Cold Chaos: Stories From a North by Nathalie Guilbeault

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


COLD CHAOS, Stories from a North, by Nathalie Guilbeault

Fourteen stories that explore with honesty, humour, and insight a young woman's coming-of-age in a work camp of mostly men in the James Bay region of northern Quebec. Auto-fictive in nature, Guilbeault brings it all forward - what is the world; family; life from the eyes of Adeline, walking with wonderment through a world of isolation and men? The author creates a dance of time and place and the impact that has on everyone her pen touches. Love, loss, a certain craziness, and happiness too. It's all here. Guilbeault immerses us in lives lived together in a way that allows us to feel as if we too were participating in this narrative that feels like a secret, such that we arrive at the need of asking the same questions; from life. Here. Now. This place. These people. It's slice of life unflinching and unafraid. It's Munro's small town Ontario that is all too human. Open this book - read the words, and and you too will lean into these people and what it meant to be them; in that place; that time. Gone now, and here again, thanks to Guilbeault.



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