Kathleen Molloy

David Cole continues his Cool Canadian Crime interviews. See what west-Quebec mystery writer RJ Harlick is up to. I’ll give you a hint… her characters are freezing their tushes off. http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2009/07/rj-harlick-cool-canadian-crime.html   

Tales of my unfettered youth  

When I was 3, I was allowed to ride my tricycle as far as the Webb’s house; three glorious doors down from the left. And my little feet were allowed to peddle as far as the hydrant; three doors to the right – one door short of Estelle the Witch’s house. The neighbourhood kids called Estelle “Estelle the Witch” when she shooed us away from stealing her chestnuts.

From age 4-8, when we were still too small to go to the park without our folks and still too annoying for the big kids to drag us along… so the little kids on the street were allowed to play in the street. Along with fierce street hockey battles we skipped, played Spud, and showed off our dangerous bike stunts that included Pop-a-wheelies and leaping off homemade ramps built from bits of wood we had scavenged from somebody’s backyard.

Somebody’s mom or dad always lingered on a veranda, watching us bounce in and out of each of the neighbour’s hedges to elude our captures in Hide-and-Seek. We called our friends’ parents “Auntie Linda and Uncle Jim”, and “Auntie Heather and Uncle John.” And when all of the parents were squirreled away cooking dinner, old Mr. Burns kept an eye out for us. We loved old Mr. Burns best because he made us jelly sandwiches at the first sight of a split knee, a bumped noggin’, or a hurt feeling. Mom said she thought old Mr. Burns had been a medic in the war. Dad confirmed it was the war of 1812. We adored Mr. Burns but we loved his slobbering orange spaniel Rusty that much more and slipped Rusty our crusts as we recovered.

We had the run of the town.

Well, actually it was only the run of Holley Avenue in what is now known as Toronto, and to be honest, it was only a swath of about 10 working-class houses in a row. While I’m confessing I had better admit that we had to come in when the lights came on… so we didn’t actually do much run’n.  Still, it felt like we had the run of the town.

We were free.

This youthful freedom has been beautifully captured in Terrence Rundles West’s  Run of the Town–Stories of an unfettered youth.

http://terrencerundlewest.com/home.php

Notes from the website:

             The two pictures on the jacket of Run of the Town - a little boy playing hockey on a street (front cover) and a young adult holding a stubby beer (back cover) - represent R.J. Martin and the twenty-year time frame in which the 17 short-stories take place. It’s 1940-65 and R.J. happens to be growing up in Hearst, Northern Ontario, although it could be any of hundreds of small communities across the country.               Canada in the mid-twentieth century was neither better nor worse than the Canada of today. But it certainly was different - mothers stayed home, few people had cars, radio was king, a holiday meant a couple of weeks at the lake, childhood diseases could be fatal, teachers gave the strap, condoms were hard to obtain (only at the local poolroom in Hearst, because the druggist was Catholic). It was a time when families were large and kids expected to do chores. Children were loved but unencumbered by parents micro-managing their lives or hovering over them every minute of their waking day. Result? Kids had the run of the town. In short, it was as golden age for growing up.  

Unlike protagonist R.J. Martin, the town of my unfettered youth was not a small post-war northern Ontario community where Anglophone and Francophone boys designed ball-breaking insults for each other, each insult worse than the first until an interned Japanese family showed up in town and then the boys had to ban together to invent slanderous racial names to add to the mix.

I grew up a tomboy in Weston Ontario in the 70s, in a racial mixed working class neighbourhood. Alongside Dalbir (Sikh), Anson (Black), Richard (Korean), the Morel brothers (Dad Dany still had a bit of a French accent), and Timmy and the rest of the pale-faced kids I yelled “car” when our street hockey matches were interrupted. Our gang didn’t call each other names based on skin colour or maternal tongue; we called each other “fag”. It was “fag” when someone missed a goal or when a check hurt too much, or when one of the boys got distracted by jiggling boobs walking by. We wore Pepsi shoes, exchanged hockey cards, and counted the Summers until we could go to the park unsupervised. At the park we played tackling tag, tackle football and tackle baseball; fell out of trees; and blew things up.

