The Secret of the Northern Lights

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

W.P. Kinsella won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for the
critically acclaimed Shoeless Joe, the novel upon which the movie Field
of Dreams was based. Silas Ermineskin, who has appeared in earlier
Kinsella stories, serves as the narrator in this new and wonderful
collection of stories about the characters and culture of Canada’s
First Nations. As part of his apprenticeship to Mad Etta, medicine woman
on the Ermineskin Reserve, Silas shares a wealth of inside information
with us. Together with some of the most delightfully quirky characters
ever committed to paper (including “Brother” Frank Fencepost and
Bedelia Coyote), he becomes embroiled in a variety of schemes and
adventures.

If W.P. Kinsella is not a genius, then I don’t know who is. Who else
can make you laugh at a story about the bleaching of a buffalo and at
the same time take your breath away with a description of the Alberta
landscape?