The Canning Season

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.

Adults will undoubtedly find The Canning Season a delightfully amusing
read, but identifying its juvenile audience is challenging. The normal
guideline, that the audience for a children’s book will usually be
younger than the work’s central character, does not really apply,
because the girls, Ratchet Clark and Harper Madison, are 13 and 14,
respectively, while the principal adult characters, who are equally
central to the story, are 91-year-old twins Tilly and Penpen Menuto. All
four are motherless. When the twins were 13, their mother committed
suicide by cutting off her own head. Ratchet’s self-focused single
mother has sent Ratchet away to spend the summer with her great-second
cousins the Menutos, at their remote Maine “estate” by the ocean, so
that she can pursue a husband. Harper’s unwed mother had abandoned
Harper to the care of her younger sister, who, in turn, comes to leave
Harper with the nonagenarians. The four females ultimately come to
constitute a “family,” and the canning season, the busy time when
the Menutos preserve local blueberries for their livelihood, symbolizes
kinship.

Both the book’s isolated setting and its extended cast of characters
are quirky. Tilly, who likes her sherry, and Penpen, who has a crush on
the local doctor (decades her junior), are wonderfully eccentric.
Ratchet, quiet and withdrawn, is the antithesis of the outgoing and
assertive Harper. Young-adult readers who do get into the book will be
rewarded by Horvath’s richness of language and episodic style, plus an
epilogue that offers an overview of Ratchet’s and Harper’s adult
lives. Recommended.