Keeper of the Mountains

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Writing good young-adult historical fiction is a demanding task, and one
that Matheson achieved successfully in Flying Ghosts (1993), wherein she
embedded her plot within the WW II construction of the Alcan Highway.
Unfortunately, Keeper of the Mountains falls well short of that
standard.

A resident of British Columbia’s Peace River country, Chris Haldane,
15, is of mixed parentage; his father is a Danish immigrant and his
mother is a member of the Dunne-Za (Beaver tribe). At the book’s
beginning, readers learn that Chris has promised his maternal
grandmother that he will climb the sacred Two Mountains That Sit
Together. There he will “seek mahine, a supernatural power from
animals, which [can] only be gained through a stay on these sacred
slopes”—an act he accomplishes in the book’s closing pages and
through which he gains knowledge of his life’s purpose. In between,
Chris is a “cowboy,” one of many employed to provide logistical
support to Charles Bedaux’s 1934 Sub-Arctic Expedition, in which the
wealthy Frenchman, using specially outfitted Citroeens, attempted to
travel 600 miles through virgin forest from Fort St. John to the Pacific
Ocean.

At best, the book offers a disjointed, episodic plot constructed around
the various chronologically linked happenings that take place during the
journey. However, the storyline is so thin that only the most devoted
adolescent readers will stick with Chris until his vision quest. The
romantic triangle involving Chris, Jessie Watson, and Chris’s rival
and fellow expedition member, Billy Turner, remains largely undeveloped,
as does the large cast of characters surrounding Chris. Not recommended.