Richard Van Camp, story teller extraordinaire enthralls kids at Semiahmoo Library

On Friday Richard Van Camp told stories at Semiahmoo. The tales were intended for children in Grades 1 to 5, but I was there too. Along with the little kids, I learned how to call the northern lights, and how to repel them if they get too close, with their hissing and popping and their fishy smell. Did you know that frogs are indicators of clean water? Were you aware that bears can read your thoughts? What a privilege to watch Richard enthrall the kids, gifting them with aboriginal stories they'll long remember. Mahsi Cho, Richard.

The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse by Alexander McCall Smith

As usual, Alexander McCall Smith delights and surprises. In this book, while portraying dark wartime history, he grapples with fate and other great questions of life.

He also writes a mean (sic) dog, though Peter Woodhouse is certainly not mean. Peter has a unique role in Smith's pantheon of fictional dogs. Unlike Freddy de la Hay, who has to be rescued from a spying mission gone wrong, he is not a point of view character. Even Cyril, drinker of ale and Edinburgh artist companion, reveals through his doggy point of view his compulsion to bite ankles. But Peter's role is different. Though he has plenty of adventures, he is more symbolic than pivotal to the plot. For this is a novel about love and forgiveness and ultimate redemption, even for some who've recently fought on the side of "a government founded on hate."

A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee

Mystery, with history, brilliant use of language, and wry twists of humour. Abir Mukherjee has a delightful voice.

"The Red Gang" was a "criminal organization that specialized in opium, prostitution, extortion and gambling. And with that sort of pedigree it was natural that they exercised a degree of political control too." Our hero's doomed attraction to a certain lady causes a fatal resignation tinged with irony. "I imagine most women would go off a man who accused them of complicity in murder," he muses, and later, pessimistically watching said lady dancing the Turkey Trot with a prince, he concludes that "Women can't help falling for men that can dance." In a philosophical vein, a powerful maharani advises the policeman with a questing soul to "seek the truth and do not concern yourself with consequences."

Island of the Sea Women by Lisa See

This harrowing story is ultimately a tale of healing, forgiveness and redemption. Lisa See portrays the evolving history of the Haenyeo, female divers of Jeju Island off the coast of Korea. Through the lives of Diving Chief YongSuk and the close friend who "betrays" her, the author reveals the nature of the human ego as well as the tensions that hold us together and pull us apart: parents versus children, individual versus group, tradition versus modernity.

After the Japanese occupation ends, the inhabitants of the island soon discover that the arrival of an American occupying force makes matters worse. They must cope through more and death and loss and the splitting of the country into parts and factions. Struggles between pro-communists, anti-communists and rebels decimate the male population, cause the deaths of many innocent men, women and children, and bring the islanders near chaos and starvation.

Following the bloodshed, the survivors are poisoned by guilt and self-blame. They succumb to the dangers of the gossip mill, and live in constant fear because those who lost relatives, innocent or not, are tainted by the old custom of guilt by association. As they are watched, harassed, gossiped about, threatened and forbidden to leave the island, some turn on themselves and each other.

On top of this, the Haenyeo, who had followed an ancient and isolated matriarchal culture centered around diving for food, goddess worship and shamanism are being catapulted into the future. In a few short years they must adapt to the disappearance of their old life and values and cope with huge and sudden changes, as outsiders legislate their old female diving collectives out of existence and transform their island into a tourist destination. But it is impossible to paper over past tragedy by constructing temples to consumer culture on top of it.

The volcanic island of Jeju (or Cheju) is now a UNESCO Heritage site, but a great deal of dark history took place there during and after WWII and the division of Korea into north and south. In 2012, the Washington Post carried a story about the island; at the time, the government was planning to build a naval base on it, and the islanders were protesting against this.

Once we were Sisters: a memoir by Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler was born in apartheid South Africa and spent her early childhood in an enormous house maintained by an army of black servants. Her father made money, and her mother felt sure that "appearance was everything." Money and privilege insulated her and her sister Maxine.

From the beginning, Kohler builds suspense, gradually revealing the dark underbelly of the violent, racist and misogynistic society that surrounded her. The reader knows that Maxine is dead, but must wait until the end for her grieving sister to learn the details of her demise.

After an early reference to childhood games of Cowboys and Indians, the violence escalates. In passing, the author alludes to the "great enmity between the two white tribes" dating back to the Boer War. Her half-page summation of the violently illogical apartheid state is jaw-dropping.

Following the pattern of their culture, both sisters marry young, and learn that "our husbands seem to prefer us pregnant." Maxine's husband, a doctor, works with the famed heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard. Carl "glowers," and the reader feels the first mild shudder of apprehension. We soon learn that "his life has been filled with narrow rules and regulations" which he has no compunction in breaking, but "cannot countenance others breaking." He "wants...above all, to be in control."

