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The Broken Heart of Winter
by Judy LeBlanc
(Caitlin Press $24.95)
Review by Grant Buday (BCBW 2024)
When wayward son, Daniel, runs away from his Victoria home at the age of sixteen to explore his Acadian roots in Nova Scotia, he leaves behind his bewildered and grieving parents. Although his mother, Lise, is descended from the French settlers who were exiled by English armies in the mid-18th century during what is now called the Expulsion of the Acadians, she is not at first aware that this tragic event still affects her so many generations later. But Daniel feels the impact and he seeks some answers in Judy LeBlanc’s novel, The Broken Heart of Winter, an exploration of how historical trauma is passed from generation to generation.
The Expulsion of the Acadians, or the Grand Dérangement, dates to 1713, when Britain gained control of Acadia, which included parts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Maine. Over the following decades, tensions flared between France and England, who were competing for control of North America. Refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, some Acadians joined French military operations against the English, culminating in the Acadians’ forced removal; an entire people—farmers, fishers, hunters—were brutally uprooted.
Of the approximately 14,500 Acadians, 11,000 were relocated, nearly a third of whom died of disease, while some 3,000 managed to hide or make it to safety in Quebec. Those sent by ship to Louisiana became known as Cajuns. In 1764 an order was given allowing them to return. Such is the book’s backstory.
The Broken Heart of Winter does not deliver epic sea voyages, military heroics or naval battles. LeBlanc focuses instead on family life and what she describes as the mass trauma that caused “patterns of deep disruption [that] repeat themselves generation after generation.” This is an exploration of stress that persists through the centuries like a virus.
Composed of three sections, the first and longest one focuses on Lise and Daniel. The latter two sections, set in 1832 and 1755–63 respectively, take us into the lives of those who emigrated from France to North America and were subsequently persecuted.
Certainly Lise, her husband Dick and Daniel are stressed, particularly when Daniel suddenly leaves at such a young age. “For the first two years Daniel was gone, Lise looked for him through the police, his friends, the obituaries,” writes LeBlanc. “She and Dick blamed one another; they made vicious accusations.” And later, “All those years of conflict with Dick didn’t amount to anything resembling resolution.” Inevitably they divorce.
Section two, titled Isle Madame, 1832, Contrary Winds, is narrated by Appoline, the backbone of a multigenerational family composed mostly of women. The dour and dutiful Appoline negotiates between her exhausted mother, her nearly one-hundred-year-old grandmother and a wild younger sister. “My grandfather died before I was born, though his fiddle has rested against the wall near Grand-Mère’s bed my entire life and no one, not even Papa, was permitted to touch it. I’ve never known music in the house and yet there it sits, a reminder that it was not always this way.”
The third section, Acadia, 1755–1763, The Starving Time, is narrated by the grandmother herself, who survived the crisis as a young woman. This is the book’s most dramatic part with its combination of suspense and action as the Acadians flee through the forest avoiding the redcoats.
“I lost track of how many days we walked, how often we returned to where we’d started that morning. We were slower each day and our food supply dwindled. We ate eels when we were near enough to the marshes and when the night was light enough that the men could spot and spear them in the shallow waters.”
Their trek culminates with the narrator killing not an eel but an Englishman. “I loaded my gun again and fired just as he reached his. It had become a game to keep him from his gun. I kicked it farther up the bank as he moaned and held a bloody hand to his chest. The creek swirled red, the colour of his infantry jacket.”
The rifle she uses is a Charleville, a five-foot-long flintlock French infantry musket. Like the Acadians themselves, this particular specimen survives, and we meet it in all three sections of the book, including the first: Victoria–Halifax, 2001, The Charleville.
The Broken Heart of Winter is about endurance, hope and survival. Though generally gloomy in tone, the third section ends on an upbeat note with Grand-Mère saying: “Shouts of ‘Je suis Acadian’ ride high above the clamour and throng. A daughter of a time I’ve not yet known will be swept into the motion of the crowd, not quite of the people that flow around her and yet affected with their lightness and energy. My memory is a rich country.”
Rich in domestic detail and personal emotion, The Broken Heart of Winter will enlarge any reader’s appreciation of Acadian history in particular, and Canadian history in general. 9781773861050
Grant Buday’s historical fiction novels, Orphans of Empire (Brindle & Glass, 2020) and In the Belly of the Sphinx (Brindle & Glass, 2023) tell of the late 19th century lives of settlers in Vancouver and Victoria respectively.
