A Maritimes question...

[daemonluna]

I've been reading for a provincial kids' book award committee since December, and am halfway through my latest stack of about ten books. (So far, one really good but a touch too old for target age range, two okay, and one not-so-great.) The not-so-great one takes place in Newfoundland. For all that it's a teenage-boy survival story, it's remarkably maudlin in spots. All that aside...

So, our intrepid main character is out in his dead brother's kayak, and gets caught unawares by a storm and washed up on a small island. It takes place... somewhere in Newfoundland, in a small-ish town with a fish-packing factory. With A DAY of ending up on the island, he kills a wounded seal (but he doesn't WANT to, angstangstANGST), skins it with his pocketknife and wears the skin (no mention of any kind of cleaning, tanning, etc.), the NEXT DAY has dried seal meat (no mention of any kind of drying process--he doesn't manage to start a fire unril the fourth day) and oh, then there are the dreams he has about the Beothuk people, and the wisdom imparted by the elders about spirit animals, and of COURSE his dead brother is a seal and his dead grandfather is a polar bear and his pothead friend is a gull, and he is a caribou...

Now, I'm a prairie girl. I am perhaps not as familiar with the geographic dispersement of Arctic wildlife or the indigenous wildlife of the east coast as I should be. But what I want to know... is it just me, or is it highly improbable that on his little island, he would be attacked by a (OMG!) POLAR BEAR?

Comments

[daemonluna.livejournal.com]

And then died of worms, I assume. :P Seal is not one of those things you'd want to eat raw. (Porcupine is, if that's ever something you need to know).

The thing that really got me is HE'D ONLY BEEN MAROONED A DAY! And, he had oysters to eat. Somehow, raw seal was better than raw oysters. (???) But porcupine is safe to eat raw? Huh.

I'm disappointed to hear anyone would write a bad Halifax explosion book. There's so much already-interesting-enough-history there, you'd think they could refrain from inserting Time Travel.

Ohh, this one was a sequel to a time travel book about the Frank Slide. And time travel can be done well (like Tom's Midnight Garden, or on the adult side of things, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis), but this was one of those books where it's just a way to just explain everything through the eyes of a modern character. Also, the dialogue was impossibly clunky, and it was full of characters randomly telling people they'd just met their whole life stories.

One of the most recent Dear Canada books is also about the Halifax Explosion (I think the title is No Safe Harbour, but the author escapes me right now), and it was pretty good, though I think that if the author had left more of the main character's family alive, she wouldn't have had to gloss over the emotional trauma at the end, which annoyed me. I've been told that the best kids' book to read on the Halifax Explosion is Irish Chain by Barbara Haworth-Attard. It's on my (very long) mental to-read list.