From the start, Sheila senses that her brother-in-law "does not take for granted that the world will consider him with benevolence." When he indulges in bouts of rage, "We placate and appease." Apartheid South African culture supports his anger and entitlement. Kohler shocks the reader with her vivid portrayal of the mass denial, the cotton wadding of lies and secrecy that surround her. From early childhood, Sheila is aware that "none of these people want to confront the truth." Instead, they "prefer to mouth banalities,"...'received text,' phrases that sound pleasant to the ear." The truth runs beneath in an underground thread of violence.

At boarding school, the girls live in dormitories named after "dead white men:... Kitchener, Selborne, Athlone and Milner." The teachers are "women, mostly spinsters, and some quite mad." Later, their widowed mother takes her teenage daughters to Italy for the summer. When an Italian friend asks her to let the girls stay on, the mother agrees, and Sheila speculates that "she is not unwilling to leave South Africa for awhile." After all, it is "only a few months after the Sharpeville massacre."

Riding his wave of white male entitlement, Carl has no shame about hitting Maxine. "He forces his black female servants...to participate in a particularly South African form of wife-beating, holding my struggling sister down on the bed while he beats her." His wife's sister sees "a man who feels all is permitted to him, that he can follow his desires wherever they might lead."

Carl has a gun in his closet. When his son finds it, he worries that his father intends to kill the whole family. Indeed, says the narrator, "A friend of theirs, another doctor, has attempted to do just this," to gas his entire family, but has "botched the job." Meanwhile, each time Maxine's husband beats her black and blue, she goes to her mother to recover. Afterwards, he seems remorseful, and "would apologize, promise, threaten with reprisals, the classic scenario with a South African twist."

And so life goes on. "This is a world where appearances, above all, count, where sorrow is not expressed," while people go on "pretending that all is for the best in the best of worlds." But the author cannot bear this painfully charged silence. In an effort to heal her grief, she has spent many years writing variations of Maxine's story. In this poignant memoir, she finally exposes all she knows and all she doesn't know about her beloved sister's death. She does so out of a deeply felt need "to share my story with others, a way of establishing a community of souls."

Michael Kluckner reveals Julia Henshaw in word and image

Michael Kluckner's graphic history book is one more proof of his artistic versatility. Filled with wonderful drawings, it captures the past of one of Vancouver's interesting characters. With his usual verve, Kluckner reveals Julia Henshaw as a smart woman ahead of her times: a novelist, journalist, naturalist and mountain climber. One of many archival newspaper tidbits that surprised me: Canadian Authors, formed in 1921, was active in the west by 1926, when Julia and fellow scribes met in Caulfeild.

Full of lively contradictions, she was also a crack shot, a supporter of women's rights who spoke against giving votes to women. A pro-British Conservative, she overcame her anti-Americanism enough to form a close friendship with an American naturalist from Philadelphia. She was a snob, but she was thoughtful and courageous too, willing to express her evolving views on women's suffrage in print. Her work as a volunteer ambulance driver proved her physical courage.

Sharply imagined dialogue and artistic-authorial intrusions lend credence and humour to this well-told history. I adored the imaginary but eminently believable comments by a pre-WWII Churchill. Some examples  of the author's conversations with Mrs. Henshaw's ghost are seen below. These drawings showcase the sensibility and inventive intellect of this wonderfully original historian. Michael Kluckner was the guest presenter of Canadian Authors--Metro Vancouver at WORD 2018.

Laurel Deedrick-Mayne reads in Surrey

Saturday afternoon WIBA and Canadian Authors -- Metro Vancouver hosted a reading by Edmonton author Laurel Deedrick-Mayne at the Surrey City Centre Library. Set in Edmonton, A Wake for the Dreamland portrays the lives of three friends before, during and after WWII. As well as reading from her novel, the author shared some milestones on her publishing journey. The decision to go indy was a response to the realization that trade publishing would take so long. The people she was writing for were aging, and she felt pressed to get her work in print.

This debut won the Alberta Readers' Choice Award and the Whistler Independent Book Award for fiction. Writers can be hermits, says Deedrick-Mayne, "but authors must be gregarious hermits" in order to promote their books. She's helped hers find its way onto bestseller lists and radio shows, and connect with readers as far away as Denmark.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

In this rather tragic but beautifully told tale of World War II, Sarah Waters mines the depths of the human heart, with its varied expressions of love, secretive and open, permitted and illicit, selfless and jealous, gay and straight.

A favourite line came from a conversation between two women. When Helen expresses her feeling of unworthiness to Julia, her friend and lover answers with a phrase that drops readers in the centre of London, the war, and the class differences of the time.

"You mutt," she says with calm reassurance.

Enjoy the book, the audiobook, or the film.