Pélagie: The Return to Acadie

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

This book, which was originally published in French in 1979, won the
author the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary award.

In 1755, the British forced the French to leave their beloved Acadie on
the shores of the Bay of Fundy. The families scattered down the length
of the Atlantic States. Twenty years later, an indomitable woman named
Pélagie leads a small group of Acadians from Georgia back to their
homeland. They travel by oxcart, picking up a few stragglers (a runaway
slave, a midwife, a 100-year-old patriarch, a giant, and a fool) en
route, and the journey takes 10 years. They suffer hardships every mile
of the way, and many die, although the club-footed Celina uses all her
knowledge of herbs and berries to keep them healthy. The winters are
bitterly cold. They are hungry and must rely on scarce animals to eat.
The carts are mired in mud, and only superhuman efforts free them. They
use snakes to grease the wheels. And they run into the American War of
Independence. But there are many lighter moments. Pélagie and the
captain of a four-masted schooner fall in love and follow each other up
the coast; the fool practises magic as a way to get new clothes; and the
patriarch has a duel with the Wagon of Death.

The cast of characters is enormous, and not only do they have long,
hyphenated names, they also have nicknames and involved family
histories. The translation from the French is sometimes convoluted, but
the writing is lyrical at times and funny: “fit to be crowned with
laurels, if laurels had been in season”; “It would be another
century before cowboys invented the lasso.” In sum, Pélagie is an
entertaining mixture of history, fantasy, and magic.