***
Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer from Fanny Bay, Vancouver Island. She has published stories in Canadian literary journals, won the Antigonish Review's fiction contest and was longlisted for the CBC short story prize in 2013. LeBlanc is a North Island College English and creative writing instructor and founding member and artistic director of the Fat Oyster Reading Series.
BOOKS:
The Promise of Water (Oolichan, 2017) $19.95 9780889823204. Short stories
The Broken Heart of Winter (Caitlin, 2023) $24.95 9781773861050. Novel
[BCBW 2023]
*
REVIEW
The Promise of Water by Judy LeBlanc (Oolichan $19.95)
Review by by Caroline Woodward
Judy leblanc's debut collection evokes a tangible sense of place--Vancouver Island--where the sweet fragrance of cedar mingles with the murky odours of damp mold and stale cigarette smoke that can be washed away by a clean, cold blast of salt air. It is populated with fully-imagined lives, allowing us to gain insight and even feel compassion for humanity's blundering ways.
Each story has what I call an 'emotional time bomb' within it, the kind of tension we all feel when we have to attend to something we have been avoiding, like the dying of a difficult brother who has constantly sneered at your life, your house, your kids, your spouse, et cetera, ad nauseum, or the ending of a romantic relationship with someone who does not have your back and never will because they are much more concerned with the false front they present to everyone else.
There is sadness, yes, because this is a book about vulnerable children and teens and mature, usually, adults who struggle with hard knocks and gain depth and wisdom. These are characters so real they practically stride off the pages or sidle up and try to bum a smoke off you. Harsh and hopeful lives lit up by glimmering flashes of joy and towed along by undercurrents of humour.
In 'Can't Go Wrong with an Iris,' we meet a sixteen-year-old mother, attempting to look after her newborn, who must contend with her own ineffectual, self-absorbed mother dedicated to avoiding responsibility, never mind possessing the grandmotherly gene.
The basement suite-dwelling teen must accept the fact her own mother will bail on her yet again. Then she must face the formidable mother of the fifteen-year-old father of her baby, who at least brings two bags of groceries, a cheque and a bouquet of irises before fleeing.
His mother declares, as she heads for the door, that her son has a future, high-stepping through the muck left behind by a recent flood. I cheered on the abandoned young mom, tough, and with a bright and beautiful heart, much like an iris.
The title story, like all the sixteen powerful stories in The Promise of Water, is grounded in place and seemingly tethered there by indelible memories. It's about one boy's dream of swimming in the Olympics and his mother's promise to buy him swimming lessons in a pool year-round, not just Shawnigan Lake across the road in the summer. His reluctant teenage cousin from Nanaimo is pressured by his own mother to spend a week with his younger cousins, so she and his father can spend a week in Vegas.
The cousins, including the would-be Olympian, are the kind of brothers who sneer and slap and punch each other non-stop, competing for the attention of their boozehound father, who eggs them on when he returns from his well-worn chair in the local Legion.
His aunt copes by playing the perpetual comedian with rose-coloured glasses resolutely attached to her head, and by working three night shifts a week at a retirement home to keep the family fridge stocked with weiners (and flats of Lucky Lager, I surmise, to pacify her seasonally-employed husband).
Hope floats like so much dandelion fluff and tragedy ensues. The writing is so evocative, so pitch-perfect I keep returning to these characters with 'what if' scenarios, wanting to bargain on their behalf for better choices and happier outcomes for them all.
Leblanc deftly shows us what economic and social and educational class differences really look and sound and taste like. Her adult characters work at all kinds of occupations from group home parents to English as a Second Language teachers to loggers and miners and kayak guides. Parenting by men and by women gets its fair share of scrutiny and some of us, as the report cards indicate, have room for improvement and that's an understatement. But we cannot help but feel empathy for those souls who are truly doing the best they can, too.
I very much enjoy, probably more than I should but I am gleefully unrepentant, how LeBlanc reveals and then skewers the privileged poseurs and slackers in these stories.
