[.ca] After (SC) River (ISBN 1554681669)

Stunning New Canadian Author:
It's summer 1966 in British Columbia, a stone's throw from the U.S. border. Fifteen year old Natalie Ward, her parents -Nettie and Gus and her three brothers live on their dairy farm in a secluded valley. Natalie is happiest within the enclave of her family. Their lives seem idyllic, both to themselves and to their friends and neighbours. When the need for a new handyman arises, Nettie hires a young American draft dodger - River Jordan. "She was expecting him. She wasn't expecting the heartache that would follow like a cold wind". Milner's masterful use of foreshadowing throughout this novel is never overdone, rather it leaves the reader hungering to follow the story. We are tantalized by some future cataclysmic event, that will change the seemingly perfect lives of the Ward family. River Jordan's arrival seems to be the momentum that begins the change..... After River tells it's story flipping between the past and the present. We relive the past through Natalie and Nettie's memories. In the present it is 2003 and Nettie is dying from cancer. She needs to see Natalie before she dies. Natalie has been estranged from her family for over 25 years. "The unnamed resentment I carried with me out the door the day I left. I carried it every day, like some animal clinging to my back that wouldn't let go because I kept petting it, stroking it, enjoying the perverse pleasure of letting it hang on". What could have happened to this family to create such a rift? I will not spoil the book for future readers by detailing the events that lead up to this rift. Rather, I encourage you to experience this hauntingly beautiful book for yourself. Everyone will be able to relate to and reflect on the complexity of family relationships detailed in this amazing first novel. Milner's writing is quite simply, beautiful. "My favourite memory is of my father and brothers working in the fields. I carry a mental picture of them drenched in the golden glow of the late summer sun. I keep this precious gem hidden deep in the dark closet of my mind, behind all of life's stored clutter. I take it out rarely, cautiously. Like a fragile object stored in opaque tissue, I unwrap it with slow trepidation. I turn it this way and that, trying to see more, to see beyond the faded edges of memory". Milner was a real estate agent until her husband encouraged her to start writing. I'm very glad he did. Milner is an important new voice in Canadian literature.

Amazing story, well written, easy read.:
This was such a great story, I wish it wasn't over. Not often do you get to know the characters this well. I can't stop thinking about them and what this family lived through. One of the best stories I have read in a long time, I will read this one again for certain.

"Where the past cannot be altered; it can only be lived with. Or buried.":
Natalie Ward, the heroine of Donna Milner's exquisitely written debut novel must finally confront the ghosts of her past. She's a happily married middle-aged mother and a natural journalist who also has a capacity for engendering great empathy and kindness, but she also has secrets - mostly of the family variety, and mostly sublimated. It is these secrets, and also a sudden phone call from her daughter Jenny telling her that her mother Nettie is dying, that thrusts Natalie back into the past where she forced to relive events - both gorgeous and catastrophic - as she comes of age on her family's dairy farm in British Columbia. It is the turbulent mid-sixties and the impressionable sixteen-year-old Natalie is living a secluded and insular life with her parents Gus and Nettie, and her three brothers, Morgan and Carl, and Natalie's favourite, the brilliant and bookish older brother, Boyer. Indeed the Wards live in their own world in the long, hot summer of 1966 where all is drenched in the golden glow of the summer sun on their farm near the town of Atwood just miles from the US/Canadian border. A mercurial and imaginative girl, with a virtuous sense of conscience, Natalie seems to relish in her alienation. At school she does nothing to encourage friendships, content to spend most of her spare time with Boyer, playing his word games in his room up in the attic and reading his books. Things change when a young American draft-dodger by the name of River Jordan is employed by Natalie as a handyman and flows into the lives of the Ward family with his large green duffel bag, his guitar case over his shoulder, his hair the sun-streaked colour of a hayfield drying in the sun. At first, for Natalie, River comes across as a hippie, perhaps representative of all of the oddly dressed young Americans marching beneath peace signs, protesting the Vietnam War while also sticking flowers into the gun barrels of riot police. But soon enough Natalie is falling under his spell, his eyes entrancing her, "like the colour of a blue-green ocean," an ocean she had only seen in her imagination. The rest of the Wards accept River's reasons for coming to Canada, his gentle and beguiling nature at first seemingly a perfect fit for this close-knit family, especially Boyer whose analytical mind craves knowledge and ultimately understands how River is exorcising his democratic right to choose. Only Gus, a blue collar working man who wears his long johns like a second skin, winter and summer, belies an instinctual mistrust of the young man, considering him to be one of the spoiled greasy haired hooligans who stand under a peace banner because they don't have the guts to fight for their country. None of the Wards however, can predict the eventual heartache that will follow River's arrival, a heartache that sweeps "like a cold wind" through the valley, shattering this family and becoming an irrevocable tragedy of errors accomplished in the course of a few long ago summer days. Indeed the Wards, and Natalie in particular spend the rest of their lives coming to terms with the events of that year, River's presence eroding the jagged edges of their resistance, his ghost echoing throughout their world for decades to come. When Natalie travels towards Atwood on the bus thirty-five years later, "like a time machine carrying her in slow motion back to her past," she must ask for forgiveness from her mother Nettie and her brother Boyer and see beyond the faded edges of memory. Natalie longs to unburden herself, to confess her part the downfall of her family and to say out loud how it all came about, and where it could have been changed. It's hard to fathom which themes are more profound in this novel: the bigotry and intolerance that gradually isolate the Ward family in a town where there is little respect for tolerating anything that is different different, or a young girl that is so blinded with what she believes is love that she gradually loses sight of reality with devasting consequences; in the end, she's a child lost in the moment, believing that her desire has made her an adult. Ultimately a novel about the past and what has been left behind, Donna Milner captures the beautiful natural rhythms of day-to-day workings of dairy farm life and the ways that personal jealousies can balloon into ruthless and bitter vendettas. Throughout, Milner's graceful prose is deliberately propulsive but plain, and her talent lies in her careful plotting as Natalie moves through her solitary world, bound to her mother Nettie and her brother Boyer by a shared secret. She's unable to let go of her unamed resentment that she carries with her out the door the day she left the family fold. Obviously River's arrival became catalyst, causing a fracture of connectedness when the glue that holds the Ward family together was suddenly torn apart. For Natalie what was once predictable and imperceptible suddenly seems to be accelerating with an almost unimaginable force. Part of her growth is that she must come to terms with how much has been lost and left behind even as she tries to understand how River came to the Wards, became a part of them and, how he ultimately forced them to confront their deepest fears and desires. Mike Leonard May 08.