A Hard Witching And Other Stories

by Jacqueline Baker

Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, is a region of the prairies that is unique, an expanse of shifting sand dunes interrupted by patches of green vegetation, small lakes, and saline flats. Foreign yet familiar, Sand Hills is the extraordinarily vivid place threaded through Jacqueline Baker’s highly praised first collection of short fiction, eight fresh and true stories of prairie life. Baker writes with confidence and unvarnished honesty, and like Flannery O’Connor or Bonnie Burnard, she has the rare ability to make the familiar brilliant and finely understood. Hers are universal themes of the tensionsof family life, of relationships defined by what isn’t said, rather than what is, and of our connection to a past that may be real or imagined. Reading A Hard Witching is like entering a complete and perfectly detailed world with each story―worlds that are not easy to leave and even harder to forget.

Genres: Short Stories, Canada

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 2003

About the author

Jacqueline Baker is the author of "A Hard Witching and Other Stories", which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her first novel, "The Horseman's Graves" won wide critical acclaim and was a finalist for the Evergreen Award. Jacqueline Baker lives with her husband and children in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Reviews

[Pooker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely stories that conjured up Saskatchewan like nothing I've ever read.

Longer review to follow

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Words that describe the people in this book: miserable, mean, narrow, nasty, uncharitable, UGH! Since this book is a series of vignettes about these people (yes, I shelved it under short-stories but really, stories implies plots and there were none). So, the read was bleak, dreary, tedious, and hard work to go with the hard witching.

How did Baker manage to cram so many buttholes into such a small space? This book does Saskatchewanians a HUGE disservice. If I were from that province, I probably would have given one star. I rounded up to two because the writing is decent despite the book being a giant UGH! in its characters.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book consists of 8 stories all set in South Saskatchewan. They deal primarily with rural lives, and are concerned with family history, secrets and relationships. Baker has a Germanic family background, and many of these stories take the lives of German immigrant farmers as a starting point. I enjoyed them especially for their evocation of place.

Jacqueline Baker has a voice that is very like Saskatchewan; calm and definite, with much attention paid to the natural world. There is also humour, but it shows in amusement in the telling rather than a laugh-out-loud slapstick variety. I read this book straight through, and admired her ability to construct stories that feel as spacious as the landscape.

Full Review Here

[Anton Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was looking for the conflict and the resolution in these stories and was disappointed.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed the relationships between the characters in these short stories. Very real. Heart wrenching in some cases.