We were loved but unencumbered by parents micro-managing our lives or hovering over us every minute of our waking days. This became a blessing in Grade 5 when girls started sniffing around the periphery of our circle after Timmy instituted Kissing Tag.

Any one of us could have been R.J. Martin, some 30 some years later.

Like R.J., I hope we all turn out alright in the end.

Run of the Town is the 8th book by a west Quebec author that I’ve enjoyed for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge.

This is the sixth west Quebec author I have read for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge.

Kiss the Sunset Pig, Lauire Gough

Since moving to Quebec I have discovered that everyone in Guelph Ontario adores Laurie Gough. I know this because whenever I meet someone from Guelph they assume “Oh, you must know my dear friend Laurie.” And when my dear friends from Guelph hop over the bridge for a visit they always pre-arrange a tea date with Laurie and her family. Laurie Gough collects good people.

Having finished reading Kiss the Sunset Pig I now know that Laurie has managed to collect good people from around the world. In her first book of travel adventures, Laurie squeezes us into her beat up old Bronco named Marcia. We accompany her on a road trip across the United States, pass the non-descript strip malls, pass the Plains, pass the bigger-than-life Americans… all the way to California. She’s looking for a cave in which she spent some time during her youth, a time when she felt safe and certain of who she was and what she wanted.

Laurie’s first trip to the cave was in her twenties, she wrote this travel log in her thirties, and she now bounces happily into her forties. Yet although we know she is a mature adult woman it is still impressive to read how she described her journey from who she thought she was en route to becoming who she wants to be.

And isn’t travelling as much about what we learn from the world as it is what we learn about ourselves? On this adventure Laurie learned that she could be happily independent, happily in love with Mr. Right if she ran him over, and profoundly lonely and isolated.

As she described her misgivings about her Korea trip I remembered the complete isolation I also felt when holed up in a Seoul hotel for three days.

My return flight from Singapore was delayed for two days because of jam. Not an air traffic jam but raspberry jam. Crates of raspberry jam had crashed in the cargo, spilling a gooey mess and forcing the passengers to sleep in the airport for 2 days while the airline searched a jam-free flight for us. It was impossible to get information from the airlines. Impossible to escape old Korean ladies body slamming their way to the front of the line. After being knocked around a line-up for almost 12 hours I finally reached the ticket counter where I pressed my elbows down flat, stretched my arms the width of the counter and spied the ticket agent dead on. He couldn’t have possibly ignored me. Yet he did. And this was because an old lady wedged herself in between the counter and my breasts. She had ducked under the stinky gap of my armpit and settled comfortably between me and the counter. My stunned response to the invasion didn’t last long and I barely got out an “Uhh excuse me,” before a second old lady joined her. Now, I must confess, I never was a girl blessed by the Hooter Fairy, so it is hard to imagine how two grown women could nestle in between my boobs. But they did and the ticket agent didn’t flinch.

My travel mates and I were shuttled to a suburban hotel where we spent 3 nights eating noodles and watching American GI TV. Just as Laurie described it, for me Seoul was bleak, crowded, overcast, polluted and… did I mention crowded? In that suburban hotel I was isolated. I woke with panic attacks fearing that the airline would lose all records of my existence and forget me there. On night two I had a nightmare that the American soldiers had taken over the city and in response the Koreans slaughtered foreigners in the street. Screaming myself awake I had only my purse and the airline-issued tooth brush to fend off the nightmares. Fortunately the hotel laundered my clothes every night but during those hours when they bleached my jeans, I can honestly say that I felt naked, my soul, my hope, my common sense - all gone.

Like Laurie, I’ve had the opportunity to explore much of this world and I’ve made some curious and oft times unhealthy travel choices. Part of the adventure right? But I have never felt as lonely and vulnerable as I did in the Korean suburb, naked, with only a tooth brush and David Letterman.

