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All The Quiet Places by Brian Thomas Isaac
(Brindle & Glass/TouchWood Editions $22)
Review by Caroline Woodward
From the very first paragraph of Brian Thomas Isaac’s debut novel, we are immersed in the North Okanagan world of five-year-old Eddie Toma who lives with his mother and three-year-old brother in a small, dark, wood-heated house. His Grandma and Uncle Alphonse live a boy’s non-stop run past the woodshed, down “Little Hill Path” and through the pines and cottonwoods. These story-like landmarks, alongside Highway 97 between Vernon and Falkland and the bridge over the Salmon River on the far eastern edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve, are shown in a useful, large-scale map at the beginning of the book.
Things which initially loom large in this boy’s life—climbing onto the roof to wedge a flattened syrup can between wood shingles to plug a leak, a rare smile lighting up his mother’s face, hot fried bread with homemade applesauce at his Grandma’s, the relief of time alone just watching the river flow without his annoying little brother to look after—are eclipsed by other dangerous realities.
“Like a moth to a coal oil lamp” Eddie is compelled to test warnings from the adults in his life, from loading and carrying a .303 intending to shoot a deer or a bear, to exploring a treacherous bog with another boy. But he also learns from his uncle how to stay calm and observe his surroundings so he will not get lost in the bush. And Eddie’s mother shows him exactly where to run for help if she taps him on the back, should a vehicle with a certain dangerous man behind the wheel appear on their road.
Then there are the adults who make his mother’s nails dig into his small shoulders, like blowhard Uncle Ray, a man with a mean streak. But Ray is hardworking and convinces the family, including Grandma, to join him in the migrant worker camps of Washington’s Yakima Valley. Amidst the heat and substandard living conditions, there are first outings to a movie theatre, his mother smiling so much he “didn’t know she had so many teeth” and then, a terrible tragedy which haunts them all.
Throughout it all, Grace, their fierce, determined mother advocates with the Indian Agent to get electricity out to their home, which she has chosen for a specific reason: so that Eddie and Lewis can take the school bus and attend the all-white Falkland School. She will not have them sent to St. Mary’s Residential School in Kamloops where her brother Alphonse was essentially ruined except that some of his good heart and all of his protective nature survived. The Indian Agent, like all petty bureaucrats, fears most that he will “look bad” to those higher on the perch. He doesn’t mind actually being bad, threatening Grace with taking away her children or dumping their Christmas hamper at the bottom of their unploughed road, declaring he “hopes the dogs don’t get to it.” It’s all because Grace writes letters to Indian Affairs in Ottawa telling them she doesn’t have electricity and nor does her mother and uncle and it’s the 1960s. Likewise, the public health nurse and the RCMP display their specific racist and sexist prejudices of that era.
The writing is disarming yet unsentimental, never didactic or seething with an agenda; a masterful example of showing not telling and of staying true and consistent with the always tricky child’s point of view. Brian Thomas Isaac writes descriptions of a wild horse herd thundering into a valley and of Grandma and Eddie fishing and eating trout over a campfire which are so vivid we can practically hear, smell and taste the dust and the hot, fresh fish. He does not spare the untrustworthy and violent Indigenous men in their lives, from Uncle Ray to their absentee father Jimmy (and Jimmy’s vicious father whose legacy lingers in his son) despite grand declarations of better days ahead. The school experience is buoyed by a kind grade one teacher and Eva, the intelligent daughter of the neighbouring rancher who helps Eddie navigate the snobbery of the pecking order. Nobody can protect Eddie from a relentless school bully however, nor his complicity and sheer relief when the school’s first Black student arrives, not even the decent man who is the principal.
Eddie’s teenage visits to small town Vernon offer a vintage time capsule with an Indigenous twist. Isaac depicts the hierarchy of the two pool halls, the sex appeal of car hops, and the fumbling missteps of first love, with a ten-cent jukebox soundtrack; or a car on a hill at night where it might pick up a Spokane radio station.
Brian Thomas Isaac was born on the Okanagan Indian Reserve in 1950 and now lives in the Salmon River valley after an adventurous life of riding bulls in his youth “until common sense steered him away,” working in the Alberta oil patch and retiring as a bricklayer. He coached minor hockey, played slow-pitch baseball, and is now a proud father and grandfather, grateful husband and devoted golfer. He has been writing all his life and I, for one, hope for more great storytelling like this first book which has been highly commended and recognized for its contribution to Canadian literature.
78-1-990071-02-7
Caroline Woodward’s first book for children, Singing Away the Dark (Simply Read Books: 2010, 2017) about walking a mile to the Peace River school bus stop in 1958 is now translated to French, Korean, Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese.