Take Darren, in 'The Confusion Technique,' who prefers to be called Thesp, for thespian. As an erstwhile co-house parent in a challenging group home, he writes a farewell note to Amy, his girlfriend of several years duration, who is in way over her young, earnest head with the streetwise teens: "I've been talking to my father again. He'll set me up if I finish my degree: tuition and an apartment. He says I've got to live up to my potential. I know you don't believe it, but I could be anything I want. It's been a gas. We had some nice times, you and I, and likely we'll miss each other now and then. Take care and all the best."
Thesp has avoided successive house parent meetings with the social worker by wrapping himself in a carpet and getting into method acting while employed by Lug-A-Rug and waving at traffic on Blanshard Street in Victoria. Amy has been dealing with keeping hard-partying young women alive in the age of deadly drugs and morose, towering youths with knives strapped to their boots. She emails the feckless Thesp, after summing up her life to date and their relationship on her own terms, with these overdue words: "This is not a gas, you clown."
'Exposure' is a stunningly good story set in the mining town of Cumberland in the first half of the last century. A miner's widow looks after her father who is dying of Black Lung or silicosis. The prevailing working man's suspicion of anyone without coal-seamed hands is compounded by racism when a photographer, known locally as 'The Jap,' dares to walk the same streets nattily dressed in a suit with a fedora on his head. 'The Jap' is very good at what he does. Everyone in the segregated town who can afford to hire him does so to photograph their weddings and family portraits. But he sets tongues wagging when he advertises for a white lady to model for him, for which he will pay cash. The miner's widow is the only woman who applies and she has a particular grievance to sort out with the photographer, who also has the nerve to call himself an artist.
This is a terrific debut and a book to reread just to admire the use of the language and to spend more time with some classic Vancouver Island characters. I found myself revisiting these characters as they set their sights on freedom and a better way of living and expressing their best qualities in this world.
Judy LeBlanc is a North Island College English and creative writing instructor and founding member and artistic director of the popular Fat Oyster Reading Series, yet another good reason to go to the Fanny Bay Community Hall with a pit stop at the Fanny Bay Inn, aka The F.B.I., afterwards.
Caroline Woodward is a lightkeeper on Lenard Island, near Tofino and the author of many books including Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper.
by Judy LeBlanc
(Caitlin Press $24.95)
Review by Grant Buday (BCBW 2024)
When wayward son, Daniel, runs away from his Victoria home at the age of sixteen to explore his Acadian roots in Nova Scotia, he leaves behind his bewildered and grieving parents. Although his mother, Lise, is descended from the French settlers who were exiled by English armies in the mid-18th century during what is now called the Expulsion of the Acadians, she is not at first aware that this tragic event still affects her so many generations later. But Daniel feels the impact and he seeks some answers in Judy LeBlanc’s novel, The Broken Heart of Winter, an exploration of how historical trauma is passed from generation to generation.
The Expulsion of the Acadians, or the Grand Dérangement, dates to 1713, when Britain gained control of Acadia, which included parts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Maine. Over the following decades, tensions flared between France and England, who were competing for control of North America. Refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, some Acadians joined French military operations against the English, culminating in the Acadians’ forced removal; an entire people—farmers, fishers, hunters—were brutally uprooted.
Of the approximately 14,500 Acadians, 11,000 were relocated, nearly a third of whom died of disease, while some 3,000 managed to hide or make it to safety in Quebec. Those sent by ship to Louisiana became known as Cajuns. In 1764 an order was given allowing them to return. Such is the book’s backstory.
The Broken Heart of Winter does not deliver epic sea voyages, military heroics or naval battles. LeBlanc focuses instead on family life and what she describes as the mass trauma that caused “patterns of deep disruption [that] repeat themselves generation after generation.” This is an exploration of stress that persists through the centuries like a virus.
Composed of three sections, the first and longest one focuses on Lise and Daniel. The latter two sections, set in 1832 and 1755–63 respectively, take us into the lives of those who emigrated from France to North America and were subsequently persecuted.
Certainly Lise, her husband Dick and Daniel are stressed, particularly when Daniel suddenly leaves at such a young age. “For the first two years Daniel was gone, Lise looked for him through the police, his friends, the obituaries,” writes LeBlanc. “She and Dick blamed one another; they made vicious accusations.” And later, “All those years of conflict with Dick didn’t amount to anything resembling resolution.” Inevitably they divorce.
