(Debby)

Three Day Road – Joseph Boyden

A really, really well done story. Right up there with Fugitive Pieces. I don’t know what it is about Canadian authors, but they write differently than anyone else. I suppose part of it is that they come from a different country. But UK writers are writing in English also, and yet somehow I don’t sense the same break between US American writing and theirs. Good Canadian writing – Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Anne Michaels, Rudy Wiebe and the other really good “culturally-Mennonite” writers…somehow it is different from other nationalities, and it is different in a similar way. It achieves a very specific resonance, or at least it does within me.

This is an excellent book of war – World War I, a Canadian Cree fighting for the Allies in Europe. I don’t tend to take well to war books – they tend to aim to show the ‘grittiness’ of war, but then veer off into sentiment and reassurances. This book is honest and respectful and a really well told story.