R8| ARTS OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019
E
ndings are the starting
points of many of this fall’s
new young-adult novels,
with the death and departure of
loved ones setting the stories in
motion. The young people in
these books have to come to
grips with the gaping holes left
in their lives, on top of the usual
challenges that come with grow-
ing up.
The Spanish Civil War and its
aftermath have made orphans of
three siblings in Ruta Sepetys’s
The Fountains of Silence (Philo-
mel, 512 pages, ages 12 and up).
Their parents were known oppo-
nents of the fascist leader Fran-
cisco Franco, so the kids, two
girls, one boy, as they come of
age, have to contend with the
taint attached to them while also
working to support themselves.
One of the sisters lands a job
as a maid at the Madrid Hilton, a
hotel opened in the 1950s, as part
of Franco’s bid to draw tourist
dollars and foreign investors,
and is assigned to look after a
visiting Texan family. The oilman
father hopes to enter a joint ven-
ture with the regime to drill for
oil, the mother born in Spain to
reconnect with her mother
country and the son, an aspiring
photographer who wants to cap-
ture the country on film.
After getting to know the
maid some, the Texan boy asks
her if she’d be willing, for a fee,
to show him about her native
city, not realizing that his re-
quest compromises her.
(The police state wanted for-
eign capital, but required that lo-
cals speak little to outsiders,
keeping the silence referenced in
the title.)
The author of several bestsell-
ing works of historical fiction, Se-
petys deftly weaves scrupulous
research into Spain’s troubled
past into the narrative, giving a
vivid sense of the darkness
looming over Spain at the time,
of the rigid gender roles the sib-
lings are expected to observe, of
the near-absolute power wielded
by soldier-police and the church.
The latest from the National
Book Award-winning writer
Thanhha Lai,Butterfly Yellow
(Harper, 304 pages, 13 and up)
also takes place in the wake of a
war, the conflict between Amer-
ican and Communist forces in
Vietnam. At the outset of the
book, 12-year-old Hang’s father
dies in the conflict. When the girl
hears that Westerners are adopt-
ing children orphaned in the
conflict, she takes her baby
brother Linh to an airport in the
hopes that both of them will be
lifted out. Only the boy gets tak-
en, wrested from her arms in the
chaos that was Operation Baby-
lift.
The book follows Hang’s
quest, six years later, to find her
brother, in rural Texas, with the
help of a hapless, funny Texan
youth who reluctantly puts off
his dream of becoming a rodeo
star to help her. Although there
are high jinks on the road, Lai
has a serious destination in
mind.
The book deals with the har-
rowing trauma visited on Hang
in her attempt to escape her
home country, to claim refugee
status in the United States. The
reunion between brother and
sister is haunted by the deaths oftheir parents and grandmother,
by the times they shared and
those they didn’t. What, if any-
thing, does the boy, now re-
named David, remember?
Should her genetic and cultural
ties to him outweigh those of the
Americans who adopted and
raised him?The beginning of Jo Treggiari’s
thrillerThe Grey Sisters (Pen-
guin Teen, 288 pages, 12 and up)
is also the stuff of nightmares. In
the riveting opening scene, we
watch the excitement of kids on
a class trip turn to horror as their
plane goes down. The Grey Sis-
ters in question are the moun-
tains where the plane crashes,
not far from a cult’s compound.
Its leader, Big Daddy, has estab-
lished a community right out of
The Handmaid’sTale,with some
women, the Cows, assigned the
role of breeding and child-rear-
ing, and others, the Warriors,
trained to defend the insular
place from outsiders. Three of
these outsiders, two sisters of
classmates who went down withthe plane and a friend, make a
pilgrimage to the crash site and,
without meaning to, get mixed
up in the cult’s business.
Now the owner of an inde-
pendent bookstore in Lunen-
berg, N.S., Treggiari once worked
as a music journalist covering
the punk scene, and there’s a
punk sensibility on offer here, a
raw look at our society’s under-
side. She keeps the pace of the
Governor-General’s Award-nom-
inated book brisk, with raging
bears and shootouts, but she has
also given the human sisters
who go on this pilgrimage dis-
tinct – and nuanced – approach-
es to the grief they’re trying to
weather. While lively, the book
doesn’t cohere, its sudden tone
shifts from quiet to loud, from
gentle to hardcore jar, as do its
riffs on various myths and leg-
ends.
Kate DiCamillo is a known
quantity in YA literature, a win-
ner of two Newbery medals
(both for books with animals as
heroes) and, most famously, a
novel about a dog,Because of
Winn-Dixie, that became a 2005
movie. The action in her latest
bookBeverly, Right Here (Can-
dlewick Press, 256 pages, 10 and
up)starts with the 14-year-old
girl named in the title burying
her dog, but it’s person-focused.
