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Summary
Summary
A gorgeous, poetic literary debut from award-winning author Frances Greenslade, Shelter is a brilliant coming-of-age story of two strong, brave sisters searching for their mother.
For sisters Maggie and Jenny growing up in the Pacific mountains in the early 1970s, life felt nearly perfect. Seasons in their tiny rustic home were peppered with wilderness hikes, building shelters from pine boughs and telling stories by the fire with their doting father and beautiful, adventurous mother. But at night, Maggie--a born worrier--would count the freckles on her father's weathered arms, listening for the peal of her mother's laughter in the kitchen, and never stop praying to keep them all safe from harm. Then her worst fears come true: Not long after Maggie's tenth birthday, their father is killed in a logging accident, and a few months later, their mother abruptly drops the girls at a neighbor's house, promising to return. She never does.
With deep compassion and sparkling prose, Frances Greenslade's mesmerizing debut takes us inside the extraordinary strength of these two girls as they are propelled from the quiet, natural freedom in which they were raised to a world they can't begin to fathom. Even as the sisters struggle to understand how their mother could abandon them, they keep alive the hope that she is fighting her way back to the daughters who adore her and who need her so desperately.
Heartwarming and lushly imagined, Shelter celebrates the love between two sisters and the complicated bonds of family. It is an exquisitely written ode to sisters, mothers, daughters, and to a woman's responsibility to herself and those she loves.
Author Notes
Frances Greenslade is the author of two memoirs and is the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction. She teaches English in Penticton, BC.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Greenslade's beautiful debut novel (after the memoir By a Secret Ladder) chronicles the struggles of sisters Maggie and Jenny as they attempt to make sense of a life without parents in rural Duchess Creek, Canada, in the 1970s. After their father dies in a tragic logging accident when the girls are young, Maggie and Jenny's mother drops them off with friends, and never returns. As weeks bleed into months that pool into years, Maggie and Jenny grow into very different teenagers, though both girls labor on with the memory of their beloved father and the persistent hope that one day their mother might return. Maggie, the narrator, finds comfort in local loner Vern George-with whom she builds makeshift shelters in the woods-and his kind Uncle Leslie. When Jenny gets pregnant and is shipped off to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home for Unwed Mothers, Maggie takes it upon herself to locate their prodigal mother-or at least uncover her fate-and build a true shelter wherein Maggie and Jenny might reconstitute the loving family they once had. Agent: Denise Bukowski, the Bukowski Agency. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
This quiet but powerful first novel feels like the best sort of campfire story-slow to build, with flickering flashes of insight mixed with a slightly ominous foreboding and elements of native folklore. Set in the Chilcotin region of northern British Columbia, it tells the story of two sisters, Jenny and Maggie, who grow up without running water, electricity, and many other comforts except the love of their parents, Irene and Patrick, and the beauty of the natural world around them. When Patrick dies in a logging accident, Irene leaves her daughters to board with a neighbor in Williams Lake while she searches for work. Her letters dwindle, then stop. The girls finally realize that they have been abandoned and that it is up to them to build the shelter-both physical and emotional-to sustain themselves as they move into adulthood. Maggie is a strong, resourceful heroine intent on finding out what happened to her mother. VERDICT This moving novel is an easy choice for book clubs, particularly those interested in learning more about the Pacific Northwest.-Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.