Just Keep Breathing

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

Toronto writer Jesse Frayne comes from—in the equine language of her
first work of adult fiction—good bloodlines. Her mother is activist
and writer June Callwood and her father is sportswriter Trent Frayne.
But, as in racing, genetics aren’t enough if initial skills are
lacking. What is missing in Just Keep Breathing is a sense of pace—the
ability to keep a narrative flowing by applying some basic tools of
storytelling such as dialogue, description, and action.

Frayne’s heroine, Jeanie Spring, her husband, Frank, and their three
children live on a farm in rural Ontario. Jeanie works for Gus Hampton,
a trainer at Toronto’s Woodbine Racetrack. She is about to resign from
her duties as assistant trainer, however, having decided that the work
she loves isn’t worth the risk of injury and death from being thrown
from one of her horses. Soon after she gives Gus her resignation, the
old man is found murdered, stabbed to death.

Jeanie and Frank, a cameraman in the movie industry, are having marital
problems. Both of them are deeply involved with their careers, but
Jeanie carries more than her fair share of responsibility for the kids
(twin girls and younger boy), and resents it considerably. Gus’s death
triggers a series of domestic problems that culminate in an attempted
reconciliation during a holiday in Jamaica.

Frayne is at her best in her descriptions of horses and racetracks;
there is clearly a love and respect for the animals and the people who
service them. But she needs more practice in balancing her narrative.
Her story, told in a headlong first person, suffers from both
breathiness and preciousness—as when she lurches into baby talk to
mimic Jeanie’s little boy, Luke. Gus’s murder is stuck away
somewhere in the story and reappears at its conclusion, almost as an
afterthought.