She can find no comfort in her
home – her mother has prob-
lems of her own. So she runsaway, taking a job at a diner, be-
friending an acne-prone variety-
store clerk (who’s going places)
and a bingo-loving retiree (who
takes Beverly into her trailer).
Even by DiCamillo’s high stan-
dards, this is an extraordinary
book, showing the stress and ex-
hilaration that can come from
leaving it all behind.
The protagonist of Christina
Kilbourne’sSafe Harbour (Dun-
durn, 264 pages, 12-15)is also a
runaway, living with her dog in a
tent in a Toronto ravine. In the
wake of her mother’s murder,
her father has sent her here,
while he sails the family’s boat
from the Florida Keys toward To-
ronto, intending to meet her
here. Raised and schooled on
that boat, the girl slowly adapts
to the land, making friends with
other homeless youth, realizing
both the shortcomings of her un-
usual upbringing and the gifts.
But will her father arrive before
the winter makes camping out-
doors untenable? The book’s set-
up is unlikely, but ultimately,
plausible, and Kilbourne draws a
careful and convincing picture of
the shelters and squats occupied
by the city’s homeless youth
These books, together, are
preoccupied with the failure of
adults to protect the young from
an often hostile world – a timely
concern.Special to The Globe and MailALEC SCOTT
TheendisjustthebeginningintheseYAreads
These books, together,
are preoccupied with
the failure of adults to
protect the young from
an often hostile world –
a timely concern.T
he smaller the town, the
more magnified its won-
ders.
I didn’t believe that to be true
until I moved away from my own
hometown, population 4,500. I
was born and raised in the village
of Vanderhoof in central British
Columbia. The town took its
name from Herbert Vanderhoof,
who envisioned the place as a col-
ony for artists and writers.
His dream never quite took
shape, but the town grew and the
name stuck. In 1942, my father
was a baby when he arrived in
Vanderhoof with his parents on a
train full of Mennonites from Sas-
katchewan, all hoping for cheap
land and trees and a place to call
home.
Before I left Vanderhoof, I nev-
er thought I’d want to write about
it. As a teenager, I had the keen
sense that nothing interesting ev-
er happened in my hometown.
The ordinary elements of small-
town life were just that – ordi-
nary. Only after I moved away
from Vanderhoof to study writing
at the University of Victoria did I
realize how profoundly that place
had seeded my literary future.
I’ve noticed this to be true for
others as well: The smaller points
on the map seem to have inspired
some of Canada’s most acclaimed
writers. The made-up town of Ma-
riposa in Stephen Leacock’s work
seems to echo his time in Orillia,
Ont., while Louise Penny’s fic-
tional Three Pines, home to her
Inspector Gamache mystery nov-
els, echoes the author’s own
home in Knowlton, Que. Writers
such as Eden Robinson from Kita-
maat and Jack Hodgins from Mer-
ville, both in B.C., Margaret Lau-
rence from Neepawa, Man., and
Alice Munro from Wingham,
Ont., have written their land-
scapes of origin into our con-
sciousness, expanding our litera-
ry map to include the overlooked,
the rural and the nothing-ever-
happens-here places.
Not only have they given us an-
other way of reading Canada, but
they have also given other writers
permission to write the specks on
the maps.
When I set out to writeEvery
Little Scrap and Wonder, a mem-
oirs of my small-town Vander-
hoof upbringing, the resonant
images of childhood flooded
back: fire in the fall poplar leaves,
moose tracks in snow, wood-
smoke and diesel exhaust, the
hiss of a logging truck’s air brakes,
the perfume of wild strawberries.
As I wrote, I began to see more
clearly how the place and its peo-
ple had trained me to bear wit-
ness to the world.
In every province and territory,
writers are welcoming readers to
small towns, some born of imag-
ination and others just waiting to
be found on the map.RANKIN INLET, NUNAVUT
Kisimi Taimaippaktut Angirrarija-
rani/Only in My Hometown
(Groundwood Books, 2017) intro-
duces young readers to an Inuit
community in Nunavut, where
the Northern Lights dazzle and
small-town life makes everyone
feel like family. The book, trans-
lated into Inuktituk by Jean Kusu-
gak, is a collaboration between
Angnakuluk Friesen (text) and
Ippiksaut Friesen (illustration),
sisters who grew up in Rankin In-
let, a hamlet on the Kudlulik Pen-
sisula.FORT SIMMER (FORT SMITH/HAY
RIVER/BEHCHOKO), NWT
Richard Van Camp’s first novel,
The Lesser Blessed(Douglas &
McIntyre, 1996), opens up the
world of Larry Sole, a Dogrib teen-
ager, living in the stark and brutal
world of Fort Simmer, a fictional
town that is, according to Van
Camp, “the chimera of Fort
Smith, Hay River, Behchoko.”JOHNSON’S CROSSING, YUKON
InThe Cinnamon Mine: An Alaskan
Highway Childhood (Harbour
Publishing, 2011), Ellen Davignon
tells the story of her family’s tour-
ist lodge near the Teslin River. As
a refuge on a remote stretch of
land, Johnson’s Crossing has
served as a “weather station, post
office, lending library, off-sales
beer outlet,” as well as a dance
hall, police headquarters, baby-
birthing location and community
news hub.ROLLA, B.C.
