Paula Elizabeth Sitts

A super-sentimental, earnestly written, highly fictional feel-good tale of an orphaned boy and his grandmother "homesteading" somewhere in the South Cariboo of British Columbia in the 1930s. All the neighbours are über-helpful, and apparently endowed with super-human abilities. The versimilitude deal-breaker for me: one old man assisted only by his short, stout, also-elderly wife cuts down - by hand-axe/saw - enough trees to build a substantial log cabin in one morning. He then rafts the logs across a lake, and has the roof on the cabin by the end of day three. A second cabin takes a whole two days. Anyone at all familiar with the tasks so involved will understand my cynical dismissal of the author's subsequent storytelling. This deeply dull book is well-meaning enough, but not rooted in reality in any significant way. Being from the Cariboo myself, I wanted so much to like it, and gave it much benefit of the doubt, but it defeated me completely. Into the giveaway box.… (mer)