One Last Good Look

R.G. Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

In this series of interconnected stories, acclaimed Newfoundland writer
Michael Winter re-creates the coming-of-age ritual of Gabriel English as
he grows up in Newfoundland experiencing hunting accidents, death in the
family, sibling rivalry, romantic attachments (breaking up and making
up), unreliable friendships, and the typical growing pains of the late
teenage years.

Though Winter’s style might become tedious for some readers (he
prefers the clipped, tart phrase to the more expansive, and he tends to
start many sentences with a proper noun or pronoun), through it he
conveys a sense of life’s repetitiveness—the idea that, as the
epigraph to his book suggests, all the new thinking is about loss. In
this it resembles all the old thinking. Thus, the storyline is, as the
blurb states, “one of the oldest in literature—that of a young man
making sense of the world and choosing his place in it.” The reason we
want to read it again, however, is because Michael Winter brings to it
an originality, a freshness of perspective; he dresses the story in such
unfamiliar garments that we are struck by just how old and yet how new
this story really is.