Kiss the Sunset Pig is not so much about hitchhiking through Sumatra, canoeing in the Yukon, sleeping in a redwood tree…as it is about yearning to find yourself somewhere else. Let’s see where Laurie’s next adventure takes her.

http://www.lauriegough.com/books.html

And who wants to Kiss the Sunset Pig of the title? Singer Joni Mitchell does.

http://top5.weblog.ro/2008-04-28/355177/California—Joni-Mitchell.html

I’ve picked another YA novel for the 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge.West Quebecer Catherine Joyce’s gives us Psyche’s Children.I squirreled away in my mother’s old boat to read this one. I don’t know how many books I read in that boat as a teen. Eighty million? When the other teens on Georgian Bay were water skiing during the day and getting plastered on the beach at night, I was reading. Writing too, always writing, but mostly reading. In my youth I never slipped away for moonlit petting sessions with hunky cottagers. I didn’t lie, do drugs, or collect messed up friends. I guess I wasn’t much of a worry for my folks; I wasn’t much of a teen. For this reason, when I picked up Pyche’s Children I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to read it with my still vibrant rose-coloured remembrances of teenagerhood. I liked being a teen. I liked that my family encouraged me to make healthy decisions, that my friends respected me, that I respected myself. I’m happy to say that I have no teen angst poetry that needs to be burned when I’m rich and famous. I had no teen angst. Incredible? Believable? I’m afraid it’s true, my formative years were perfect. Happy happy memories. As I slowly became introduced to the girls in Psyche’s Children I was thrown back into high school.  And I’m ashamed to say that it was the first time I felt sorry for some of the girls I barely knew in my old school, or knew through friends of friends of friends, or passed in the halls and ignored. Unlike the girls in the story and I see now… unlike some girls in my old high school, I never cut class to have casual sex. I never bumped into a gang of bullies stomping another girl in the middle of the road in the middle of the day. I never had to worry about what I wanted to be when I grew up, fear that I wouldn’t get into university, or face the fact that I had nothing in common with my family.  And I never had a friend who cut herself to ooze the pain out. 

The next time one of my girlfriends confides that she doesn’t know what her teenage daughter is thinking, I’m going to suggest that they read Catherine Joyce. Coinciding with her writing career, Catherine works with youth at risk, including anorexic and bulimic girls.

 http://www.catherinejoyce.ca/

The fourth west Quebec author I read for the 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge was James Stark with his 1993 The Lidek Revolution.

I am always attracted to political thrillers but frequently disappointed by them. I was not disappointed with this one. It was neat to read the protagonist zipping around in a Blue Line taxi, schmoozing with the rich folk in Rockcliff, and cottaging with investors on Meech Lake. Neat.But let me tell you why I am usually disappointed about the typical political thriller tale.  The standard formula generally seems, well, formulaic. Nevertheless, for me they are a guilty pleasure and I gobble them up as soon as my beau is done with them. Politically thrillers are perfectly good for heavy-duty flues when the body complains too much to get up to go to the library. Yet the Ludlums of the world all share the same plot and that works only if you love the standard plot.In my mind the plot pretty much goes like this: recently retired (but physically fit and undeniably handsome) male American agent gets drawn back into the game to save the world (or his country, or his agency, or some small unfortunate/unorganized/undemocratic/ country from imploding. He gets teamed up with a thirty-something female agent with legs up to here who downplays her looks because she wants to be taken seriously. They can’t trust each other immediately because of their indisputable physical attraction but readers know they would lay their lives on the line for each other while they tumble into bed during their hunt for terrorists/rogue agents/bad guys with obvious markings. The good guys win.In the July - August copy of Canadian Dimension, John Saul offers a great summary of some of the renowned political thrillers that don’t follow the standard formula. Admittedly, the titles he mentions lean a little left where the plot puts not the good guy but the mediocre guy in the face of danger as he helps save (but doesn’t singlehandedly save) the town’s water supply, or helps with some sort of greater good mission. The point is that the good guy doesn’t always win and when he does, what he wins is worth winning (such as finding humility or faith, uncorrupting corrupt police forces and government agencies, and perhaps even protecting clean drinking water…).