(BCBW 2022)
***
Bones of a Giant
by Brian Thomas Isaac
(Random House $35)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2025)
British Columbia’s Interior’s high plateau along Highway 97 from Vernon to Kamloops is unexpectedly beautiful. Its rolling hills, lakes, dry grasslands and vast blue skies are traditional cowboy country, although you can’t miss the summer and retirement homes springing up along the shorefronts. Drive half an hour out of Vernon into the Salmon River Valley and you reach Falkland, an old-time community of less than a thousand—but that swells with its rodeo in May. Those small-town buckaroos that Ian Tyson sang about are still here.
In the late 1960s, life in Falkland was simpler. On the Okanagan First Nation Reserve nearby, where Bones of a Giant plays out, it was simpler yet. In jerry-built homes without piped-in water or electricity and with residential schools still the norm for children most of the year, conditions off the grid on the Rez were as basic as it got in Canada. Mainstream sources pretty much ignored Indigenous communities back then. However, the writers Jeanette Armstrong, Ruby Slipperjack, George Clutesi and Richard Wagamese, among others, would provide readers with incisive writing on the subject, to which Brian Thomas Isaac from the Okanagan Reserve added barometric depth in 2021 with his acclaimed first novel, All the Quiet Places (TouchWood). Its story of young Eddie Toma and daily life on the Rez there circa summer 1968 depicted a culture in both remedial and long-term crisis that drew sparkling critical attention. Without reproach or invective, Isaac’s book demonstrated why a Reconciliation Movement was overdue.
It’s not necessary to read Isaac’s earlier book to appreciate Bones of a Giant, but after reading it you’ll want to. Isaac delivers with a calm, laid-back voice, one we can trust. It’s a voice that emerges from the land, the territory you encounter upcountry in this province. Honest in the bone, it unfolds with the mastery of a wise, seasoned storyteller that your gut tells you has seen some bad stuff—an elder who knows that without deep, structural change, there’ll be more.
Lewis Toma, like his disappeared brother Eddie before him, has a hard time negotiating friendships at high school. Embarrassed by the slapdash appearance of the “Indian” house he lives in with his mother, and by his uncle’s broken down cars around the property, he’s a loner—the sole Indigenous kid in Falkland’s public school. His mother, Grace, has been able to convince the white Indian Agent that governs their material life to keep him away from the residential school as a chance to try and learn alongside white classmates, the summas, for his future. He’s a walking target for abuse and bullying there, a symbol of the whole larger culture’s systemic racism against Aboriginals.
Early on, bushwalking behind his bachelor Uncle Alphonse’s house, Lewis sees strangers shoot the lock off a keep-out fence, then trespass onto Reserve land. He partly overhears a plan, but doesn’t understand its aims. Nervous, he retreats to a hollow tree hiding place that his brother knew. Nearby, a giant cottonwood has toppled and crashed; the ragged branches look like the bones of a giant, he thinks. It’s his safe place, the only one besides his uncle’s home where he learns from Alphonse and from his mother’s friend, Isabel, the story of his own young life and that of his missing brother. Eddie, we learn, vanished following a terrible accident that took the life of his girlfriend, Eva, daughter of a white family from near the Rez. Two years later, everyone has an opinion about it. “I bet he saw her everywhere he looked and couldn’t stand it no more,” his old boss, Hank, says. Odds are that he headed for the river, and is probably dead.
Grace, still grieving, is a tough bush-mom, abandoned by her shiftless husband, Jimmy, a drinker and womanizer. He’s the novel’s bad luck sign that Grace can’t shake, even though a beating from him in pregnancy caused the stillborn death of her baby girl. Grace smokes roll-your-owns and harangues the Indian Agent to get plumbing and power funded for her house. With its veto power over fundamental life conditions, the corrosive control of the Indian Act is plainly evident. One alternative is for Reserve natives to earn independent summer cash packing fruit across the border in Washington. When Grace and Isabel leave to work, Lewis is left with relatives.
Life moves slowly on the Rez. Isaac spins a Book of Days recounting incidents familiar to any teenager, punctuated with period radio hits and a believable cast of Lewis’ friends and checkered characters. Uncle Alphonse delivers raw one-liners that would make a logger blush and there’s the necessary summer teen romance and an unlikely intervention—all in prelude to a return of the devil himself. Jimmy’s back with a fast car sporting a hot flames paint-job and a plan. Trouble is knocking.
When the patriarchal language of the Indian Act ensures Grace’s family land tenure is vulnerable, existential conflict grows. At stake is a shaken world that needs rectifying. No spoiler alerts here: Isaac can put the ball over the plate and can handle the curve. If the narrative dynamics that made his first novel resound are not as pronounced, the resolution here makes sense in curious Rez fashion—as if the third in a uniquely BC trilogy was already underway. 9781039011779
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver.
