Orphans of Winter

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Ontario’s Rob Ritchie is versatile. He is a professional pianist and a
founder and member of the folk/roots band Tanglefoot. He has also
composed and performed musical dramas in Ontario schools. Orphans of
Winter, his first novel, seizes on the iconic Canadian sport of ice
hockey. But having lined up his cast of characters—the hockey scout
the rookie phenom, the officials and the sports reporters—Ritchie
moves them into shadowy terrain: he invokes the occult, the spiritual,
and magic. He introduces his main character, hockey scout Stephen
Gillis, to arcane customs of First Nations people of Northern British
Columbia, to ley lines, and to dark memories of troubled relations with
his parents.

Ritchie has written a DaVinci Code of Canadian hockey. Wikipedia
defines ley lines as “hypothetical alignments of a number of places of
geographical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths.” The
novel’s plot involves a group of self-styled prophets that believes it
can see in a pattern of such geographical points an apocalyptic future
centring on Pasadena. Gillis is, by his own admission, a simple man, and
he becomes deeply upset by the events in which he becomes involved.
“‘Look,” he says to Robin Touchwater, one of the prophets, “this
all sounds fascinating but it’s a little much to take in. And to tell
you the truth, I still don’t really know what you want from me.’”

Ritchie has some difficulty with both narrative rhythm and dialogue; as
his plot becomes more and opaque, both dialogue and description become
stilted and forced. There are too many characters with limited
understanding trying to make sense of strange events. Thrown into the
mix are the terrible family backgrounds with which Gillis and others
have to deal. Ritchie needs to tame his muse a bit in his future
fiction.