by Thomas King
ISBN: 0006485251
King doesn’t tell one good story in this book — he tells ten of them. Each story is different, yet they all share a certain quality that I can’t quite name, but I want to describe as “heard.” Reading the book (silently) to myself, I felt like I was being told a story because I could hear it.
King plays with myth, interrogates identity, pokes at history and nationalism, and even throws in a bit of science fiction. He’s also got kids and parents who don’t really know how to talk to each other, a well-intentioned man who struggles to live up to his promises, and another who isn’t very likeable because he talks too loudly and tells the truth.
He even has the requisite anthropologist coming to listen to the native tell a story — actually, he has that happen in the first story. It is an unsettling in a good way choice, and that is really the quality I was hoping to find in this book. My expectations for King’s narratives were set by having read his reach into your body cavity and yank on internal organs moving nonfiction work The Truth About Stories, and though this collection didn’t live up to that mark for me, I still recommend it, because you can hear the stories so clearly in your head, and they are worth knowing.
I hated this book. Not disliked it, hated it. King’s writing style was beyond irritating. His stories were primative and boring to say the least. If it wasn’t a required text for an English course, I would have abandoned it without a doubt.
I loved this book. It’s a perfect mix of the supernatural myths of natives and regular lives of Canadians. It mixes sarcasm, unworldly events every day events to create a very interesting stew of ten different stories. I too was required to read this story for a class, but ended up not being able to put it down.
It’s a great story. So deep. This is the story that has to be read between lines. Great sense of humor, and a big, big truth.