Customer Reviews

Francouer Novels

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What a delight for a Canuck girl far from home to come across David Plante's FRANCOEUR NOVELS: The Family, the Woods, the Country. I read them as soon as they came out in the early eighties, and then looked for Plante's books everywhere. David's French Canadian enclave in Providence had much in common with the Woonsocket and Pawtucket of my youth. He nails the intensity of the French Catholic Church. Plantes' family, like most French Canadians, had an Indian ancestor. Naturally I was drawn and intriqued that he was also part Blackfeet. What was the Blackfeet, French Canadian, Rhode Island connection? The Northern Plains of Montana and Alberta Canada are worlds and thousands of miles away from the urban milltowns of New England. Yet when I traveled there the women looked like my grandmother Mimi and the men like her brother mon oncle Leo. They knew about the Lamberts and welcomed me into their homes and tipis. Mothers and grandmothers sent us home with gifts of pemmican and sweetgrass and pictures to show my grandmother and matantes of me and my toddler standing in front of the tipi they taught me to raise. Years later I met Tchin, a stately Blackfeet/Narragansett silverworker who said that many Blackfeet, who were legendary travelers like the French Canadians, had gone East in the eighteen thirties during a famine and many marriages had resulted. And then there were the Voyageurs who traveled West from the time they arrived in Canada in the 1500s returning with Indian brides, so that nearly every family had Indian ancestry shown in the chisled faces they bent over factory looms and in the straight black hair they kept braided and wrapped in kerchiefs to keep it from getting caught in the textile machines. Plante's lyrical and haunting FRANCOEUR NOVELS will feel queasily familar to those millions raised with "foi, langue, et famille" in French Canadian mill towns in New England, and reveal a little known culture to everyone else. I can't wait to read Plante's new AMERICAN GHOSTS.