Imagine my delight to have found The Lidek Revolution at a bookstore last week – a political thriller about the Cold War written by a west Quebecer. Is it left leaning? I don’t know. The author is founder of a Canadian nuclear disarmament organization called Operation Dismantle. I don’t know what his political leanings are but I suspect he is a fan of clean drinking water.And his protagonist Victor Helliwell isn’t a hunky über-agent but a bit of a hermit. He isn’t planning to use his Lidek device to detect when folks are lying so that he can uncorrupt corrupted government agencies; he wants to get rich. And there is no indication that 3o-something-year-olds with legs up to here fall on their backs when he enters a room. Victor is a Canuk schmuck that gets twisted up with lying politicians et al. How does he get by? How do any of us get by?

The Lidek revolution
by T. James Stark

• Paperback: 413 pages
• Publisher: Creative Bound (1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0921165277
• ISBN-13: 978-0921165279

Amazon’s note about the Author
Born July 20, 1943, Jim Stark’s main claim to fame to date is as founder and leader of a Canadian nuclear disarmament organization called Operation Dismantle (see “Cold War Blues,” available through Amazon.com). He has written nine books (7 of them unpublished), and teaches golf in the summers.

Pure Springs, by Brian Doyle

“Teenage boys lie. I know; I was a boy once.” It was the advice my father gave me when I got my driver’s licence. He said I could drive the Ford Bronco as long as I didn’t let any boys hitch a ride.  “Boys lie to get what they want,” he reminded me when I went off to university, “I know; I was a boy once.”

And so starts the story Pure Springs by west Quebec author Brian Doyle. The protagonist Martin O’Boy is caught in a lie that he can’t shake and it gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. “Now the thing about lying,” my paternal Grandma Molloy taught me “is that you have to remember the lie.” I think Martin O’Boy could have benefitted from the kindly advice of Grandma Molloy rather than the truisms he learned from his surrogate Grandpa Rip.

Set in the period of the Korean War the story lets us imagine how it might have been for a young fellow aspiring to be a man when all of his manly heros were off shooting strangers in the Orient and the closest male figures he had to look up to were a kindly but often confused old man and a crooked delivery truck driver. O’Boy is a character that Doyle has allowed to grow up.

I would be curious to know if today’s teenage boys in O’Boy’s age group (15 unless you lie and say 16) share the experiences of first love, of wanting to do the right thing in the wrong circumstances, and trying to make your way in life toward being an almost-man.  I don’t think we’ve heard the last of Martin O’Boy.

Pure Springs was the third book I selected for my 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge reading west Quebec authors.

Attached is a linked article from Doyle’s perspective, as published online by the Ottawa Citizen http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/arts/story.html?id=2e090c1b-edc7-43cb-b690-78f9d38c6dcc&k=61706&p=1

 Format: HardcoverPublished: February 22, 2007Dimensions: 174 Pages, 5.88 x 8.88 x 0.75 inPublished By: Groundwood BooksThe following ISBNs are associated with this title:
ISBN - 10: 0888997744
ISBN - 13: 9780888997746

CanLit lovers applaud the Finishers of the Canadian Book Challenge. I’m not actually sure what the proper title is for a book challenge finisher, so if anyone can come up with a better name, please let me know. For now, let’s applaud the Finishers as identified on John Mutford’s blog.

•  
  • 395 classics and other quaint Canadian stories books were enjoyed by 47 lovers of CanLit.

http://bookmineset.blogspot.com/2008/07/canadian-book-challenge-final-update.html

And now, readers are stretching their dog-ear-making fingers in preparation of the
2^nd Canadian Book Challenge.

