Strong at the Broken Places

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Sixty-something Freda MacDougall, a Cape Bretoner, decides to leave the
comfort of her Ingonish home to fly across Canada to Vancouver. Her trip
begins with an hilarious, hair-raising drive down Cape Smokey and ends
with her residence in a seedy Vancouver hotel. Her coast-to-coast travel
experience is full of colorful observations. In Halifax airport she
notices that a bowl of cereal costs more than two whole boxes of
porridge; she thinks that if the plane crashes when she’s in the
bathroom, “this’ll be a nice finish to it all.”

In Vancouver, Freda visits her fellow Cape Bretoner, Wilena; encounters
street people whose “sorrowful eyes” and “wrinkled scarred skin”
disturb her; and meets many people from other countries, including a
Chinese gentleman, Tet-Yin, whom she soon marries. Whereas the street
people have given up, Freda plods cheerfully and uncritically onward.
Her genuine joy in living shines through in everything she says and
does, from her joke at Halifax airport (“The only bag I need checked
is me”) to her helping Wilena bury her dead cat in a park. Freda’s
strength comes from accepting the depressing side of life (including the
sudden death of her new husband) and moving on, leaving the broken
places within her to mend themselves.

David Doucette’s novel is a masterpiece, deserving a place with the
best of Canadian fiction. The music of his Cape Breton voices and the
island idioms are unforgettable. His style is beautiful: “The two left
the kitchen, the floor giving off an aching sound as they passed over it
in the dark.” The people and places are so real that we expect to find
Freda and friends on the Vancouver streets. This is a novel everyone
should read, because it gives our sometimes grim Canadian life a
beautiful, optimistic glow.