5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Where the past cannot be altered; it can only be lived with. Or buried.", May 8, 2008
Natalie Ward, the heroine of Donna Milner's exquisitely written debut novel must finally confront the ghosts of her past. She's a happily married middle-aged mother and a natural journalist who also has a capacity for engendering great empathy and kindness, but she also has secrets - mostly of the family variety, and mostly sublimated. It is these secrets, and also a sudden phone call from her daughter Jenny telling her that her mother Nettie is dying, that thrusts Natalie back into the past where she forced to relive events - both gorgeous and catastrophic - as she comes of age on her family's dairy farm in British Columbia.
It is the turbulent mid-sixties and the impressionable sixteen-year-old Natalie is living a secluded and insular life with her parents Gus and Nettie, and her three brothers, Morgan and Carl, and Natalie's favourite, the brilliant and bookish older brother, Boyer. Indeed the Wards live in their own world in the long, hot summer of 1966 where all is drenched in the golden glow of the summer sun on their farm near the town of Atwood just miles from the US/Canadian border.
A mercurial and imaginative girl, with a virtuous sense of conscience, Natalie seems to relish in her alienation. At school she does nothing to encourage friendships, content to spend most of her spare time with Boyer, playing his word games in his room up in the attic and reading his books. Things change when a young American draft-dodger by the name of River Jordan is employed by Natalie as a handyman and flows into the lives of the Ward family with his large green duffel bag, his guitar case over his shoulder, his hair the sun-streaked colour of a hayfield drying in the sun.
At first, for Natalie, River comes across as a hippie, perhaps representative of all of the oddly dressed young Americans marching beneath peace signs, protesting the Vietnam War while also sticking flowers into the gun barrels of riot police. But soon enough Natalie is falling under his spell, his eyes entrancing her, "like the colour of a blue-green ocean," an ocean she had only seen in her imagination. The rest of the Wards accept River's reasons for coming to Canada, his gentle and beguiling nature at first seemingly a perfect fit for this close-knit family, especially Boyer whose analytical mind craves knowledge and ultimately understands how River is exorcising his democratic right to choose.
Only Gus, a blue collar working man who wears his long johns like a second skin, winter and summer, belies an instinctual mistrust of the young man, considering him to be one of the spoiled greasy haired hooligans who stand under a peace banner because they don't have the guts to fight for their country. None of the Wards however, can predict the eventual heartache that will follow River's arrival, a heartache that sweeps "like a cold wind" through the valley, shattering this family and becoming an irrevocable tragedy of errors accomplished in the course of a few long ago summer days. Indeed the Wards, and Natalie in particular spend the rest of their lives coming to terms with the events of that year, River's presence eroding the jagged edges of their resistance, his ghost echoing throughout their world for decades to come.
When Natalie travels towards Atwood on the bus thirty-five years later, "like a time machine carrying her in slow motion back to her past," she must ask for forgiveness from her mother Nettie and her brother Boyer and see beyond the faded edges of memory. Natalie longs to unburden herself, to confess her part the downfall of her family and to say out loud how it all came about, and where it could have been changed.
It's hard to fathom which themes are more profound in this novel: the bigotry and intolerance that gradually isolate the Ward family in a town where there is little respect for tolerating anything that is different different, or a young girl that is so blinded with what she believes is love that she gradually loses sight of reality with devasting consequences; in the end, she's a child lost in the moment, believing that her desire has made her an adult. Ultimately a novel about the past and what has been left behind, Donna Milner captures the beautiful natural rhythms of day-to-day workings of dairy farm life and the ways that personal jealousies can balloon into ruthless and bitter vendettas.
Throughout, Milner's graceful prose is deliberately propulsive but plain, and her talent lies in her careful plotting as Natalie moves through her solitary world, bound to her mother Nettie and her brother Boyer by a shared secret. She's unable to let go of her unamed resentment that she carries with her out the door the day she left the family fold.
Obviously River's arrival became catalyst, causing a fracture of connectedness when the glue that holds the Ward family together was suddenly torn apart. For Natalie what was once predictable and imperceptible suddenly seems to be accelerating with an almost unimaginable force. Part of her growth is that she must come to terms with how much has been lost and left behind even as she tries to understand how River came to the Wards, became a part of them and, how he ultimately forced them to confront their deepest fears and desires. Mike Leonard May 08.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written, compelling firstnovel, September 6, 2008
I loved this book. I agree with all the other reviewers have written, and cannot urge you enough to buy it,read it,share it,and rave about it.
I sometimes find myself scanning pages, but with this book I was careful to read every word and to re-read whole sentences and paragraphs. It is hard to believe that Donna Milner did not know she was a writer! She's a gifted writer, and I hope that well runs deeply as I anxiously await her next novel.
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