The North American wilderness is the setting for a novel part Brothers Grimm and three generations of family bonded by history and the "crippling beauty of winter". Sawgamet, a former mining town become logging village, was founded by Jeannot Boucher, Stephen Boucher's grandfather. Sitting vigil at his mother's bedside in her final days, forty-something Stephen uses the quiet hours to reflect on his childhood, where a demanding landscape requires extraordinary sacrifices, yet yields magical images of a land between worlds. This is a tale of love, loss and the realization that anything is possible where survival and beauty coexist. Jeannot's larger-than-life presence in the boy's life has a profound effect from their first meeting, when ten-year-old Stephen has lost his father, Pierre, and sister, Marie, both trapped beneath the shelf of ice where Marie fell through while skating. Father and daughter float, still visible, hands near touching in a tragic tableau.
While Pierre has taught his son the meaning of strength and courage, it is Jeannot who embodies the magic and the myth in the land of the trickster, the loupgarou and the gallupilluit (sea witch), Flaireur, a singing dog and Gregory, a Russian miner returned for revenge for his untimely death. Thanks to the determined efforts of sixteen-year-old Jeannot, a young man in search of his fortune in gold, Sawgamet grows from mining town to a more sustainable logging community, Jeannot as much myth as man. Confiding to Stephen, "I've come back for your grandmother. I've come back to raise the dead", Jeannot spends hours with the boy, describing how he walked the lonely terrain alone, guided by a stubborn dog who refuses to bark but finally sings, drawing forth a flurry of beating wings and sharp beaks, birds that will sustain man and dog through the winter.
Through the prism of Stephen's understanding, Jeannot's world is hard, yet achingly beautiful, from a golden creature appearing to Martine and Jeannot to monsters that prowl in search of souls, couples buried under snow for long winter months, the unavoidable demands of survival: "With a single bite he called down a vengeance upon himself." Envision a boy of ten enthralled by his grandfather's tales, the loss of beloved father and sister still fresh and raw; a driven young miner who cobbles together a shelter as winter strikes, sleeping back to back with his animal; a couple striding naked through a magical forest in pursuit of a golden caribou, gilt sprinkling the air like snowflakes; a father reaching for his young daughter's hand under the ice, their fingers nearly touching. The "magical realism" of the author's transcendent prose is both fascinating and terrifying, the melding of three generations, a place "where mountains loom... where shape shifters fly past us in the dark", where Stephen links hands with the past and "memories are another way to wake the dead". Luan Gaines/2011.
