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A review by pinknantucket
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
4.0
Lovely, lovely, lovely - my Mum found this one and insisted I read it before our own trip to Cape Breton, part of Nova Scotia in Canada.
The story is told from the viewpoint of an adult Alexander MacDonald, who grew up on Cape Breton and whose parents fell through the ice when he was three. (Warning: There's a lot of tragedy in this book, you will be sad). He and his twin sister were subsequently raised by their grandparents; his elder brothers set out to fend for themselves. Their lives diverged - his brothers came to work mainly in the mines; Alexander ends up going to university and becoming a dentist. However, his story focuses primarily on their similarities, the shared bonds of family, place and history. Alexander's sister, travelling to Scotland with her husband, even finds MacDonalds there who still consider her family and can remember the story of her great-great-great-grandfather's move to Canada in the eighteenth century. I can't really imagine what it must be like to identify so strongly with a group of people, even though I consider my own family relatively close-knit.
The relationships between siblings, between grandchildren and grandparents, and between the grandparents themselves are so beautifully presented.
It's not a historical novel, really, but you can't help learning so much about the history of Nova Scotia as you read. Particularly interesting is the friction between the residents of French origin and those from the Scots, a result of all the argy-bargy between the French and the English in that part of the world.
The story is told from the viewpoint of an adult Alexander MacDonald, who grew up on Cape Breton and whose parents fell through the ice when he was three. (Warning: There's a lot of tragedy in this book, you will be sad). He and his twin sister were subsequently raised by their grandparents; his elder brothers set out to fend for themselves. Their lives diverged - his brothers came to work mainly in the mines; Alexander ends up going to university and becoming a dentist. However, his story focuses primarily on their similarities, the shared bonds of family, place and history. Alexander's sister, travelling to Scotland with her husband, even finds MacDonalds there who still consider her family and can remember the story of her great-great-great-grandfather's move to Canada in the eighteenth century. I can't really imagine what it must be like to identify so strongly with a group of people, even though I consider my own family relatively close-knit.
The relationships between siblings, between grandchildren and grandparents, and between the grandparents themselves are so beautifully presented.
It's not a historical novel, really, but you can't help learning so much about the history of Nova Scotia as you read. Particularly interesting is the friction between the residents of French origin and those from the Scots, a result of all the argy-bargy between the French and the English in that part of the world.