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All the Quiet Places: A Novel

por Brian Thomas Isaac

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483527,873 (3.5)8
Fiction. Literature. HTML:

Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads

An Indigo Top 100 Book of 2021

"What a welcome debut. Young Eddie Toma's passage through the truly ugly parts of this world is met, like an antidote, or perhaps a compensation, by his remarkable awareness of its beauty. This is a writer who understands youth, and how to tell a story." â??Gil Adamson, winner of the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Ridgerunner

It's 1956, and six-year-old Eddie Toma lives with his mother, Grace, and his little brother, Lewis, near the Salmon River on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in the British Columbia Southern Interior. Grace, her friend Isabel, Isabel's husband Ray, and his nephew Gregory cross the border to work as summer farm labourers in Washington state. There Eddie is free to spend long days with Gregory exploring the farm: climbing a hill to watch the sunset and listening to the wind in the grass. The boys learn from Ray's funny and dark stories. But when tragedy strikes, Eddie returns home grief-stricken, confused, and lonely.

Eddie's life is governed by the decisions of the adults around him. Grace is determined to have him learn the ways of the white world by sending him to school in the small community of Falkland. On Eddie's first day of school, as he crosses the reserve boundary at the Salmon River bridge, he leaves behind his world. Grace challenges the Indian Agent and writes futile letters to Ottawa to protest the sparse resources in their community. His father returns to the family after years away only to bring chaos and instability. Isabel and Ray join them in an overcrowded house. Only in his grandmother's company does he find solace and true companionship.

In his teens, Eddie's future seems more secureâ??he finds a job, and his long-time crush on his white neighbour Eva is finally reciprocated. But every time things look up, circumstances beyond his control crash down around him. The cumulative effects of guilt, grief, and despair threaten everything Eddie has ever known or loved.

All the Quiet Places is the story of what can happen when every adult in a person's life has been affected by colonialism; it tells of the acute separation from culture that can occur even at home in a loved familiar landscape. Its narrative power relies on the unguarded, unsentimental witness provided by Eddie… (más)

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Brian Thomas Isaac's debut novel comes with a long list of awards and almosts:

Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A National Bestseller
Winner of the 2022 Indigenous Voices Awards' Published Prose in English Prize
Shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2022
An Indigo Top 100 Book of 2021
An Indigo Top 10 Best Canadian Fiction Book of 2021

And it is for this reason I chose to read this much-acclaimed novel.

My decision was met with disappointment and even frustration. I shall enumerate for those who care to read:

- The writing was flat, like reading a 14 year-old's English literature assignment. There were no literary devices to engage and evoke response. There was no emotion. Only events and facts. It was almost like reading a statement from a person suffering from PTSD.

- There was no character development, no nuance, no tying character to environment and situation. It was simply a recounting of events.

To illustrate: early in the novel there is a death of the child-protagonist's friend and relative. It is a tragic event. But there is no emotion whatever involved in that event, or that crucial scene. No reaction. The boy drowns. The friend finds him. The families pack up and move on.

In the early portion of the novel there is a hint of the misery about which Steinbeck wrote so well in The Grapes of Wrath. But unlike Steinbeck, Isaac fails to evoke any sense of social injustice, of rage, of misery. It's all just events moving across a flat cinematic landscape. And more's the pity, because there is much about which to rage, to engage, to evoke response. But instead Isaac's novel remains in the flatline grey zone of a could-be great.

At about the halfway point the writing, characterization, and plot arc had become so predictable, stereotyped, and tedious I started speed-reading just to get through it, hoping at some point to find some nugget, some gem to engage my pathos, my investment.

And in the end, in this hopeless tale, hopelessly written, is a hopeless finality which loses all impact because as a reader I wasn't invested.

Certainly the plight of Canada's First Nations people is worthy of examination, of our engagement, of our call to action. And that has been done very eloquently and powerfully by writers like Thomas King, Joseph Boyden, Richard Wagamese, and more. But Isaac? Sadly, his is a whisper of a voice among a forest of giants. ( )
  fiverivers | Dec 14, 2022 |
The Publisher Says: Brian Isaac's powerful debut novel All the Quiet Places is the coming-of-age story of Eddie Toma, an Indigenous (Syilx) boy, told through the young narrator's wide-eyed observations of the world around him.

