Summer Reading 1

I certainly started my summer with two amazing novels!

Let's start with the one on the right: "Found Drowned" is written by my friend Laurie Glenn Norris and the story takes place on the River Philip in Rockley, just downriver from where I live. Laurie's novel is inspired by a ghost story she read about in a book put together by a local historical society, and she spent 25 years researching the details of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in the late 1800's to create a life for Mary Harney after her untimely death at the age of 16.
And that's all Laurie had: a location, a name and an age. But she had a real person who needed a life.

The book on the left is also written by a Canadian author, and this story is similar to Laurie's in that there is a real story to be told, and in the case of "Bellewether", the story is told through a ghost. This book is completely fictional, though; her inspiration is not a real person.

For so many of us, fiction is all made up. The place may be familiar, the characters may be based upon people we know, the story may be inspired by something that happened in real life -- but the story is our own, from our own imaginations. When I wrote a novel sixteen years ago called "The Mushroom Picker's Dog", it was inspired by a small news item I read in the Vancouver newspaper, but everything about the story was absolutely made up.

For these two novels, the authors have used as much true historical detail, and in some case, people, as possible.
Susanna Kearsley's novel moves between the past and present (a format she does very well; I recommend all her books) and unravels a ghost story in the present that turns out to be based on false information. The main characters, past and present, are made up, but the historical circumstances are, of course, portrayed as accurately as possible. This is the pleasure of reading of reading an accomplished historical novelist.

Laurie's novel is almost the opposite. It is created around a real person as the main character who inspired a ghost story based on her death, but with few details about her, and her family, Laurie had to make up an entire life for Mary, and an explanation for her death as well. It was a fascinating read I couldn't put down. I wanted to know what really happened to Mary Harney, even though her story is utterly fictional. As with Kearsely, Laurie portrays the historical setting as accurately as possible. She researched all the actual people she knew were involved in the original "found drowned" event, and researched all the elements of that time, including how an autopsy would have been done in 1877.

One note about the Susanna Kearsely novel (and this is something she acknowledges in her end-of-book explanations about the source of her characters): her portrayal of Indigenous people is what it always should have been. Through two characters, one in the present and one in the past, they are portrayed as real people to be respected and honoured, not as savages to be wiped out or a race to be mocked and denigrated. There were several instances when I wanted to leap onto Twitter and quote her portrayal. In her final comments, she quotes the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada: "The arts  help to restore human dignity and identity in the face of injustice", then she goes on to say, "And that's what I've tried to do."

I, for one, noticed and appreciated it.