(Brindle & Glass/TouchWood Editions $22)
Review by Caroline Woodward
From the very first paragraph of Brian Thomas Isaac’s debut novel, we are immersed in the North Okanagan world of five-year-old Eddie Toma who lives with his mother and three-year-old brother in a small, dark, wood-heated house. His Grandma and Uncle Alphonse live a boy’s non-stop run past the woodshed, down “Little Hill Path” and through the pines and cottonwoods. These story-like landmarks, alongside Highway 97 between Vernon and Falkland and the bridge over the Salmon River on the far eastern edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve, are shown in a useful, large-scale map at the beginning of the book.
Things which initially loom large in this boy’s life—climbing onto the roof to wedge a flattened syrup can between wood shingles to plug a leak, a rare smile lighting up his mother’s face, hot fried bread with homemade applesauce at his Grandma’s, the relief of time alone just watching the river flow without his annoying little brother to look after—are eclipsed by other dangerous realities.
“Like a moth to a coal oil lamp” Eddie is compelled to test warnings from the adults in his life, from loading and carrying a .303 intending to shoot a deer or a bear, to exploring a treacherous bog with another boy. But he also learns from his uncle how to stay calm and observe his surroundings so he will not get lost in the bush. And Eddie’s mother shows him exactly where to run for help if she taps him on the back, should a vehicle with a certain dangerous man behind the wheel appear on their road.
Then there are the adults who make his mother’s nails dig into his small shoulders, like blowhard Uncle Ray, a man with a mean streak. But Ray is hardworking and convinces the family, including Grandma, to join him in the migrant worker camps of Washington’s Yakima Valley. Amidst the heat and substandard living conditions, there are first outings to a movie theatre, his mother smiling so much he “didn’t know she had so many teeth” and then, a terrible tragedy which haunts them all.
Throughout it all, Grace, their fierce, determined mother advocates with the Indian Agent to get electricity out to their home, which she has chosen for a specific reason: so that Eddie and Lewis can take the school bus and attend the all-white Falkland School. She will not have them sent to St. Mary’s Residential School in Kamloops where her brother Alphonse was essentially ruined except that some of his good heart and all of his protective nature survived. The Indian Agent, like all petty bureaucrats, fears most that he will “look bad” to those higher on the perch. He doesn’t mind actually being bad, threatening Grace with taking away her children or dumping their Christmas hamper at the bottom of their unploughed road, declaring he “hopes the dogs don’t get to it.” It’s all because Grace writes letters to Indian Affairs in Ottawa telling them she doesn’t have electricity and nor does her mother and uncle and it’s the 1960s. Likewise, the public health nurse and the RCMP display their specific racist and sexist prejudices of that era.
The writing is disarming yet unsentimental, never didactic or seething with an agenda; a masterful example of showing not telling and of staying true and consistent with the always tricky child’s point of view. Brian Thomas Isaac writes descriptions of a wild horse herd thundering into a valley and of Grandma and Eddie fishing and eating trout over a campfire which are so vivid we can practically hear, smell and taste the dust and the hot, fresh fish. He does not spare the untrustworthy and violent Indigenous men in their lives, from Uncle Ray to their absentee father Jimmy (and Jimmy’s vicious father whose legacy lingers in his son) despite grand declarations of better days ahead. The school experience is buoyed by a kind grade one teacher and Eva, the intelligent daughter of the neighbouring rancher who helps Eddie navigate the snobbery of the pecking order. Nobody can protect Eddie from a relentless school bully however, nor his complicity and sheer relief when the school’s first Black student arrives, not even the decent man who is the principal.
Eddie’s teenage visits to small town Vernon offer a vintage time capsule with an Indigenous twist. Isaac depicts the hierarchy of the two pool halls, the sex appeal of car hops, and the fumbling missteps of first love, with a ten-cent jukebox soundtrack; or a car on a hill at night where it might pick up a Spokane radio station.
Brian Thomas Isaac was born on the Okanagan Indian Reserve in 1950 and now lives in the Salmon River valley after an adventurous life of riding bulls in his youth “until common sense steered him away,” working in the Alberta oil patch and retiring as a bricklayer. He coached minor hockey, played slow-pitch baseball, and is now a proud father and grandfather, grateful husband and devoted golfer. He has been writing all his life and I, for one, hope for more great storytelling like this first book which has been highly commended and recognized for its contribution to Canadian literature.
78-1-990071-02-7
Caroline Woodward’s first book for children, Singing Away the Dark (Simply Read Books: 2010, 2017) about walking a mile to the Peace River school bus stop in 1958 is now translated to French, Korean, Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese.