Section two, titled Isle Madame, 1832, Contrary Winds, is narrated by Appoline, the backbone of a multigenerational family composed mostly of women. The dour and dutiful Appoline negotiates between her exhausted mother, her nearly one-hundred-year-old grandmother and a wild younger sister. “My grandfather died before I was born, though his fiddle has rested against the wall near Grand-Mère’s bed my entire life and no one, not even Papa, was permitted to touch it. I’ve never known music in the house and yet there it sits, a reminder that it was not always this way.”
The third section, Acadia, 1755–1763, The Starving Time, is narrated by the grandmother herself, who survived the crisis as a young woman. This is the book’s most dramatic part with its combination of suspense and action as the Acadians flee through the forest avoiding the redcoats.
“I lost track of how many days we walked, how often we returned to where we’d started that morning. We were slower each day and our food supply dwindled. We ate eels when we were near enough to the marshes and when the night was light enough that the men could spot and spear them in the shallow waters.”
Their trek culminates with the narrator killing not an eel but an Englishman. “I loaded my gun again and fired just as he reached his. It had become a game to keep him from his gun. I kicked it farther up the bank as he moaned and held a bloody hand to his chest. The creek swirled red, the colour of his infantry jacket.”
The rifle she uses is a Charleville, a five-foot-long flintlock French infantry musket. Like the Acadians themselves, this particular specimen survives, and we meet it in all three sections of the book, including the first: Victoria–Halifax, 2001, The Charleville.
The Broken Heart of Winter is about endurance, hope and survival. Though generally gloomy in tone, the third section ends on an upbeat note with Grand-Mère saying: “Shouts of ‘Je suis Acadian’ ride high above the clamour and throng. A daughter of a time I’ve not yet known will be swept into the motion of the crowd, not quite of the people that flow around her and yet affected with their lightness and energy. My memory is a rich country.”
Rich in domestic detail and personal emotion, The Broken Heart of Winter will enlarge any reader’s appreciation of Acadian history in particular, and Canadian history in general. 9781773861050
Grant Buday’s historical fiction novels, Orphans of Empire (Brindle & Glass, 2020) and In the Belly of the Sphinx (Brindle & Glass, 2023) tell of the late 19th century lives of settlers in Vancouver and Victoria respectively.
***
Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer from Fanny Bay, Vancouver Island. She has published stories in Canadian literary journals, won the Antigonish Review's fiction contest and was longlisted for the CBC short story prize in 2013. LeBlanc is a North Island College English and creative writing instructor and founding member and artistic director of the Fat Oyster Reading Series.
BOOKS:
The Promise of Water (Oolichan, 2017) $19.95 9780889823204. Short stories
The Broken Heart of Winter (Caitlin, 2023) $24.95 9781773861050. Novel
[BCBW 2023]
*
REVIEW
The Promise of Water by Judy LeBlanc (Oolichan $19.95)
Review by by Caroline Woodward
Judy leblanc's debut collection evokes a tangible sense of place--Vancouver Island--where the sweet fragrance of cedar mingles with the murky odours of damp mold and stale cigarette smoke that can be washed away by a clean, cold blast of salt air. It is populated with fully-imagined lives, allowing us to gain insight and even feel compassion for humanity's blundering ways.
Each story has what I call an 'emotional time bomb' within it, the kind of tension we all feel when we have to attend to something we have been avoiding, like the dying of a difficult brother who has constantly sneered at your life, your house, your kids, your spouse, et cetera, ad nauseum, or the ending of a romantic relationship with someone who does not have your back and never will because they are much more concerned with the false front they present to everyone else.
There is sadness, yes, because this is a book about vulnerable children and teens and mature, usually, adults who struggle with hard knocks and gain depth and wisdom. These are characters so real they practically stride off the pages or sidle up and try to bum a smoke off you. Harsh and hopeful lives lit up by glimmering flashes of joy and towed along by undercurrents of humour.
In 'Can't Go Wrong with an Iris,' we meet a sixteen-year-old mother, attempting to look after her newborn, who must contend with her own ineffectual, self-absorbed mother dedicated to avoiding responsibility, never mind possessing the grandmotherly gene.
