Wednesday, 1st January 2003, 11:26am
An opinion by: Rascal

 

The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

So yeah the verdict is in: read it - you'll like it. Solid story, chock full of historic trivia on life on a farm in Westrn Canada during WWII. The author's clearly done much research and that always works for me. I like to know how to light a stove, what's kept in the pantry, what's in the cellar, and what's hidden in a hole in the wall behind mother's bed. The food, the recipes, the utensils, the prices, this is the stuff that transports you to a very different time and place.

Beth Weeks is a bonny farmer's daughter who's got two native farmhands interested, as well as a girl from the nearby reservation. Her father has recently gone nutso, after a wilderness encounter with a bear. Her mother keeps a very cool scrapbook of recipes marked with memories.

"I stood next to my mother at the kitchen table on the afternoon that Nora and I had picked cherries, dicing a pile of cleaned beets. On the table before us, the scrapbook was open to the recipe for beet wine. My mother's beet-bloody fingerprints covered the page. As I was cutting, I sprayed a bit of beet juice on this page, so I grabbed a dry dishrag and dabbed it up.
'Leave it!' said my mother.
'I was just wiping it off.'
'I said leave it!'"

Beth has a big brother who just wants to get out of there and enlist. School is a drag, the kids are mean to her, the weather ruins one crop and something has got to blow, which it does. This story has got great soap opera value, but not at all fluffy or tedious - very engaging. If you are perchance travelling alone, staying among strangers, living out of a hotel room, get this book. It's a great comfort. --RBR

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