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River Thieves

Michael Crummey

Start date: September 1, 2022

Finish date: November 30, 2022

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Jul 30, 2022 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: canada, kindle, twenty-first-century, 5-star-reads, gr-recommended

This is definitely fiction, but apparently based on an actual event. The epigraph:
Various versions of this event have appeared from time to time in our histories and other publications, but as numerous discrepancies characterise these accounts, I prefer to give the story as I had it from the lips of the late John Peyton, J.P. of Twillingate, himself the actual captor of the Beothuk woman. —James P. Howley, The Beothuks or Red Indians, published 1915
The events take place from about 1810 thro This is definitely fiction, but apparently based on an actual event. The epigraph:
Various versions of this event have appeared from time to time in our histories and other publications, but as numerous discrepancies characterise these accounts, I prefer to give the story as I had it from the lips of the late John Peyton, J.P. of Twillingate, himself the actual captor of the Beothuk woman. —James P. Howley, The Beothuks or Red Indians, published 1915
The events take place from about 1810 through 1820 in Newfoundland. Nearly all of it takes place in winter, when the rivers and lakes are frozen. It is hard to imagine a harsher life.

Expectation accompanied the actual captor of the Beothuk woman and I felt an undercurrent of tension in the pages leading up to the capture - more than halfway. I need to state, however, that the tension is so much in the mind of the reader, that everything on the actual page is life pretty much as the characters would be expected to live it. There is no expectation on their part that anything unusual will happen in their near future.

We are given both a sense of time and a sense of place. He looked overhead at the oncoming weather. Where the black banks of cloud met and overlapped there were brilliant red and gold seams of light burning through, the colours as vivid as molten lava. I was too caught up in the story to do much underlining, but I used the dictionary more often than usual. At the beginning of chapters, Crummey gives us a Newfoundland Dictionary definition of some words or phrases. I looked up others. The old man slathered his gandies with molasses and recounted the pleasure of yet another night of uninterrupted slumber. What are gandies? A Google search tells me it is fried dough or bread, cut in about the size of a hamburger patty; usually buttered and with molasses.

Those who need mostly plot may not appreciate this. The strength of the novel is in the characterizations, again I say the sense of place, and also the writing style. The writing isn't necessarily beautiful, but the way the words are put together makes it seem to say more than just the words might otherwise convey. Sometimes the silence between the characters was palpable, other times a facial expression was clear and conveyed much.

I'm sorry I let this languish on my shelves so long. I added it to my Kindle holding nearly 4 years ago to the day. On the other hand, sometimes a book happens precisely when one is ready to read it. Perhaps that is the case with this. There were a few places where I wanted Crummey to just get on with it. This is 5-stars, but with that thought in mind, only just so.
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