Tantramar.

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

Tantramar, writes Eric Sparling, is the name of the marsh “you drive through when you pass from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia.” It is the place where young Dante Devon’s mother is killed in a crash, the car she was riding in driven by Dante’s adopted sister, Crystal. Dante is 14, a ninth-grade student at Amherst District Secondary School in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. Sparling, a Guelph editor and newspaper reporter and first-time novelist, saddles young Dante with all the painful weight of male puberty, then adds to it by giving him a dysfunctional family.

Dante tells his own story. Daniel, his dad, paints portraits using a pin dipped into paint instead of a brush. For reasons the book does not fully explain, he builds a lighthouse on the property. “I was a child with a tower going up in his backyard,” Dante says. “I’d be able to see the ocean. I’d turn on the light and help cutters negotiate the deadly Chignecto Passage.” Daniel withdraws into himself when his wife is killed, leaving Dante to cope as best he can. And 16-year old Crystal’s sexual escapades do nothing to make the boy’s life any easier.

Sparling’s short novel (138 pages) pulls no punches in its description of the emotional turmoil experienced by adolescent boys. Dante’s efforts to forge friendships, his encounters with bullies, his desperate efforts to fit the discovery of girls into his life, all are rendered with painful clarity. This is a well-written first novel. Recommended.