Sugarmilk Falls

Susan Merskey is freelance writer in London, Ontario.

For years, the residents of Sugarmilk Falls, a remote Canadian town on
the borders of Northern Ontario and Manitoba, have lived with terrible
secrets. At last, on a long winter night, the inhabitants gather to tell
a stranger about these secrets. Painful memories surface as the
decades-old events are gradually described.

The official story is that it all began when Grand’mere Osweken, an
Ojibwa self-styled shaman, lost the maple forests that her family had
originally won in a game of craps. Other versions of the story revolve
around the arrival of a schoolteacher and Holocaust survivor named
Marina Grochowska, and still other accounts centre on a woodsman named
Zack Guillem, who discovered a curious powdery coating on a patch of
foliage deep in the forest.

Ilona Van Mil’s first novel vividly captures the spirit and
repression of a blighted community, riven by prejudice and the secrets
of the past, as it slowly turns in on itself. The themes of disputed
land rights, conspiracy, and murder are interwoven with the main plot to
produce a gripping and compelling story.