Origin of Haloes

by Kristen Den Hartog

When sixteen-year-old gymnast Kay Clancy finds herself pregnant by the handsome Coach Halliwell, she tells a lie that has dire consequences. Despite her transgressions, she manages to marry the young Joe LeBlanc, and embarks on a happy life with him until suddenly, late in Kay’s third pregnancy, he vanishes, along with his treasured canoe. Joe is nowhere to be found, but his paddle surfaces near a dock in front of the Halliwell home, where the coach lives with his manic but fragile wife, Marie, and their son, Eddie. Years on, Margar, the mischievous daughter Joe never knew, is determined to find her father. Time and again she is drawn to that house by the river. What Margar discovers there will change forever the way she views her family.From the acclaimed author of Water Wings and The Perpetual Ending, Origin of Haloes is a novel of lives large and small, interweaving captivating vignettes from Olympic history and Greek mythology with small-town Ontario to tell a story of love, betrayal, and loss.

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Kristen den Hartog is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose novels have won the Alberta Trade Fiction Book of the Year and been shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and the Trillium Award. She is the co-author (with her sister Tracy Kasaboski) of two previous non-fiction books: The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-torn Holland, a Globe & Mail Top 100 selection, and The Cowkeeper’s Wish, praised by Canada’s History as a blend of “graceful prose” and “meticulous research on a stupendous scale.” Work on these two books — intimate histories of ordinary families — sparked the writing of The Roosting Box and den Hartog’s ongoing interest in how war changes the direction of people’s lives so dramatically. Kristen den Hartog lives in Lyndhurst, Ontario, and also in the west end of Toronto, not far from the site of the former Christie Street Hospital.

Reviews

[Samuel Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A multi-threaded collage of the quiet tumult and dysfunction that resides behind the facade of small-town suburbia. I appreciated the way the author used the Olympic games as a framework to relate the passing of time and to give some big-world context, since the story never departs far from the quaint range of a single residential street. There were elements I really enjoyed, but ultimately I was unsatisfied with the resolution (as with real life, there are rarely satisfying conclusions, so I get that). It is an emotional ride, and full of tragedy, but also filled with beautiful passages to balance.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this story, which focused on the fallout of one big lie. In the book, a teenaged gymnast in Canada gets pregnant, and she makes a declaration about who the father is. This declaration affects the trajectory of multiple families across a small town. What I loved was watching how all the pieces began to fall into place, as the reader slowly sees how different characters and different events fit together.