Confederation Drive

by Janice MacDonald

In the summer of 1967 Janice MacDonald and her mother Joyce jumped into their Plymouth Barracuda and drove across Canada to celebrate Canada's 100th birthday and Expo in Montreal. Fifty years later she recreates this road trip with her husband to experience the same magic that defined her childhood. Janice MacDonald's Confederation Drive looks at how Expo was Canada's coming out party to the rest of the world and how we are seen by the global community fifty years later. It's a love letter to her beloved mother. It's lobster dinners and Anne of Green Gables and Saskatchewan rest stops and Manitoba detours. As Canada's 150th birthday is right around the corner there is no more Canadian thing to do than curl up with this book and reflect on where we've been as a country and, more importantly, where we're going.

“Part meditation and part travel memoir, Confederation Drive is a wholly charming cross-country adventure that explores themes of connection. As might be expected from one of Edmonton’s foremost detective writers, Janice MacDonald also seeks to unravel the mystery of how a childhood road trip in honour of Expo ‘67 shaped her identity. With musings on motherhood, culture and politics and a requisite number of traffic mishaps and lobster dinners, MacDonald brings back the great Canadian road trip in time for Canada’s biggest birthday yet.”
—Ali Bryan, author of Roost

200 pages, Paperback

Published May 4, 2017

About the author

Janice MacDonald is a bestselling Canadian author who is best known for a series of crime novels featuring amateur sleuth Miranda "Randy" Craig; the latest of these popular mysteries is The Eye of the Beholder (2018). The Randy Craig Mysteries were the first detective series to be set in Edmonton, Alberta, where Janice lives and works. Janice is also the author of 2017's Confederation Drive, a work of creative non-fiction written for Canada's 150th birthday. Her other titles include an award-winning children's book (The Ghouls' Night Out), a university textbook, and several non-fiction/historical titles about her home province.

Born on the side of a mountain in Banff National Park, the daughter of a cowboy from southern Alberta and a schoolteacher who herself had been born in a pioneer log cabin in the Peace River Country, Janice considers herself to be a example of the quintessential Albertan. A dyed-in-the-wool Edmontonian, Janice makes no apologies for setting her novels in a recognizable Edmonton and celebrating the things that make this northern metropolis so vibrant and unique.

Reviews

[Cheryl Sinclair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. So many places I have been to are mentioned on her trip back to Expo 67. I never saw Expo although I was on a boat on the St Lawrence river for the fireworks to celebrate the official ground breaking.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child I remember wanting to go to Expo 67 in Montreal after reading about it in Weekly Reader in school. My parents said no, but I remained fascinated with it. (That summer the closest we got was a trip to Mackinac Island in Michigan.) But Janice MacDonald, eight years old at the time, made the trip by car with her mom all the way from Edmonton, Alberta to Montreal and beyond to easternmost provinces of Canada. The journey made a lifelong impression on her. Decades later, to mark Canada's sesquicentennial and to gain a better understand of how the road trip helped to shape her, Janice made the trip again, this time with her husband Randy.

Her account of the journey is personal; we learn about her mother, her background, and the friends and relatives she visited along the way, both in the past and the future. Yet, every step of the way is relatable, evoking universal themes and feelings. Reading it brought back memories for me of vacations with my parents when I was little, of seeing unfamiliar landscapes and visiting quirky towns and roadside tourist attractions. And as Janice reflected on her childhood and relationship with her mom, so did I. The story is a narrative of the trip and a memoir of the past, and also so much more.

As an American, I also appreciated learning about Canada seeing a perspective of the United States through the eyes of a Canadian. (Janice and Randy's journey dipped into the US twice).