7. Wolf in White Van

By John Darnielle                   

Disappointing.

Here I am exactly three years later retroactively adding this as an entry and I cannot for the life of me recall what this novel was about.  It has such a great cover though.

6. Through Black Spruce

By Joseph Boyden

Picked this up at a secondhand book shop in Charlottetown a couple of years after reading the excellent Three Day Road.  I think I would have read this sooner had I not learned about the controversy of Boyden’s indigenous ancestry, which blew up in 2016.  I remember talking about this with an old friend who was visiting from Winnipeg. 

She still recommended that I read Through Black Spruce, saying if I liked Three Day Road, I’ll like this one too, as she thought TBS was even better. 

So I finally gave it a go, and was disappointed with the book as a whole.  Although it was meant to be a follow up, as the son of the protagonist from TDR, Will Bird, is now an old bush pilot who spends most of the novel in a coma at the hospital. The narrative weaves between Will's life before his accident and his niece Annie, who is looking for her sister, a model who went missing in NYC. 

As you can tell from the summary,   was not like Three Day Road - at all. It was inferior in every way, from narrative cohesian, characterization and quality of writing. The one aspect I did appreciate was seeing how First Nations characters who are at home in the wilds, but can also navigate the urban streets of Toronto and social in-circles of Manhattan. 

But compared to brilliance of Three Day Road, I found Through Black Spruce rather superficial, lifeless and boring.  I had trouble getting into the character of Annie.  The writing was very distant and unrelatable, and because I didn't really care what would happen, I had to force myself to finish the book.