Beyond the Blue.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Andrea MacPherson is a Canadian of Scottish descent. As a young girl, she listened to her grandmother and mother tell stories of life in Dundee, and eventually grew up to become a storyteller herself. Her first novel, When She Was Electric, was published in 2003 and received favourable reviews. Her second novel is set in Dundee, in and around the jute mill where her mother worked.

Beyond the Blue is the story of a family of women who struggle to find love and belonging during the First World War in Scotland. Morag has endured a difficult marriage and many years of hard labour in the jute mill. Her health is failing, and she wants nothing except the love and assured well-being of her girls. Her elder daughter, Wallis, seeks to improve the lives of the women around her by forming a union at the mill, and dreams of a better life for herself with a childhood love who left for Ireland long ago. Caroline, the younger, wishes to belong to a different social class. Her goals include a big house, fine clothes, and a life free of toil; to achieve this end, she sets out to seduce the mill owner. Finally, there is Imogen, the much younger niece who has been adopted into the family. She fervently desires the life she led before her mother so mysteriously passed away, but of course, can never have it.

MacPherson’s tales of the jute mill sing with an honest melancholy that would bring tears to the eyes of any sensitive reader. In Morag and Wallis, she has told the story of women who have learned to be strong through the hardships that war inevitably brings, and in Imogen, she has created a fanciful, magnetic little girl. When writing less likeable characters, however, MacPherson paints a rather simplistic portrait, and her novel is less complex as a result.