Broken Ground

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Vancouver Island, Jack Hodgins once observed, “is littered with failed
utopias.” The harrowing failure of one such quixotic scheme is the
basis of this powerful, poignant, and heartbreaking story.

After World War I, a Land Settlement Act for a granted land to “the
Returned Soldier,” but much of what is given to the disparate men and
women on Vancouver Island is unfit for farming. The father of the
book’s principal narrator is killed trying to clear the land, but this
is only the beginning of a series of tragedies and misfortunes that
culminate in a forest fire that looms in the background before exploding
onto the settlement. This beautifully written book transports the reader
from the inferno of the forest fire to the inferno of the war’s
Western Front, as the young Canadians struggle with the reality of one
and with memories of the other. The conflagration leads to a numbing
loss that drives one man back to France, haunted by wartime horror and
postwar tragedy.

The first half of the novel is told by the voices of twelve
characters—or so it seems, until one finds out more about them in the
book’s third part, which is set in 1996. The one character we never
hear from directly is a veteran who rides his horse across the country
from Ontario in search of a prewar love. His stay in the pioneer
settlement affects each of the books’ richly developed characters.

Jack Hodgins is already an internationally acclaimed novelist, and
Broken Ground will enhance his reputation. It is an exceptional novel
that will linger long in memory.