A Stone in My Pocket.

Virginia Gillham is Associate Librarian in the Public Service Library at
the University of Guelph.

The storyline of this novel concerns the coming of age and search for independence of a teenaged girl in Colonial Canada in the mid-19th century. The premise holds considerable potential, and there are some literary aspects of this work that are very skilfully handled. Analysis of the novel as a whole is, however, a study in contrasts. The author has done a significant amount of research, and the incorporation of certain historical events and their impact, such as the coming of steam train service to Southern Ontario, is well done. On the other hand, the novel suffers from the attempt to incorporate too much of the historical detail as fact, rather than just allowing some of it to permeate the background environment, and from the phenomenon of a middle-aged man of the 21st century attempting to speak in the first person as a teenaged girl of the 19th.

When the novel opens, Gretchen Williamson is a nearly 15-year-old young woman living in the Clarkson/Port Credit area of what is now Mississauga. Her family includes an uptight, controlling, Methodist father; an understanding, but compliant-to-her-husband mother; and three daughters whose precocious philosophical musings challenge credibility.

Gretchen, a thoughtful loner, makes friends, in succession, with an elderly sage of the Mississauga tribe, a young Irish immigrant labourer, an Irish soothsayer, and ultimately the young woman who was formerly her school teacher. Her relationship with the native sage precipitates a family crisis of monumental proportions, the impact of which is also skillfully articulated. The device used at the end of the novel to explain the father’s reaction is brilliantly subtle.

Each of these relationships contributes to Gretchen’s emotional growth and awakening, and the author handles her evolution to mental maturity with great skill. She experiences a gently evolving relationship with a young man, and she navigates an awakening understanding of life in general and the idiosyncrasies of the members of her family in particular. The frequent and lengthy descriptions of her interactions with these people who are her mentors in the journey are, however, melodramatic, contrived, and tedious.

Matthew Manera has a gift for lyrical description and a gift for the subtle weaving of a tale. The difficulty arises when the two are combined, without sufficient constraint, in the same piece of literature.