Frog Moon

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

This intergenerational novel, set mainly in Northern Ontario against an
anglo-franco-Cree backdrop, successfully weaves these elements and more
into a text of many layers and colors. Tapestry is the word that comes
to mind. The book’s beautiful cover, which looks like a medieval book
illumination, underlines this appartenance (a word French-speaking
Canadians use frequently, to define their belonging to their own culture
and language).

The narrator is a middle-class woman who attended a convent school. Her
husband is a professor; her daughter attends university; her fanciful,
circus-loving father runs a hotel and tends bar; her pragmatic and
devoutly Catholic mother fixes appliances, cooks, knits, and keeps the
accounts. At a Christmas dinner that all attend, conversation becomes a
forum for language issues. (According to the author, language marks
people; it is their refuge as well as their weapon.) Later, the
conversation develops into a discussion of Quebec’s desire for
independence, and reveals a split between family members. That split
also exists within the narrator.

Frog Moon is both reverent and irreverent, and truly Canadian through
its analysis of cultural, linguistic, and social contradictions. It is
also sophisticated, funny, sensitive, and innovative in its use of
language, and places Lola Lemire Tostevin among the major figures of
Canadian literature.