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macwoods's review against another edition
3.75
I really enjoyed this book - though the structure of the storytelling was annoying at first (a little ADD) and a bit of a gimmick by the end - it did make you want to keep reading, which is clever enough. I liked that it had the occasional Gaelic phrase. Takes place in CB - in Port Hawkesbury, near the causeway. Follows the lives of three young people and their intertwined families. Touches on the intergenerational impact of war and the damages that people experience in them. This is part of a trilogy - and it made me want to read the others.
hnelson_2021's review against another edition
3.0
Estranged cousins meet and spend the night talking about the past. It is intense, and goes back and forth in time.
chalicotherex's review
5.0
I think this was my favourite of MacIntyre's trilogy (though to be fair I read them out of order and I think that made the last book harder to read). It's a great book about how boredom and a need to impose logic can start painful rumours, and how wars can keep killing people long after they've ended.
MacIntyre has an ear for the way Cape Bretoners speak, I'd rate his dialogue higher than Alistair MacLeod's or Lynne Coady's. The novel is mostly one long conversation between two related men, and it's a fair cop that sometimes the book is hard to follow: too many men sharing the same names, with huge parts of family history avoided or referred to only euphemistically (one of the characters is even named Euphemia). This doesn't detract from the book, though. That's how Catholic families of the time used to discuss their problems, and there were never more than four or five first names in those communities.
MacIntyre has an ear for the way Cape Bretoners speak, I'd rate his dialogue higher than Alistair MacLeod's or Lynne Coady's. The novel is mostly one long conversation between two related men, and it's a fair cop that sometimes the book is hard to follow: too many men sharing the same names, with huge parts of family history avoided or referred to only euphemistically (one of the characters is even named Euphemia). This doesn't detract from the book, though. That's how Catholic families of the time used to discuss their problems, and there were never more than four or five first names in those communities.
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