Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Autor de The Cure for Death by Lightning
Sobre El Autor
Gail Anderson-Dargatz wrote The Miss Herford Stories, a collection of short stories, A Recipe for Bees, and The Cure for Death by Lightning, which won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the British Columbia Book Prize. (Bowker Author Biography) Gail Anderson-Dargatz is also the author of the mostrar más award-winning "The Cure for Death by Lightning". She lives with her husband on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
Créditos de la imagen: wordfest.com
Series
Obras de Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Anderson-Dargatz, Gail Kathryn
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1963-11-14
Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada - Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- Canada
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada
- Lugares de residencia
- Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada
Thompson-Shuswap, British Columbia, Canada
Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada - Educación
- University of Victoria (BA|Creative Writing)
- Ocupaciones
- novelist
reporter
photographer
cartoonist
writing instructor (Providence Bay Writers' Camp ∙ University of British Columbia) - Organizaciones
- University of British Columbia
Canadian Writers' Union
Providence Bay Writers' Camp - Agente
- Denise Bukowski
- Biografía breve
- Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose fictional style has been coined as “Pacific Northwest Gothic” by the Boston Globe, has been published worldwide in English and in many other languages. A Recipe for Bees and The Cure for Death by Lighting were international bestsellers, and were both finalists for the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada. The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize among other awards. A Rhinestone Button was a national bestseller in Canada and her first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was short-listed for the Leacock Award for humour. She currently teaches fiction in the creative writing MFA program at the University of British Columbia, and lives in the Shuswap, the landscape found in so much of her writing.
Miembros
Reseñas
I absolutely love the ending of this book. I love that everyone got the ending they deserved.
Don't want to give anything away, so I will just say that I will definitely read more of Gail Anderson-Dargatz's novels in the future.
Don't want to give anything away, so I will just say that I will definitely read more of Gail Anderson-Dargatz's novels in the future.
I don't know why, but I had it in my head that this was a fun, light-hearted book, sort of in the way that [b:Amphibian|6452033|Amphibian|Carla Gunn|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328759365s/6452033.jpg|6642202] by [a:Carla Gunn|2922903|Carla Gunn|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1306197890p2/2922903.jpg] is. See, I tend to quickly read summaries of books, decide if it's of interest, and then add it to my "to read" list. I never again look at what the book is supposed to be about so that nothing is given away.
It must have been the title and the cover that made me think this book was entertaining. The content is way too heavy to be considered "light-hearted."
(Stop reading here if you want "nothing given away".)
Beth is a farmer's daughter to a poor family in rural country during WWII. They're so rural and back-country that it might as well be 100 years ago. Her father went crazy about a year prior and is prone to fly into rages unexpectedly. Her mother is part submissive, part willfully blind to the abuse he gives his family, the daughter in particular. The older brother is mostly "normal" until you find out he's got a thing for cows. Beth drops out of school after being stripped and tormented by the other kids. Even when she confesses to her mother what happened, her mother refuses to believe it "they're nice kids, they'd never do that." So Beth finds friendship with a local biracial Aboriginal girl and the two of them explore their sexuality together.
All the while, there's another local "crazy man" who's been possessed by the trickster Coyote and has a hunger for young children. Beth is haunted and stalked by Coyote.
It's all very dark and other-worldly. Not at all whimsical and fun. The writing captivated me and compelled me to keep reading, but the storyline also caused me some stress because of all the awfulness that went on.
Great Canadian literature, but don't let the cover & title fool you!… (más)
It must have been the title and the cover that made me think this book was entertaining. The content is way too heavy to be considered "light-hearted."
(Stop reading here if you want "nothing given away".)
Beth is a farmer's daughter to a poor family in rural country during WWII. They're so rural and back-country that it might as well be 100 years ago. Her father went crazy about a year prior and is prone to fly into rages unexpectedly. Her mother is part submissive, part willfully blind to the abuse he gives his family, the daughter in particular. The older brother is mostly "normal" until you find out he's got a thing for cows. Beth drops out of school after being stripped and tormented by the other kids. Even when she confesses to her mother what happened, her mother refuses to believe it "they're nice kids, they'd never do that." So Beth finds friendship with a local biracial Aboriginal girl and the two of them explore their sexuality together.
All the while, there's another local "crazy man" who's been possessed by the trickster Coyote and has a hunger for young children. Beth is haunted and stalked by Coyote.
It's all very dark and other-worldly. Not at all whimsical and fun. The writing captivated me and compelled me to keep reading, but the storyline also caused me some stress because of all the awfulness that went on.
Great Canadian literature, but don't let the cover & title fool you!… (más)
Esta reseña ha sido escrita por los Primeros Reseñadores de LibraryThing.I received this book as a Librarything-giveaway. this novelette was simply written and a page turner. I read it in just over an hour. The language and vocabulary are quite simple and the chapters short so this will appeal to non-readers. The plot is riveting and the theme interesting. I will be recommending it to my 17 year old son who is not a big reader, but I think this will appeal to him
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- Idiomas
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- Favorito
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I had no sympathy for the main character: Augusta was such a querulous woman. I know I'm supposed to see how rural women had no choices 80 or so years ago, & I'm supposed to see how people can create a good marriage out of a bad one if they just stick with it long enough. But even when she's thinking how much she loves her husband (as an old woman), she has a flash of anger at what she considers being slighted. I'm supposed to see how her attitude towards First Nations people changed from her grade school taunting to her elderly appreciation of the First Nations woman who sat next to her on a train ride. I'm supposed to see how hard women had to fight to get some respect in their family, yet Augusta also made choices which undermined her respectability. I'm suppposed to see how small town gossip can ruin lives.
The first chapter opens with a conversation between Augusta & Rose. I was all primed to expect Rose to have an important role in the book, & at first felt confused as to who was talking. Rose is actually just a foil for Augusta's thoughts & has no life of her own that we are told.
Some of the Canadian local terms threw me off: 'salish' was considered a derogatory name for First Nations--I thought it was just the name of a US tribe. 'sluts wool' is what I call 'dust bunnies'. I never thought that an english-speaking nation so close would have such different terminology.
And the bees? From the start, Augusta is throwing out novel facts about bees, as she talks w/her friend/husband. But the facts seem randomly placed in the book. Are we to interpret them as part of her obsession with sex? I do want to follow up on her quote from Virgil: this is obviously a reference to maggots, so has the original Greek misinterpreted some word as Bees instead of Fly? Or were the Greeks really so unaware that what hatches from maggots was a different insect?
I did get 1 quote that I'm thinking of sending to a friend who is going thru an unhappy marriage now & had just mentioned how small her kitchen seems. Just don't think this is representative of the quality of the book as a whole. "Somewhere along the road something knocked the life breath from the marriage...Oh, it struggled on for a while, but anyone looking at a couple at that stage could see that the marriage was dying. The partners' movements seemed at odds with one another. Suddenly they were crashing into each other in the kitchen, steppping on each other's toes. The dance they had once done effortlessly became a chore that left them both irritable and hateful. But after that stage, after the kicking was over and the breath was gone, they passed by each other like strangers on the street; there was an agreement there, all right, but of another kind. But that was where the magic, the recipe for bees, came in. Because occasionally something fermented inside the lifeless carcass of a marriage, something began to stir, limbless at first, then with wings whirring, trying out the thin air, till suddenly, like rain from a summer cloud, it burst out with a force that drove old lovers to do things no one, not even they themselves, thought they were capable of." (p. 253)
2011 review… (más)