Caitlin Hicks's Blog: Book Reviews, page 15

She’s Not Screaming!

A heart breaking but beautiful story about a teenager, estranged from her family at that vulnerable and powerful time of her life – when she begins to step into the world. An almost unbelievable ‘one in a million’ event happens to her and she holds on for the ride. Only to be stopped by the face of a newborn in a moment she describes as “you know you are where the universe has put you.” Unexpected, lively and mostly true. An irresistible character!

The story originates locally, with Maggi Guzzi, during the time I was writing SINGING THE BONES. I needed two stories that would justify the mother not wanting to go to the hospital ever again for the birth of her next child; as in SINGING THE BONES, the mother needed to be acutely motivated to risk a birth of twins – when everyone around her counselled her against it. I was trying to explore what it means to give a woman the choice of her birthplace, the people she wants to birth with, and any other Mother-generated wishes. After all, isn’t she the centre of birth? Or shouldn’t she be?

For the play, I wanted a story of a woman whose birth was traumatic enough to make her fear hospital birth. This one, generously shared by Maggi Guzzi, wasn’t as much about her experience in hospital as it was about the conception, pregnancy and ultimate outcome of the birth. As a young teen, the experience was traumatizing – she was completely alone in a brusque, sterile environment while her body was tortured with pain. She had no idea what to expect and had to endure the physical and emotional pain alone.

The photo above was taken from SINGING THE BONES, the film to express this alienation and trauma. The character, however, is resilient. Photo below the moment when Nicole says: “You know you are where the universe has put you.”

I love this story! Listen and enjoy!

The post She’s Not Screaming! appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

The flu in 1963, Pasadena, California

And now a word from Annie Shea in
A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE

“Dear Jesus

Last night, after dinner and the rosary, all the kids watched Walt Disney. The show was Son of Flubber. I was not feeling well. I kept praying to you not to let me have the flu. But I gues it was your will that I suffer. I ran to the bathroom with that horrible feeling and spit up. You gave me this penance and I am offering it up for your glory. I already offered up some of it all over the bathroom. Usually it’s disgusting to even get near the toilet, but when you have the flu, it doesn’t seem so bad to have your mouth wide open right next to the bowl. Mother cleaned it up. I hate the flu. But it’s probably not as bad as getting crucified.”

Sign up at any level of subscription at www.Patreon.com/SomeKindaWoman between now and March 20th and you will receive an audio book of A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE in half-hour podcast segments to enjoy!

The post The flu in 1963, Pasadena, California appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

Wind, Water

Serendipity. A magical birth, a death in almost the same breath. Midwife Wendy Clemens opens her heart and rural practice to support a mysterious woman she knows nothing about who insists she will not go to hospital. This encounter becomes a meditation on that fascinating slip of time and space between life and the universe.

Photo: from Singing the Bones, the film. Actor: Brenda Menard

The post Wind, Water appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

Those Darn Chickens!

Always with a smile and always thoughtful, Maribel Holland gives us a glimpse of her life as the daughter of a Preacher in Gibsons in the thirties. From age 13 Maribel embraces the simple life until years later, on a day like any other, that life abruptly ends.

“You know, I’m glad I was there in the room with him,” she says “then I didn’t have to wonder if there was anything I could have done for him,” says Maribel.

See if you can find the details of the simple life on BC’s west coast, the hallmark of a truly rural and magical time.

*For this podcast, I used an English accent, although Maribel had a west coast of Canada way of speaking.

 

 

 

The post Those Darn Chickens! appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

Louella, Who Survived Her Times

Born in 1918 “into the hands of Granny Rouse” Louella Duncan was a child of the first landowners in Bargain Harbour. Their family existed in conditions that have vanished with modern life. As one child in a family of eleven, she lived on a float house in a logging camp and travelled everywhere by boat, since the roads had not been built yet.

Life could be brutal and spectacular. Louella describes the big earthquake at Queen Charlotte in 1946, losing a brother off the back of a boat in a gale; and a family tragedy that still happens in close-knit communities in rural British Columbia.

Louella is the voice of a woman who survived her times.

This particular story was presented live asThe Life We Lived, with Louella in the audience at The Rockwood in Sechelt. She was one of several women whose stories were told that day,  true stories from women who lived in the early part of the 20th century.

This episode Louella, Who Survived Her Times, is due to be published as a podcast this coming Thursday, Feb 6th. It is part of the ongoing series SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us, a podcast about women at pivotal moments of their lives. One voice at a time.

You can download here, when it is available:

 

.

The post Louella, Who Survived Her Times appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

Next of Kin, podcast

When I was 21 years old, preparing to travel to Europe for the first time, my Mother whispered a request: to get her a photo of the grave of her childhood sweetheart in a cemetery in France.  This is the true story of how, years after she died, I finally got the photo, and came to understand its importance. NEXT OF KIN was published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as ‘A Visit for Remembrance’ in 2003 and on Smashwords to 5 star reviews. It inspired an aspect of my novel A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, published in 2015 by Light Messages Publishing, North Carolina.

 

 

The post Next of Kin, podcast appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

The Majesties

The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao

Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster

Reviewer: Caitlin Hicks

Tiffany Tsao’s novel The Majesties opens brutally: the reader is in the mind of a young woman as she lies in intensive care, the sole survivor of a mass murder at the birthday of a family’s beloved patriarch where everyone gathered around a lavish meal, dressed to the nines. Gwendolyn reimagines her sister Estella pouring the poison in the shark fin soup in the gleaming restaurant kitchen and recounts her vision of a roomful of over 300 guests of all ages in their fashionable finery retching and twisting and vomiting through the last moments of their lives.

