The Nettle Spinner [Paperback]

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 2005

In her early twenties, Alma met a tree-planter and fell in love — not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, after several seasons of planting trees out west, the tough-minded hero of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer“s visceral first novel has come home to northern Ontario to help reforest the ravaged landscape with a gang of filthy ex-hippies and idealistic students. Baking by day in the hot sun and tormented by mosquitoes and blackflies, Alma and her fellow planters relieve their backbreaking toil at night with sex, dope, and alcohol. But her brief passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer named Willem raises the ire of Karl (whose amorous attentions she has deflected in the past), and he viciously rapes her. Pregnant and alone, Alma flees to an abandoned mining camp where she and Willem once made love. There, with the help of the camp’s single weird inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby an increasingly ominous new life. Weaving together Alma’s story with an ancient Flemish folktale about a peasant girl’s magical hold over a lustful count, Kuitenbrouwer links the power of narrative with the passion for self-realization. The Nettle Spinner is a gritty, sensuous debut that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A stark, vigorous, and sophisticated weave of folklore and gritty realism

From the Inside Flap

In her early twenties, alma met a treeplanter and fell in love — not with the man but with his strangely romantic work. Now, with a filthy, fly-bitten crew of misfits, idealists, and transients, she works to reforest the ravaged landscape of northern Ontario. In an emotional freefall after a passionate affair with a charismatic newcomer and a vicious attack, Alma retreats, pregnant and alone, to an abandoned mining settlement. There, with the help of the camp’s single inhabitant, she constructs for herself and her unwanted baby a world that grows more and more ominous. To keep terror at bay, she weaves cloth from stinging nettle fibre. Like the peasant girl in the ancient Flemish folk tale who vanquishes her seducer by weaving him a nettle shroud, Alma faces her peril, and frees herself and her child. The Nettle Spinner is a stark, vigorous, and sophisticated debut novel that portrays sex with startling clarity and violence with peculiar tenderness.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 205 pages
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions; No edition edition (April 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0864924224
• ISBN-13: 978-0864924223
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,230,712 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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