The Spruces

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

The setting for Holmes’s second novel is Depression-era Peace River
country, specifically an uncultivated plot of land referred to locally
as “The Spruces.” The story concerns the trials and tribulations a
naive young Toronto couple, Jo-Anne and Kevin McCormack, experience as
they travel to and attempt to settle in at their isolated one-room
dilapidated homestead. They meet a variety of characters, good and bad,
and encounter a number of misadventures, including and a falling rock
that narrowly misses Kevin as he digs a well and a misfiring .22 rifle
that foreshadows the novel’s tragic conclusion.

The most dramatic conflict in this well-constructed and deftly paced
tale is the one between the McCormacks and their unforgiving
environment. Although there are times when the dialogue intrudes (as,
for example, with the drayman’s guffaws of “Baw Haw” and
references to “aigs,” “Scandahoovians,” “Ay-rab’s armpit,”
“moss fer chinkin,” and “natcherel talent”), The Spruces should
appeal to anyone interested in the pioneering efforts in northern
settlements.