Some of us have already dived in. I’ve already enjoyed 4 of 13 west Quebec authors. I credit the lightening storms on Georgian Bay that had me squirreled away for 4 days with CanLit at the cottage. I will have 2 more reviews to post soon.

One of the benefits of rubbing elbows with local authors is the opportunity to scoop the big-name publishing houses. I’ve selected 2 more west Quebec authors on my list for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge and I have some neat news for readers.

Phil Jenkins has added a chapter to An Acre of Time and rereleased it, bringing the history of Le Breton Flats to real time. Pierre-Charles Généreux has been shopping around L’imprévisible trajectoire des assassins and may find himself smack dab in a bidding war.

I hope to take one of these gentlemen along on my vacation up Baie Comeau way. It’s going to be a hard choice…

L’imprévisible trajectoire des assassins

Pierre-Charles Généreux

L’ingénieur Jean-François Vidal et le dentiste Pierre-Luc Charlebois nous parlent de leurs vies linéaires, harassantes et apparemment sans issue. Conséquence d’une incroyable suite d’événements, leurs existences vont s’entremêler et prendre un tournant dramatique. Partis sans bagages pour un voyage qui les mènera de Montréal à Calgary, ils vont s’arracher la peau et renaître dans la douleur. Lors d’un week-end pascal funeste et sanglot ou tout va basculer, les deux hommes vont prendre la mesure de l’irréparable. Ils seront lancés sur la route pour tenter d’échapper aux machinations du destin. L’ennui, la désillusion, la peur, l’amour, l’horreur…C’est l’imprévisible trajectoire des assassins.

An Acre of Time

Phil Jenkins

Where is here? That question, Nothrop Frye believed, was the key to the Canadian identity, the secret of our collective psyche. For Phil Jenkins, “here” is a single acre on Le Breton Flats, in Ottawa. In this strikingly inventive book, he stakes out that acre and recounts its life story. He rides a glass elevator up from the earth’s core, describing the geological strata he passes through before reaching the surface. He watches the land submerge beneath the salt water that rises as high as the tallest skyscraper, a place where, ten thousand years ago, whales cavorted. He climbs a pine tree to watch Champlain paddle up the Ottawa River, intent on converting the native Algonquins and claiming the acre for France. He walks down Duke Street in the early part of this century and reports in detail the on the busy community he finds there. He stands on the desolate acre, expropriated by the federal government and then left in bureaucratic limbo, studying its endangered flora, fauna and future.

I’m throwing my hat in the ring. Yup, I’m signing on for Round Two of the Canadian Book Challenge and will read 13 books by Canadian authors between Canada Day 2008 and Canada Day 2009.

But I’m breaking all the rules. That’s the way we do it “icitte”. Instead of selecting one author per province or territory I will read 13 books by west Quebec authors.  I’ll dive into genres that I am not at all familiar with, such as mystery, gardening, and YA.  

I haven’t completed my list, heck I have only started my list, but I have lots of help. Frances and Chris at Chelsea Books prepared a list of almost 20 local authors and piled the books high for me to choose from. I then nipped into Solstice Books in Wakefield and Ellen gave me a tour of the local author section, loading up my arms with three new books.  Thirteen is a scary number. 

I plan to buy each of the books and then, as per tradition I will book cross them, thereby launching Canadian authors into the wild via west Quebec. And I’ll keep tabs on reads via the 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge bookmineset blog, my blog www.kathleenmolloy.offo.ca, and www.bookcrossing.com I’m relatively new to west Quebec (born and raised in Toronto, lived in Brampton ON and St. John’s NF as well as Dortmund Germany and Ottawa) so this is a great way for me to explore west Quebec - literally! 

And as you know, if there are any CanLit loving book crossers that would quiver at the thought of receiving my sloppy seconds, I would be happy to book cross them your way. Drop me a note at info@offo.ca or via my blog or website: www.diningwithdeath.ca 

Here are my first five books selected to launch Canadian authors from the “nation” of Quebec: