The Opium Lady

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and author of The Salvation Army and the
Public.

Perhaps you have done it—looked at the people in old sepia-brown
snapshots in antique-shop albums and wondered who they were, what their
thoughts were, and what their poses signified. JoAnne Soper-Cook does
this with amazing ingenuity, creating brilliantly imaginative stories
for the 31 old photographs that she has collected or that have been
collected for her in antique shops.

There is Ruth, “a 1940s woman standing in the shallow water of a
summer pond”; “Roy and Donald, standing side-by-side in their
uniforms, all tricked out to go and fight the Germans or Japanese”;
Paddy and Michael, “St. John’s Roman Catholic boys, as hard as
Newfoundland granite, brought up with the least of everything”; Edna
and Alec, the “holy Stones—the East End Stones, in the East End of
old St. John’s or somewhere like it, the grandmother and grandfather
of someone no one knows”; and almost 30 others for whom she creates
fictional lives.

There is also a narrator, who, almost surreptitiously along the way,
weaves her own story into those of the imagined others, cleverly
intertwining the tales. The imagined characters live either in the town
of Hagersfield, Maryland, or in Guernsey, Newfoundland. Soper-Cook
beguiles us with possibilities, making us look back to the photographs
to see whether we might imagine it all in a different way. She is not
only an ingenious writer but stylistically engaging as well; her
mellifluous prose lulls us into belief, and we are convinced that her
versions are, after all, the true ones. JoAnne Soper-Cook is now one of
our finest storytellers.