Stinging Nettles: A Summer at Silver Islet

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Bill MacDonald is the author of Ruby’s Last Ride and Other Stories
(2007) and Through a Dark Cloud Shining (2006), among other books. He
has published short stories in Prairie Fire and Geist magazine.

Stinging Nettles is a raucous, tongue-in-cheek, and often politically
incorrect satire that pokes fun at freeloaders, failed journalists, an
imagined international vendetta, and memories of “childhood summers
coming to an end.” There are characters with names like Freddy Truaxe
and Dominic Peebles; a squirrel-killing cat called Gallows-Tree who is
kept high on catnip cookies; bits of sex, more imagined than real;
scenes of dramatic tension over incidents more fictional than factual;
and occasional, truly moving, bouts of nostalgia.

There is enough of a plot in MacDonald’s fun-filled novella to hang a
story on, kept alive with episodes involving mistaken identity, bhang
biscuits, and a summer masquerade party at Silver Islet—a setting that
evokes memories of “the smell of pie crusts, the sharp tang of
rhubarb, a piano player named Lorne tinkling the ivories.”