It's 1956, and six-year-old Eddie Toma lives with his mother, Grace, and his little brother, Lewis, near the Salmon River on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in the British Columbia Southern Interior. Grace, her friend Isabel, Isabel's husband Ray, and his nephew Gregory cross the border to work as summer farm labourers in Washington state. There Eddie is free to spend long days with Gregory exploring the farm: climbing a hill to watch the sunset and listening to the wind in the grass. The boys learn from Ray's funny and dark stories. But when tragedy strikes, Eddie returns home grief-stricken, confused, and lonely.

Eddie's life is governed by the decisions of the adults around him. Grace is determined to have him learn the ways of the white world by sending him to school in the small community of Falkland. On Eddie's first day of school, as he crosses the reserve boundary at the Salmon River bridge, he leaves behind his world. Grace challenges the Indian Agent and writes futile letters to Ottawa to protest the sparse resources in their community. His father returns to the family after years away only to bring chaos and instability. Isabel and Ray join them in an overcrowded house. Only in his grandmother's company does he find solace and true companionship.

In his teens, Eddie's future seems more secure—he finds a job, and his long-time crush on his white neighbour Eva is finally reciprocated. But every time things look up, circumstances beyond his control crash down around him. The cumulative effects of guilt, grief, and despair threaten everything Eddie has ever known or loved.

All the Quiet Places is the story of what can happen when every adult in a person's life has been affected by colonialism; it tells of the acute separation from culture that can occur even at home in a loved familiar landscape. Its narrative power relies on the unguarded, unsentimental witness provided by Eddie.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: This beautifully written debut novel, telling a deeply affecting story of a boy's coming of age amid loss and deprivation, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. I'm a bit surprised that it didn't make the shortlist because it's got the power and the credibility to impress any judging panel. Still...however they chose, the judges chose this story to stay longlisted.

Eddie Toma is a character I recognize...a youth whose rudder isn't calibrated like he's told it's supposed to be. It's an adolescent trait, of course, but the issues Eddie is coping with are his life are those unique to an unvalued Indigenous male. In a settler-colonial society he isn't going to find a lot of validation. What he has, in compensation, is a formidable grandmother who models a moral compass nonpareil. He spends his entire growing-up time torn between the need, like all of us, to figure out what the world is about, and the impoverished person's need to find enough food to fill his hunger. His life in the white-people school in the nearest town is a nightmare of bewilderment...how is he supposed to know about racism? until he started school he'd never even been to the white people who lived across the road's home!...and there is no one to explain anything to him at home or at school.

Except Eva, the white girl who lives across the road...she's kind, and she's weird, and she's got something Eddie can't quite figure out going on in her mind. (That remains true all through the book.) Eva is a beautiful, willful, intelligent girl caught in a place too small to hold her talent, still less her interest. As Eddie and Eva continue to knock their corners together and as Life gives them nasty buffets and blows, they simply get on with getting on. Growing up. Learning and wondering and trying stuff out.

When I think about the way the story unfolds after reading the ending of the book, I feel so much more as though Author Isaac brought his bluntest weapons to the tale's wordsmithing. I was always involved in Eddie's solitary life, weirdly lived among the crowds of people who were Others to Eddie and who in their turn Othered him. I wished, at every failed opportunity to make a connection with someone, that I could go into the pages and hug Eddie. I wished his family had seen him, the "him" that this novel builds, the real him. His mother was challenged at every single step by single motherhood, by racial prejudice, by the judgment and unkindness of the world; her treatment of her sons was only marginally better than their treatment at the world's hands, and it's there that I wanted to go be a White Savior.

It's not, then, the happiest of lives that Eddie and his family live. He loves, I think, almost no one but he crushes on Eva and still can't connect with her. She, in her turn, is both kind and cruel. She's a kid...she's a rebel...she's a privileged white lass whose feelings for an Indigenous lad are titillatingly forbidden, yet came across to me as sincere. As the years progress, Eddie can't make sense of her, can't make sense of his burgeoning feelings for her, can't take in the manifold cruelties he's undergoing on every level except one quiet refuge: His grandmother.

His mother's mother is a calm center of this chaotic bunch. Even her white racist neighbors feel respect for her, though they never express it without nastiness. Eddie loves her, in the best way a deprived and neglected heart like his can love. Only to her can he turn in all his bewilderment and rage, with all his confused longings for nameless-to-him caring and nurturing. From her he absorbs respect for the wild world, and her son Alphonse (whose life doesn't include much voluntary time spent with any kids) leads him by example to knowledge of and connection with his environment. These factors enable Eddie to get through the disasters of most all colonialism-, racism-, and poverty-blighted lives. He is, at base and at heart, only truly, trustingly at home in the wild world.

