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Where the River Takes Me
In the summer of 1849, young Jenna Sinclair writes in her diary, "I begin with an Adventure!"; and then confesses to the indiscretion of "Exaggeration"; and the peril of committing a "Misdemeanor of the Gravest Sort.";
Jenna's capitalized sins reflect the admonishments of her Aunt Grace, who cares for her orphaned Scottish-Cree niece at Fort Edmonton. This "uppity"; aunt has finally settled on a husband, astonishingly a mere blacksmith rather than the expected high-ranking officer, and Jenna will leave Fort Edmonton with them after they are married.
That's the set-up for Julie Lawson's Where the River Takes Me: The Hudson's Bay Company Diary of Jenna Sinclair (Scholastic $14.99), the latest installment of the Dear Canada Series reflecting the lives of girls and young women in early Canadian history.
Jenna's diary chronicles her journey to Fort Colvile-once part of the HBC's Columbia fur trading district but now part of the United States-and her subsequent adventures during her first school year in Fort Victoria on Vancouver's Island.
Jenna is held up as an example for her prowess in mathematics and reading but her impressive abilities arising from Fort Edmonton-setting traps, speaking Cree, doing beadwork, making dye for porcupine quills-are not considered accomplishments becoming of a "young lady.";
The droning, pebble-mouthed, whip-happy schoolmaster quickly becomes the ideal Villain for Jenna's imagined Novel. But soon, Jenna will encounter a Real Life Villain and Danger and narrowly escape Murder.
Marriage a la facon du pays (marriage in the custom of the country) served the social and economic development of Western Canada. Early French traders and later the officers and servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, like Jenna's Orkney-born father, realized First Nations wives gave them companionship and family-life and better access to furs, guides and interpreters.
The women, whose relatives benefited from European trade goods, were also skilled in making moccasins, snowshoes, pemmican and the buffalo-hide sacks used to store and transport it. They also collected spruce roots and spruce gum for sewing and caulking the seams of canoes.
These mutually gainful unions became a bygone custom with the widespread arrival of missionaries, who deemed such practical liaisons immoral, and the advent of imported white wives as status symbols.
Although Fort Victoria no longer exists, Julie Lawson of Victoria can walk the perimeter of where the old stockade once stood, find the exact spot for Jenna's school and, closing her mind's eye to the present-day Empress Hotel, easily envision the mud flats of James Bay. Lawson has also written two other volumes in this impressive series, No Safe Harbour, The Halifax Explosion Diary of Charlotte Blackburn and A Ribbon of Shining Steel, The Railway Diary of Kate Cameron. 13-978-0-439-95620-8
--review by Louise Donnelly
[BCBW 2008]
Jenna's capitalized sins reflect the admonishments of her Aunt Grace, who cares for her orphaned Scottish-Cree niece at Fort Edmonton. This "uppity"; aunt has finally settled on a husband, astonishingly a mere blacksmith rather than the expected high-ranking officer, and Jenna will leave Fort Edmonton with them after they are married.
That's the set-up for Julie Lawson's Where the River Takes Me: The Hudson's Bay Company Diary of Jenna Sinclair (Scholastic $14.99), the latest installment of the Dear Canada Series reflecting the lives of girls and young women in early Canadian history.
Jenna's diary chronicles her journey to Fort Colvile-once part of the HBC's Columbia fur trading district but now part of the United States-and her subsequent adventures during her first school year in Fort Victoria on Vancouver's Island.
Jenna is held up as an example for her prowess in mathematics and reading but her impressive abilities arising from Fort Edmonton-setting traps, speaking Cree, doing beadwork, making dye for porcupine quills-are not considered accomplishments becoming of a "young lady.";
The droning, pebble-mouthed, whip-happy schoolmaster quickly becomes the ideal Villain for Jenna's imagined Novel. But soon, Jenna will encounter a Real Life Villain and Danger and narrowly escape Murder.
Marriage a la facon du pays (marriage in the custom of the country) served the social and economic development of Western Canada. Early French traders and later the officers and servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, like Jenna's Orkney-born father, realized First Nations wives gave them companionship and family-life and better access to furs, guides and interpreters.
The women, whose relatives benefited from European trade goods, were also skilled in making moccasins, snowshoes, pemmican and the buffalo-hide sacks used to store and transport it. They also collected spruce roots and spruce gum for sewing and caulking the seams of canoes.
These mutually gainful unions became a bygone custom with the widespread arrival of missionaries, who deemed such practical liaisons immoral, and the advent of imported white wives as status symbols.
Although Fort Victoria no longer exists, Julie Lawson of Victoria can walk the perimeter of where the old stockade once stood, find the exact spot for Jenna's school and, closing her mind's eye to the present-day Empress Hotel, easily envision the mud flats of James Bay. Lawson has also written two other volumes in this impressive series, No Safe Harbour, The Halifax Explosion Diary of Charlotte Blackburn and A Ribbon of Shining Steel, The Railway Diary of Kate Cameron. 13-978-0-439-95620-8
--review by Louise Donnelly
[BCBW 2008]
Submitted on October 14, 2008 in By David.