The rest of the novel takes place inside Gwendolyn’s head as she tries to understand why her sister would do such a thing. The book begins with this sentence: “When your sister murders three hundred people, you can’t help but wonder why—especially if you were one of the intended victims—though I do forgive her, if you can believe it.”

Indeed. It’s a fantastic hook for a novel that is described as a “thriller” (for want of a precise description), a book that is more a psychological study of people raised with a golden spoon in their mouths. It’s a story about an Indonesian Chinese family with their various businesses, vacations, schooling, travels, marriages, and frequent family gatherings.

Their troubles arise from their separation from the “plebes” of the world, the excess of their wealth and privilege, a condition that is both acknowledged and unseen: like the frog content to sit in a pot of water on top of the stove as the water gets warmer and hotter until at last, he’s cooked by the very thing that surrounds him.

Gwendolyn goes back into the past, searching for the clues that would warrant her close friend and sister to poison them all. The reader sits on her shoulder, wondering What could possibly warrant the murder of an entire family?

The two protagonists Gwendolyn and Estella are close, loving each other in a way that sisters who’ve relied on each other throughout their lives are capable of doing. The very compelling opening thread holds the book together even as both characters wander away from each other through their sheltered world—all taking place in the memory of Gwendolyn from her sick bed.

Looking closely at her relationship with her extended family, but mostly with her beloved Estelle, Gwendolyn stumbles upon things in plain sight by closely analyzing past events. Together the sisters track down a long-lost favorite yet rebellious aunt who appears in a photo well after she supposedly “drowned” on a boating excursion; alongside the sisters, the reader feels the excitement and suspense of finding this aunt years later. This aunt who struck Gwendolyn as genuine and truthful in a way the rest of her family wasn’t.

What does she look like now after all these years? Why did she “disappear” herself? And Leonard, the abusive husband of Estelle who “died”—the reader is only partially informed about the cause of his death, making this dropped fact part of the tension to reveal answers to the deadly puzzle Gwendolyn mulls over and over. When the cause of Leonard’s death is finally revealed, the frog in the water is simmering.

But there is more, under everyone’s noses, things that don’t really seem like secrets but more like people going about their privileged lives doing what they are entitled to do. That this family gets away with these breeches of morality and exactly what these things are, and how easily they unfold, is a shocking study of the possibilities for a different kind of abuse of wealth.

The book is written in an easy style of prose that is both taut and descriptive, the characters sympathetic, the elevated lifestyle so easy for the reader to soak up from this side of the page. There is an entire aspect of an obsession of insects that is skillfully woven into the narrative and personalities of the two main characters.

The Majesties, although it rolls out easily, troubles deeply, haunting and even chilling its reader well beyond the final page.

This review first appeared on New York Journal of Books

The post The Majesties appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

Moments Before a Wedding

It’s January of 1946, eight months after V-E Day and a mere five months after the end of the war. A young bride fixes her dress in front of a mirror just prior to her wedding.

In these private moments, she feels compelled to conjure an image of her childhood sweetheart and husband, killed in the final months of the war. She can’t be sure he’s dead; she hasn’t even seen a photo of his grave. And yet, she’s promised to marry again.

Written in the voice of the bride and based on a true story, Moments Before A Wedding was inspired by my mother, whose husband, Carl Robert Swanson, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. They had been childhood sweethearts, and shared a love of music. Here is a photo of their wedding:

We always wondered why our mother never wore a white bride’s dress when she married our father, until we saw this photo.

My mother brought fourteen children into the world with my father but no one in the family had a clue that Mother had been married before. When I was fifteen, we discovered her wedding photos in a cedar chest stacked amongst cobwebs in the tool shed. And once we found out, we weren’t allowed to talk about it. So of course, neither was our Mother.

I wrote this piece to accompany the wonder I felt every time I thought of what my Mother had to endure losing her childhood friend, her creative partner, her husband to war. I wanted to give voice to my mother, to this secret we all kept quiet about.

 

And yet, my parents were ‘madly in love’. Here is a picture of my mother with my father during what they called their ‘courtship’.

In this podcast, Gord Halloran sings a few bars of ‘We’ll meet again,” a popular song during the war.

We’re still working on the file; I’ll post it as soon as its done!

The post Moments Before a Wedding appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

“Your predecessor had a nervous breakdown!”

Cloe Day rides 33 miles by horseback to her first job as a teacher in remote Athabasca, Alberta, and later becomes a share cropper in the when she receives a multi-acre homestead in lieu of her teacher’s pay. The day after the birth of her first child, Cloe rides 30+ miles home over The Muskeg with her baby tied around her neck.

When she moves to Gibsons in 1946 to teach English in a one room basement, she is greeted by her students, taunting: ‘Your predecessor had a nervous breakdown!’ Tough, fiesty and outspoken, Cloe wallops, throws wastebaskets, and holds her students over the side of a boat as they upchuck in a storm. This and other tales will surprise you and have you smiling at a memorable woman who toughed it out in the West.

“Your predecessor had a nervous breakdown!” is an episode of THE PODCAST “SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us.” The character and monologue were part of the show called The Life We Lived, gathered, edited and performed by Caitlin Hicks, and remembering the early early days on the Sunshine Coast.

The post “Your predecessor had a nervous breakdown!” appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

The Hospital for Injured Snakes

Hospital for Injured Snakes features long time Gibsons resident Violet Winegarden in the 1930s adventuring through her rural childhood on The Sunshine Coast with her five sisters, her white kittens, wandering cows, insects, and snakes. When Violet’s Mother dies in childbirth with her seventh child, their father deserts them all. The story features The Union Steampship, called The Daddy Boat by locals; it details adventures with tug boats and log booms, with orcas and rabbits and dogs and cows lying on the hot dirt roads.

Violet is a well-known personality on the coast. She founded Happy Cat Haven, and ran the shelter for years.

The post The Hospital for Injured Snakes appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.