Donna Kane’s Summer of the
Horse(Harbour Publishing, 2018)
takes readers to the Peace River
district, a landscape dubbed “the
sacrifice zone” in the face of the
oil and gas industry expansion.
From a small farming community
on the outskirts of Dawson Creek,
Kane takes us on an inaugural
trail ride through the Muskwa-
Kechika, a protected area known
as the “Serengeti of the North,”
partly located in the western
Peace River district.FRANK, ALTA.
Gil Adamson’s The Outlander
(House of Anansi, 2007) follows a
young woman grief-stricken and
on the run through the Western
wilderness. The book takes us to a
small mining outpost nestled in
the Rockies, where the Frank
Slide of 1903 enters the story.SEDLEY, SASK.
The title of Chelsea Coupal’s de-
but poetry collection,Sedley(Co-
teau, 2018), is the name of her
hometown. Sedley, says Coupal,
“is just like the other farming
communities that line prairie
highways – they’ve all got a rink, a
store, a bar and a school if they’relucky. Sedley, though, I know in-
timately.”“ALGREN” (STEINBACH), MAN.
A Boy of Good Breeding(Vintage
Canada, 1998), Miriam Toews’
second novel, anchors itself in Al-
gren, Man., proudly “the smallest
town in Canada.” Although in-
vented, Algren exists as a micro-
version of Steinbach, Toews’s
hometown, with its vivid cast of
characters, zany humour and big
heart.CROW LAKE (BLACKWELL), ONT.
“The landscape you grow up in
shapes you, I think,” author Mary
Lawson says. Lawson’sCrow Lake
(Random House, 2002) is set in
small farming community akin to
her own childhood hometown of
Blackwell, which had “a church, a
school and a general store and
that was it, nothing else but
farms,” Lawson says.SALUIIT, QUE.
InNirliit(Véhicule Press, 2018,
translated from the French by An-
ita Anand), Juliana Léveillé-Tru-
del takes us to a contemporary In-
digneous community on the Su-
gluk fjord, where children play in
the midnight sun of a landscape
that is “stunning, but also harsh,
as life can be.”MEMRAMCOOK, N.B.
A Boy From Acadie: Roméo Le-
Blanc’s Journey to Rideau Hall
(Bouton d’or Acadie, 2018) begins
in a village near the Bay of Fundy.
As part of her literary research,
Beryl Young spent time in Mem-
ramcook, the birthplace of Ro-
méo Leblanc, the first Acadian to
ever be named governor-general.
At a book launch in Memram-cook, Young says that locals came
to hear about one of their own,
proud of “the boy born just down
the road who had dined with the
Queen of England.”SWEETLAND, N.L.
Michael Crummey’s Sweetland
(Doubleday, 2014) is named both
for its protagonist, Moses Sweet-
land, and the setting, a fictional
island that the author envisions
as “just off the south coast of
Newfoundland, somewhere west
of the islands of St. Pierre and Mi-
quelon.” Sweetland, rich in myth
and history, rises as an emblem of
the paradoxes of rural culture.WHYLAH FALLS (WEYMOUTH
FALLS), N.S.
Whylah Falls (Polestar Press,
1990) is a “jazz-blues collage of
poems, prose, songs, and pho-
tos,” says George Elliot Clarke, “all
meant to document the historical
presence of African-Nova Sco-
tians/Africadians.” The name-
sake setting of Whylah Falls has
its roots in the real “Weymouth
Falls and environs, including the
Sissiboo River, all in Digby Coun-
ty but cheek-by-jowl with the
Acadian centre, the District of
Clare.”CHARLOTTETOWN, PEI
At the centre of Stella Shepard’s
Ashes of My Dreams(Acorn Press,
2016) is a home for unwed moth-
ers where Gracie, a farm girl of
Acadian and Cree heritage, is sent
to be cared for by the Catholic
nuns until she gives birth. The
women of Charlottetown sur-
round her with support, turning
the small town into a new kind of
family for Gracie.Special to The Globe and MailThesmalltownsthatmakeCanlitgreat
Canadianwriters
welcomereadersto
thesmallerpoints
onthemap,fictional
orotherwise
CARLA FUNK
ILLUSTRATION BY PASCAL BLANCHET