Making ends meet as an assistant manager of a clothing store in Smithers, 48-year-old Isabel Lee is a recovering alcoholic with three children by three different men. The pivotal experience of her life has been an affair with a young Guatemalan Oblate priest named Álvaro Ruiz, who abruptly disappeared from her life, leaving her pregnant.

In Sheila Peters' first novel, The Taste of Ashes, we also meet Isabel's daughter, Janna, who has gone to Vancouver to complete a degree in accounting at UBC. Her mother steadfastly refuses to tell her anything about her father, the Guatemalan priest.

Father Álvaro Ruiz is a broken man, suffering from hideous flashbacks after imprisonment and torture in Guatemala. Besieged by his memories of betrayal and cruelty, he has taken refuge at the Oblate community of St. Paul's Province in Vancouver.

In The Power and the Glory, British novelist Graham Greene wrote, "When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity."; This is true of Peters' characters. They are all caught in a net of misunderstanding.

Isabel thinks that Álvaro deserted her; Janna despises her mother and fears that she got all her DNA from losers; Álvaro is completely unaware that he has a daughter because his mentor, Father Walter, has never told him.
Peters gradually brings her characters together, unravelling their complex pasts in order to throw light on their turbulent present. There is nothing pat or predictable about this, no sense of a forced happy ending.

Fate, with the active intervention of family and friends, is driving Isabel, Álvaro and Janna together, but the road to confrontation and reconciliation we anticipate is never straight; demons have to be faced, ghosts laid to rest, relationships tested.

We feel compassion for Isabel, Álvaro and Janna because they use their tormented pasts to create at least the hope of a future connection-just as Isabel salvages dormant plants from an abandoned garden to bloom again another year.

Though Peters' debut fiction is rife with suffering and her vivid descriptions of Guatemalan torture can be disturbing, The Taste of Ashes is a redemption song about the resilience of the human spirit.
978-1-894759-77-9

By Margaret Thompson, a freelance writer in Victoria

[BCBW 2012]