Celebrating Canada's 150th: October

This month's book: Birdie by Tracey Lindberg.  I actually read this one in August while on holidays and I wouldn't recommend this as a beach read as it's pretty deep and quite sad.


Book Summary:  Monkey Beach meets Green Grass, Running Water meets The Beachcombers in this wise and funny novel by a debut Cree author.  Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from wounds of the past, informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions. Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, seeking to understand the messages from The Frugal Gourmet (one of the only television shows available on CBC North) that come to her in her dreams. She is also driven by the leftover teen aged desire to meet Pat Johns, who played Jesse on The Beachcombers, because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Bernice heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers but they are not the ones she expected. With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Bernice finds the strength to face the past and draw the lessons from her dreams that she was never fully taught in life. Part road trip, dream quest and travelogue, the novel touches on the universality of women's experience, regardless of culture or race. - from amazon.ca

My thoughts: I loved this book, but reader beware that the majority of the book is dark, gritty and moving and although there are hints of hopefulness and healing throughout the book, the book doesn't really have a Sherrie-approved happy ending.  

I loved the strong, amazing - and hurting - women in this book and I would love to sit in the bakery and have a tea and a chat with them all.  Lindberg does a great job of creating realistic, well rounded characters and she refrains from over-explaining them or providing too much of their backstory so that the reader is left curious and wanted a book about each one of them!  I loved how the majority of the story is told by a woman who spends weeks lying on her bed, motionless.  This book is really not about what happens to her or around her, but is truly about Birdie's interior story... how she processes all her experiences and finds wholeness and healing.  I loved how Cree vocabulary, traditions, story-telling and dream scapes are woven into the story to provide a rich scaffolding of culture in which to understand Birdie's life.

Lindberg manipulates language so cleverly to convey the complicated, contradictory truth of life, using invented compound words like screamwheeze, cousinemotion, and im/patience.   She has a powerfully poetic way of using words and punctuation, like here:  "Bernice had forgotten about that when she would allow herself to ragemember.  And she could also not forget Freda's shaky lip when the door was kicked closed in front of her.  The knowing in her eyes.  She knew.  At the very least, Freda had noticed.  And. Was relived. That. It was not. Her." (pg 155).    

A difficult read, but well worth the effort!