The Canoe
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
Set over the course of ten days in 1912, this poetic portrait of love and loss follows two simultaneous stories: the coming of age of Bernie Kingston, teenage son of a coffin maker who lives along the Chesapeake Bay and the voyage of Katherine Chambers, a middle-aged Englishwoman leaving home for the first time as she seeks to recover from the loss of her husband and son. Written in a diary format, their parallel journeys are told against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and the communities touched by its tragedy.
Side by side the woman and boy who never meet weave a discourse between youth and middle-age, between love and death, and between dual rites of passage: coming of age and coming to terms with loss.
Customer Reviews
Poignant and poetic
Michelle Baker evokes a time gone by in vivid terms for us, allowing us to live for a short amount of time in 1912 through her two main characters, a young American boy, and a middle aged English woman. Both have experienced life and loss, and while one is coming of age as a coffin maker's son, surrounded by death every day, the other is coming to terms with moving on after her husband and son have died. Both grapple with issues brought on by death, and yet both move on, and grow, despite, or maybe because of it.
Baker's characters are beautifully drawn in richly descriptive poetic phrases that perfectly evoke both time and place for us. We are drawn into their lives and are left only wanting more. A lovely evocative first novel for this writer! Kudos!