The ending of the story is, I confess, a bit downbeat for my taste; it's the reason I'm not giving the read all five stars. It makes perfect sense. It is exactly what, I suspect, happened to someone, somewhere in Author Isaac's own past. It is not false; it is just...so very, very sad. I wouldn't recommend this as a read for someone needing a cup of cheer. But I do recommend that you read this tender, loving, cruelly realistic tale of life lived in racism's ugly glare. ( )
  richardderus | Oct 25, 2022 |
All the Quiet Places, Brian Thomas Isaac’s emotionally wrenching first novel, begins in 1956. Eddie Toma, six years old, lives in a house on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in Southern British Columbia’s rural interior with his mother, Grace, and younger brother Lewis. Eddie’s grandmother and uncle Alphonse live close by. But other than this their nearest neighbours are the Cluffs, a white family, whose farm is on the other side of the Salmon River, which marks the border between Indian land and the white man’s world. In an attempt to separate her children from the difficulties and dangers of reserve life, Grace has chosen to live in isolation from much of the Indian community. In addition, and against the advice of the government Indian Agent, who argues that Eddie would be better off in the local residential school, she has enrolled her son in the white school in the town of Falkland, a bus ride away. The novel describes Eddie’s troubled early years, from childhood into his teens. Grace is Eddie’s protector and primary influence, and her deep ambivalence toward her Indigenous heritage rubs off on her son. At the school in Falkland, where almost all the students are white, Eddie finds himself a target and is forced to defend himself on an almost daily basis. Later, Grace makes the mistake of allowing Jimmy, Eddie’s father—an unreliable man-child with a short fuse—back into their lives. Eddie has never met his father, and the man’s volatile presence in the home is upsetting and at times frightening. Eventually Jimmy leaves for good, but not before inflicting damage that will never heal. Eddie grows up intensely aware of his status as an Indian in a white man’s world and comes to expect the poor treatment he receives. His friendship with Eva Cluff, who is a couple of years older than him, is a bright spot amidst violence and chaos, but Eddie knows that despite their feelings for one another, their differences make a relationship virtually impossible. Eddie finds some solace in the natural world and his grandmother’s spiritual teachings, but the reader can’t help but wonder if this is enough to see him through. From the first page the reader is drawn to Eddie and moved by his struggles. Isaac’s prose—simple, direct, and uncluttered—cuts deeply. All the Quiet Places, the story of Eddie Toma’s journey through a young life filled with tragedy and loss, is an impressive debut by a natural storyteller who does not pull his punches. ( )
  icolford | Jul 26, 2022 |
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Fiction. Literature. HTML:

Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads

An Indigo Top 100 Book of 2021

"What a welcome debut. Young Eddie Toma's passage through the truly ugly parts of this world is met, like an antidote, or perhaps a compensation, by his remarkable awareness of its beauty. This is a writer who understands youth, and how to tell a story." â??Gil Adamson, winner of the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Ridgerunner

It's 1956, and six-year-old Eddie Toma lives with his mother, Grace, and his little brother, Lewis, near the Salmon River on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in the British Columbia Southern Interior. Grace, her friend Isabel, Isabel's husband Ray, and his nephew Gregory cross the border to work as summer farm labourers in Washington state. There Eddie is free to spend long days with Gregory exploring the farm: climbing a hill to watch the sunset and listening to the wind in the grass. The boys learn from Ray's funny and dark stories. But when tragedy strikes, Eddie returns home grief-stricken, confused, and lonely.

Eddie's life is governed by the decisions of the adults around him. Grace is determined to have him learn the ways of the white world by sending him to school in the small community of Falkland. On Eddie's first day of school, as he crosses the reserve boundary at the Salmon River bridge, he leaves behind his world. Grace challenges the Indian Agent and writes futile letters to Ottawa to protest the sparse resources in their community. His father returns to the family after years away only to bring chaos and instability. Isabel and Ray join them in an overcrowded house. Only in his grandmother's company does he find solace and true companionship.

In his teens, Eddie's future seems more secureâ??he finds a job, and his long-time crush on his white neighbour Eva is finally reciprocated. But every time things look up, circumstances beyond his control crash down around him. The cumulative effects of guilt, grief, and despair threaten everything Eddie has ever known or loved.

All the Quiet Places is the story of what can happen when every adult in a person's life has been affected by colonialism; it tells of the acute separation from culture that can occur even at home in a loved familiar landscape. Its narrative power relies on the unguarded, unsentimental witness provided by Eddie

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