that much of what he has is not the truth.

Jack’s biggest secret, revealed to the reader in the first quarter of the book, is that he is passing as white. His entire life has been devoted to passing tests to prove that he is white: “girlfriends, lunch-counter waitresses, the high-school baseball team, and so far he’d passed them all.” He joins a band called the All-Whites: “No one blinked when Jack joined the band, which meant no one knew anything about him or his family.” To remain anonymous is his goal: “Nobody knew who he was, and nobody cared, which was Jack’s idea of paradise.” When Vivian suggests that since Jack’s family is in Windsor, he belongs there, he replies, “’No, it ain’t. . . . You get born, you grow up and you leave. . . . Why can’t I belong to where I’m going?’”

The relationship between Jack and Vivian is problematic. First of all, Jack is not a likeable person. He may resemble Frank Sinatra, but he has little else going for him. He’s a glib actor and not just when he’s on stage. Vivian‘s sister calls him a “smooth” performer: “’He’s meant to be looked at, not understood. . . . He’s all surface.’” She also describes him as “by-catch” and, even after the wedding, thinks of him as an “unpleasantness, like a blocked drain.” Even Vivian is bothered by his reserve and distance: “He didn’t look at her when he talked, he didn’t put his arm around her when they walked down the street. We’re not even married yet, she thought, and already we’re acting like an old couple. What will it be like when we’re actually married.” Furthermore, Jack never tells Vivian that he loves her. She “worried how to tell him she loved him . . . [and] practised telling him,” but there is no mention made of his ever declaring his love for her. Nonetheless, she marries him? Vivian’s sister says, “’You only think you’re in love with him because he’s your ticket off the island’” and Vivian, herself, when listing reasons for getting married mentions love “almost as an afterthought.” Certainly there is not a great deal of passion in the relationship – sex, yes, but passion, no. Perhaps Vivian hits on the truth when she comments to her husband, “’How can you love me if you don’t love your own family?’”

Vivian’s character development is weak. There just seems no vitality to her personality; she could best be described as tepid. Her most outstanding trait is her naivety, this perhaps being the result of her sheltered upbringing. She speaks about “about her desire to see something of the world,” but has little concrete idea of what she would like to see. Throughout the novel, she remains vague and amorphous. The last sentence of the novel is powerful, but it does suggest that she remains a non-entity - even in her own family she has no impact.

There are some plotting issues. For example, the timing of Vivian’s epiphany is just too perfect. Then, is it likely that Jack’s secret could be kept for so long in a community the size of Windsor? And, in the episode where Jack and Peter go searching for Della, how does Peter manage to return home so quickly and without a vehicle? By the time Jack finds Della, Peter is already home, despite their being “miles from home, too far to walk”? Peter’s absence is necessary for what transpires next, but it should be explained logically.

Despite its shortcomings, the novel does have good qualities. It seriously examines the theme of self-identity and explores race issues in the mid-twentieth century. The reader may not approve of Jack’s behaviour and would prefer if he were more accepting of his heritage, but it is understandable given the treatment of blacks in that time period. The use of point of view is very effective; the perspective of several characters is given, including that of Jack, his father, and Vivian. The title of the book is genius; it refers to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, but it has an entirely different meaning for Jack. And given the date of publication and the author’s own history, Emancipation Day has meanings on other levels as well. Despite its not being flawless, the book certainly gives readers some things to consider.

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Evergreens help make much of the Pacific Northwest one of the most beautiful places on earth. Pines, cedars, and Douglas-fir line the horizon almost everywhere I go, and I’m lucky enough to see a few out any window of my house. But trees are more than ornaments. They are environments unto themselves. They provide shelter, food, and nutrients to a rich mix of birds, mammals, insects, and smaller organisms in the soil. I sometimes stop in the woods during mountain hikes and try to picture all the activity, both seen and unseen. Seeing a tree is one thing. Understanding and appreciating them is much deeper.

David Suzuki and Wayne Grady have put together an enjoyable book to help you do that. Tree: A Life Story, follows the long life of a single Douglas-fir in the Pacific Northwest. Beginning with the aftermath of a forest fire, the book studies the germination, growth, death, and recycling of the seed that becomes a giant. It rises through the forest canopy seeking sunlight, and deals with attacks and inconveniences from insects, birds, and other natural forces, before returning to the soil.

This may seem like a child’s book on the life cycle of a tree, but it is not simplistic. Suzuki (whom you may know from the television series The Nature of Things) and Grady delve into science every step of the way. Why do roots dig down while the stem sprouts up? How does the seedling know down from up anyway? How does chlorophyll work? How do the sugars produced in that process get distributed and, for that matter, how does the tree pump water and nutrients up a trunk that is over 200 feet tall?

The authors look beyond “our” individual Douglas-fir. They explore the tree’s relationships, too. A tree does not move, of course, but it connects, interacts, and communicates with nearly everything in its ecosystem, starting with the mychorrhyzial relationship its root tips share with fungi and the chemical defenses it deploys against insects. It even releases warnings to other trees when disease strikes.

Pleasantly meandering discussions in the book wander into the science of genetics, pollen distribution, bird, squirrel and salamander activity, how salmon improve forests, and the growth of botanical science over the centuries. All these topics — tread upon lightly but addressed satisfactorily — fit into a slim volume. I haven’t enjoyed a popular science book as much as this one in a long time.

Trees live longer and grow larger than any other organisms on earth, but they literally blend into the scenery unless you stop to notice the often small-scale, slow-motion activity feverishly taking place in and around them. By the time you reach the last page of Tree, even a rotted-out nurse log might stir your thoughts.

Find more of my reviews at Mostly NF.

A very good collection of 28 short stories by some of Canada's leading writers through the 19th and 20th centuries.