Roads Unravelling

In 'Aunty Grabbity,' the seventh of the eight short stories in this debut collection, Rolleen, an uneducated artist, recalls a childhood conversation with her father. 'The gravity well of earth holds us tight down to the ground,' her father tells her. 'But we long to escape it.' Tweaking her nose, he asks, 'Think we ever will?' This question is at the centre of each of Leveille's stories. In almost all of them, it is a daughter's relationship to her mother that constitutes the gravity she longs to escape.

In Leveille's stories, mothers die young, abandon their families, and, perhaps worst of all, are not who they say they are. The daughters of these mothers reflect on this primary relationship as they enter womanhood or middle age — one on her wedding day, another as she inherits the family farm outside St. John, still another as she deals with miscarriage — struggling to come to terms with their pasts so that they can move more fully toward the future.

The stories are set in New Brunswick among working-class, or formerly working-class, families. Each family has a secret, and each secret a legacy. Ultimately, each story ends with a move toward survival: the grown daughters have come to terms with their mothers' failures and are ready to embrace their own possibilities. The only exception to this trajectory is 'Sticks and Stones,' which is told from the perspective of the alcoholic mother rather than the injured daughter. The resolution for this particular mother-daughter pair is too abrupt to be convincing. Overall, however, Leveille chronicles the terrible weight of childhood betrayals with a deft touch.

Kathy-Diane Leveille sets her little volume of stories in the northernmost reaches of the Americas, in a part of Canada where the rivers freeze over during the winter. There, the folk living alongside the riverbanks drag their unwanted jumble from the attic out onto the ice to watch it slide away with the spring thaws. Much as a knitter might unravel and start over the spoiled piece of knitting that fell accidentally into the dirt, so the eight different women in Roads Unravelling retrace the roads of their lives. Each, in her own way, confronts the metaphorical junk that shadows her life and musters the courage to dump it at last, recklessly, in the nearest figurative river...

Thoughtful stories about personal journeys and new beginnings — just right for enjoyment on the eve of another New Year!