The basement suite-dwelling teen must accept the fact her own mother will bail on her yet again. Then she must face the formidable mother of the fifteen-year-old father of her baby, who at least brings two bags of groceries, a cheque and a bouquet of irises before fleeing.
His mother declares, as she heads for the door, that her son has a future, high-stepping through the muck left behind by a recent flood. I cheered on the abandoned young mom, tough, and with a bright and beautiful heart, much like an iris.
The title story, like all the sixteen powerful stories in The Promise of Water, is grounded in place and seemingly tethered there by indelible memories. It's about one boy's dream of swimming in the Olympics and his mother's promise to buy him swimming lessons in a pool year-round, not just Shawnigan Lake across the road in the summer. His reluctant teenage cousin from Nanaimo is pressured by his own mother to spend a week with his younger cousins, so she and his father can spend a week in Vegas.
The cousins, including the would-be Olympian, are the kind of brothers who sneer and slap and punch each other non-stop, competing for the attention of their boozehound father, who eggs them on when he returns from his well-worn chair in the local Legion.
His aunt copes by playing the perpetual comedian with rose-coloured glasses resolutely attached to her head, and by working three night shifts a week at a retirement home to keep the family fridge stocked with weiners (and flats of Lucky Lager, I surmise, to pacify her seasonally-employed husband).
Hope floats like so much dandelion fluff and tragedy ensues. The writing is so evocative, so pitch-perfect I keep returning to these characters with 'what if' scenarios, wanting to bargain on their behalf for better choices and happier outcomes for them all.
Leblanc deftly shows us what economic and social and educational class differences really look and sound and taste like. Her adult characters work at all kinds of occupations from group home parents to English as a Second Language teachers to loggers and miners and kayak guides. Parenting by men and by women gets its fair share of scrutiny and some of us, as the report cards indicate, have room for improvement and that's an understatement. But we cannot help but feel empathy for those souls who are truly doing the best they can, too.
I very much enjoy, probably more than I should but I am gleefully unrepentant, how LeBlanc reveals and then skewers the privileged poseurs and slackers in these stories.
Take Darren, in 'The Confusion Technique,' who prefers to be called Thesp, for thespian. As an erstwhile co-house parent in a challenging group home, he writes a farewell note to Amy, his girlfriend of several years duration, who is in way over her young, earnest head with the streetwise teens: "I've been talking to my father again. He'll set me up if I finish my degree: tuition and an apartment. He says I've got to live up to my potential. I know you don't believe it, but I could be anything I want. It's been a gas. We had some nice times, you and I, and likely we'll miss each other now and then. Take care and all the best."
Thesp has avoided successive house parent meetings with the social worker by wrapping himself in a carpet and getting into method acting while employed by Lug-A-Rug and waving at traffic on Blanshard Street in Victoria. Amy has been dealing with keeping hard-partying young women alive in the age of deadly drugs and morose, towering youths with knives strapped to their boots. She emails the feckless Thesp, after summing up her life to date and their relationship on her own terms, with these overdue words: "This is not a gas, you clown."
'Exposure' is a stunningly good story set in the mining town of Cumberland in the first half of the last century. A miner's widow looks after her father who is dying of Black Lung or silicosis. The prevailing working man's suspicion of anyone without coal-seamed hands is compounded by racism when a photographer, known locally as 'The Jap,' dares to walk the same streets nattily dressed in a suit with a fedora on his head. 'The Jap' is very good at what he does. Everyone in the segregated town who can afford to hire him does so to photograph their weddings and family portraits. But he sets tongues wagging when he advertises for a white lady to model for him, for which he will pay cash. The miner's widow is the only woman who applies and she has a particular grievance to sort out with the photographer, who also has the nerve to call himself an artist.
This is a terrific debut and a book to reread just to admire the use of the language and to spend more time with some classic Vancouver Island characters. I found myself revisiting these characters as they set their sights on freedom and a better way of living and expressing their best qualities in this world.
Judy LeBlanc is a North Island College English and creative writing instructor and founding member and artistic director of the popular Fat Oyster Reading Series, yet another good reason to go to the Fanny Bay Community Hall with a pit stop at the Fanny Bay Inn, aka The F.B.I., afterwards.
Caroline Woodward is a lightkeeper on Lenard Island, near Tofino and the author of many books including Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper.