(BCBW 2022)
***
Bones of a Giant
by Brian Thomas Isaac
(Random House $35)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2025)
British Columbia’s Interior’s high plateau along Highway 97 from Vernon to Kamloops is unexpectedly beautiful. Its rolling hills, lakes, dry grasslands and vast blue skies are traditional cowboy country, although you can’t miss the summer and retirement homes springing up along the shorefronts. Drive half an hour out of Vernon into the Salmon River Valley and you reach Falkland, an old-time community of less than a thousand—but that swells with its rodeo in May. Those small-town buckaroos that Ian Tyson sang about are still here.
In the late 1960s, life in Falkland was simpler. On the Okanagan First Nation Reserve nearby, where Bones of a Giant plays out, it was simpler yet. In jerry-built homes without piped-in water or electricity and with residential schools still the norm for children most of the year, conditions off the grid on the Rez were as basic as it got in Canada. Mainstream sources pretty much ignored Indigenous communities back then. However, the writers Jeanette Armstrong, Ruby Slipperjack, George Clutesi and Richard Wagamese, among others, would provide readers with incisive writing on the subject, to which Brian Thomas Isaac from the Okanagan Reserve added barometric depth in 2021 with his acclaimed first novel, All the Quiet Places (TouchWood). Its story of young Eddie Toma and daily life on the Rez there circa summer 1968 depicted a culture in both remedial and long-term crisis that drew sparkling critical attention. Without reproach or invective, Isaac’s book demonstrated why a Reconciliation Movement was overdue.
It’s not necessary to read Isaac’s earlier book to appreciate Bones of a Giant, but after reading it you’ll want to. Isaac delivers with a calm, laid-back voice, one we can trust. It’s a voice that emerges from the land, the territory you encounter upcountry in this province. Honest in the bone, it unfolds with the mastery of a wise, seasoned storyteller that your gut tells you has seen some bad stuff—an elder who knows that without deep, structural change, there’ll be more.
Lewis Toma, like his disappeared brother Eddie before him, has a hard time negotiating friendships at high school. Embarrassed by the slapdash appearance of the “Indian” house he lives in with his mother, and by his uncle’s broken down cars around the property, he’s a loner—the sole Indigenous kid in Falkland’s public school. His mother, Grace, has been able to convince the white Indian Agent that governs their material life to keep him away from the residential school as a chance to try and learn alongside white classmates, the summas, for his future. He’s a walking target for abuse and bullying there, a symbol of the whole larger culture’s systemic racism against Aboriginals.
Early on, bushwalking behind his bachelor Uncle Alphonse’s house, Lewis sees strangers shoot the lock off a keep-out fence, then trespass onto Reserve land. He partly overhears a plan, but doesn’t understand its aims. Nervous, he retreats to a hollow tree hiding place that his brother knew. Nearby, a giant cottonwood has toppled and crashed; the ragged branches look like the bones of a giant, he thinks. It’s his safe place, the only one besides his uncle’s home where he learns from Alphonse and from his mother’s friend, Isabel, the story of his own young life and that of his missing brother. Eddie, we learn, vanished following a terrible accident that took the life of his girlfriend, Eva, daughter of a white family from near the Rez. Two years later, everyone has an opinion about it. “I bet he saw her everywhere he looked and couldn’t stand it no more,” his old boss, Hank, says. Odds are that he headed for the river, and is probably dead.
Grace, still grieving, is a tough bush-mom, abandoned by her shiftless husband, Jimmy, a drinker and womanizer. He’s the novel’s bad luck sign that Grace can’t shake, even though a beating from him in pregnancy caused the stillborn death of her baby girl. Grace smokes roll-your-owns and harangues the Indian Agent to get plumbing and power funded for her house. With its veto power over fundamental life conditions, the corrosive control of the Indian Act is plainly evident. One alternative is for Reserve natives to earn independent summer cash packing fruit across the border in Washington. When Grace and Isabel leave to work, Lewis is left with relatives.
Life moves slowly on the Rez. Isaac spins a Book of Days recounting incidents familiar to any teenager, punctuated with period radio hits and a believable cast of Lewis’ friends and checkered characters. Uncle Alphonse delivers raw one-liners that would make a logger blush and there’s the necessary summer teen romance and an unlikely intervention—all in prelude to a return of the devil himself. Jimmy’s back with a fast car sporting a hot flames paint-job and a plan. Trouble is knocking.
When the patriarchal language of the Indian Act ensures Grace’s family land tenure is vulnerable, existential conflict grows. At stake is a shaken world that needs rectifying. No spoiler alerts here: Isaac can put the ball over the plate and can handle the curve. If the narrative dynamics that made his first novel resound are not as pronounced, the resolution here makes sense in curious Rez fashion—as if the third in a uniquely BC trilogy was already underway. 9781039011779
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver.
