Road to
Thunder Hill by Connie Barnes Rose
Inanna Publications, $22.95
Trish’s life is a little
out of control. She is in her forties
and feeling it. Her marriage to Ray has
taken a turn for the worse and he has moved out, leaving Thunder Hill to work
in the salt mines in Newville.
Trish stays
up late, drinks too much and watches her life spiraling downward, feeling
powerless to intervene. And it’s not
just her relationship with her husband that is failing. Trish’s connection with her teenage daughter
is mired in arguments and petty sniping, and to make matters much worse, a
pretender has arrived in the family.
Olive claims to be her half-sister, her father’s daughter, a premise
Trish rejects completely. Trish believes
Olive is an imposter whose primary goal in life is to irritate and annoy her. While she struggles with her faltering
relationships, Olive is a particular thorn in her side, a position not shared
by the rest of her family. “When it
comes to Olive, my mother’s take is that since she’s here and might very well
be my actual half sister, I should try to be friendly. This always gets my back up.”
Connie
Barnes Rose’s first book was a series of linked short stories and some of her
earlier characters have found their way into her new novel. Road to Thunder Hill has been a
while in the writing. “I wrote the bones
of it over two or three years,” she said in a phone interview from Montreal, “It
comes slowly. It’s hard when one has a job to establish a process for writing a
novel and keep it up. I teach creative
writing and the teaching life is not a writer’s life. It’s not at all the same. I spend time on my students’
work, reading and critiquing their writing.
It’s not always easy to refocus and find time for my own work.”
However, Road
to Thunder Hill was worth waiting for. Rose has created a host of
likeable, eccentric characters whose destinies are inextricably
intertwined. They live in a small
fictional farming community in Nova Scotia and like any small town, there is no
privacy. Lives are grist for the gossip
mill, however kindly meant.
Rose’s
characters are real and touchable. Her
easy writing style creates an intimacy with her readers which pulls us straight
into the pages. Her people look out for each other and take the time to make
sure their neighbours are getting by, which happily gives an opportunity to keep
tabs on what’s happening outside their own homes.
A freak snow
storm hits the town, cutting out power lines and isolating pockets of the
community. A wild evening in the local
pub ends with Trish sleeping on a pool table in the arms of Bear James, the
local hermit and Ray’s best friend. Not
that anything happens, mind, but community being what it is, next day the
incident begins its escalation into legend as folk find their way to Olive’s
kitchen to weather out the storm and its aftermath.
Stranded at her
alleged half-sister’s house, Trish teeters on an emotional edge between chaos
borne of insecurity and petty jealousy, and a wisdom of which she is only vaguely
aware, one which comes from age and experience. “It struck me how completely out of control my
life had become.”
“Trish is a
new character in this book,” says Rose, “She might reflect parts of me or bits
of others but she has truly become a character in her own right. I see her as a woman in ‘identity crisis
distress’. It’s what many women go
through when their children leave home and change is inevitable. Trish is
struggling with who she is becoming.”
Road to Thunder Hill is a novel about change and letting
go, so life can move on and love can find a way to bring joy and life back to
our hearts. Rose may have taken longer
than she wanted to bring this novel to fruition, but it was worth waiting for.
Connie Barnes Rose grew up in Amherst, Nova Scotia. She is the author of an acclaimed
short story collection and now lives and works in Montreal where she teaches
creative writing at Concordia University and the Quebec Writers Federation.
