Bookworm, no. 160
John Casey reads Michelle Good’s novel “Eliza Sunshine.” Catherine Owen on Dominique Béchard’s poetry collection “Shadow of the Living Brightness.” Tales from the midway. Inside the September issue.
Eliza Sunshine
Michelle Good
Random House Canada
368 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
Told by three generations of Cree women—Swan, Eliza, and Ella—Michelle Good’s Eliza Sunshine is a chronicle of stolen and reclaimed futures. It is a story about mothers teaching daughters how to live full lives in the face of colonialism.
Inspired by Good’s matrilineal heritage, the three-part narrative begins with Swan’s adolescence during the late nineteenth century. Swan tells her daughter, Eliza, how she mourned the loss of “the peaceful, sure world” in which she was raised after the “perfect balance” between Indigenous people and the land was destroyed by settlers. Even so, she found a fraught way forward and travelled throughout the prairies. In the second part, Eliza tells her own daughter, Ella, how she survived the vagaries of cultural destruction: as a student at a residential school, as a nurse-in-training in New Zealand, and as a registered nurse in Canada. But following the stillbirth of her son, Eliza recommitted herself to Cree ways of life. In the final section, Ella, a fledgling journalism student, decides to write about and advocate for Indigenous lives after her mother’s closest friend, Eleanor, is brutally killed. Her story concludes when she is prompted by her own daughter to explain how she came to be who she is.
While this is a tale of intergenerational trauma, the emphasis falls just as much on the telling as it does on suffering. We cannot choose the hardships we face, Good seems to suggest, but we can decide if and how we talk about them. This sentiment is important, but it is a shame the book doesn’t challenge it further. Moments of psychological complexity—like Swan’s relationship with her son, born as a result of rape—are left largely unexplored. Character depth is consistently sacrificed for narrative breadth. Given the novel’s ambitious scope, this is a minor criticism. Perhaps its shortcomings—in tandem with its insights—will spur still further accounts of histories as yet untold.
—John Casey
Shadow of the Living Brightness
Dominique Béchard
Coach House Books
88 pages, softcover and ebook
“I’m being endlessly revised by things,” Dominique Béchard writes in “Kinship,” a poem from her stunning second collection. Suffused with spiritual yearning, Shadow of the Living Brightness creates a melancholic mood that somehow never turns sentimental. Béchard’s ars poetica is “the great whoosh” that both disorients and anchors one inside the existential quest to understand being in the world. One must see everything differently to reconnect with their humanity.
In these pages, eggs “tremble in nervous glee,” ducks shift their “soft hips,” and a slug has “one big foot.” Such strange personifications defamiliarize the most ordinary scenes and shake the sedentary soul. This extends to verbs: “Bootprints waffle the snow,” and “black bears snuffle at the feet of driveways.” Elsewhere, “chokecherries acne/the latticework,” and there are “burnished, Octobering clouds” in the sky. Depending on one’s mood, certain lines might lean toward excess, as with the ghost pepper that has a “desire for penance.” Some entire poems, like a scattershot erasure piece based on St. Augustine, are cleverly conceived but a slog to read.
Throughout, Béchard gifts her readers with ineffable natural imagery: rain “popping like so many tiny kneecaps” and loneliness echoing in the “snow-lipped dark.” Then there are more complex scenes like “grapnel/haled through blossomwater, air gummy with chirruping.” The speaker’s voice offers a gently vatic tone but always with the presence of self-doubt. Such wry undercutting is evident in humorous entries like the filmic cento “Dominique is Dead” or the last lines of “Epektasis,” where she imagines self-mocking titles for her spiritual autobiography, “Desolation vs./Desolation.” Béchard writes like a twenty-first-century Rilke with Gertrude Schnackenberg’s bravery and an affinity for Keats (whose influence echoes throughout). This book admits to failures, aging, and tremors of faithlessness. Regardless, it honours the “lambent mysteries” of poetry and life to the fullest.
—Catherine Owen
From the Archives: Fair Dealings
It is the season of rollercoasters, midways, and deep-fried monstrosities. So why not learn more about the history of Canadian summer carnivals with our October 2024 review of John Thurston’s Carnie King: The Story of Patty Conklin and Conklin Shows?! (Everyone’s a winner with this link that’s open to all Bookworm readers.)
Inside the September Issue
“I like to think it’s the striking juxtaposition and not just my age that slows me down when I run through this miraculous landscape. I like to think that maybe all is not lost.” First things first: a note from Kyle Wyatt.
Allan Hepburn reviews John Delacourt’s new wartime thriller, The Innocent Canadian.
“Bring me that most diverse, that most exciting of spices: vanilla!” Rose Hendrie finds nothing boring in Eric T. Jennings’s Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean, one of fifteen books to have just landed on the 2026 Cundill History Prize longlist.
And much more!