The Art of Salvage.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Leona Theis’s second novel (her first, Sightlines, appeared in 2000 to critical acclaim) exists on an almost flat plane. What little action there is provides primarily a framework for the dynamic between the two main characters, Delorie and Amber. Nor is there much variance in the geography of the place (Saskatoon), the weather or peripherals, or the characters or situations. There is, instead, Theis’s remarkable narrative strengths in rendering a character’s emotions—the internal topographical struggles which sometimes parallel, sometimes intersect, but almost always transcend outward action.

When Delorie becomes pregnant she decides to have the baby and then surrender it for adoption. But things are not so straightforward: When Del’s mother hears about the pregnancy she and Del decide to take the baby to Ripley, Saskatchewan, the family home, where mother and daughter are raised as sisters. “Del, her ‘sister,’” Amber thinks later; “Del, her birth mother.” She seeks a safe spot from which to view her past, but is frustrated by Delorie’s refusal to supply details. “She’d soon be twenty-five,” Amber thinks, “and two and a half decades seemed a long time to be on earth without having your fundamentals sorted out. Twenty-five: a milestone, a time of reckoning.”

Theis excels at description: “The river was low,” she writes at one point, “its colour lightened by sandbars that showed beneath the surface. Amber strode along the trail Monday morning, underneath the University Bridge and north, in and out of the shade of tall bushes—caragana, wild rose, and wolf willow.”

Lack of information about her past leads Amber to the salvaging of “souvenirs”: wire hangers, bits and pieces of her life such as a doorbell plate from a house recently torn down, a house in which both she and Del lived, though not together. She has a cardboard box containing “a crockery shard, an old soldier’s badge, a single earring, a broken fish hook, a dozen other items. Her inventory,” she thinks, “some days you need one.”

Recommended.