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Cambium Blue
Set in the British Columbia Interior, the novel Cambium Blue is an homage to resource towns, independent women and local newspapers. In 1994, at the outset of the bark beetle epidemic that will decimate millions of acres of pine forest in western North America, a fiercely independent lumber town faces a bleak future when its only sawmill is shuttered. Encouraged by a provincial government intent on transitioning the region from timber to tourism, the town council embraces a resort developer as their last, best hope. A failure to anticipate the human cost of that choice ignites a struggle for the very soul of the community. Cambium Blue ’s narrative alternates between three viewpoints. Stevie Jeffers is a timid, 24-year-old single mom who stakes her future on the town after a traumatic break-up. Nash Malone is a reclusive Spanish Civil War veteran who supplements his pension with salvage from the local dump―an occupation that puts him on a collision course with the town’s plan to beautify itself. At 54 years old, cash-strapped and short-staffed Maggie Evans is treading water while waiting to sell her dead husband’s newspaper, the barely solvent Chronicle . As the characters’ lives intertwine and the conflict heats up, they will each be challenged to traverse the ambiguous divide between substance and hype, past and future, hope and despair. Rich with unforgettable characters and set in the Interior hinterland of British Columbia, Cambium Blue is a masterful and compassionate illumination of the human politics of a small town, and the intersection of individual lives with political agendas and environmental catastrophes.
- GenresCanada
320 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2022
4 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Maureen Brownlee
3 books7 followersMaureen Brownlee was born and raised on the western slope of the northern Rockies in British Columbia, Canada.
A former journalist, Brownlee started writing fiction as a child, on a manual typewriter with sticky keys in the cubbyhole behind the post office in her parents' tiny general store. In her twenties she paid monthly instalments for a home study writing course and wrote a handful of unpublished children’s stories. Then life intervened and she learned how to write about other topics during a decade spent running a weekly newspaper. After selling the newspaper in 1994, she moved to a small farm and spent the next fifteen years building fences, working at assorted day jobs, taking university courses by correspondence, and learning how to write fiction.
Her writing education has included workshops at Island Mountain School of the Arts, Fernie Writers Conference, and Sage Hill Writing Experience. Additionally she studied English and Creative Writing at B.C.’s Open University and the University of Northern British Columbia.
When not writing, Maureen gardens, growing much of her own food, runs for the fun of it, dabbles at the guitar and pencil sketching, and reads, reads, reads.
She lives on a farm near Valemount, British Columbia on the traditional territory of the LLheidli T’enneh and Simpcw First Nations.
A former journalist, Brownlee started writing fiction as a child, on a manual typewriter with sticky keys in the cubbyhole behind the post office in her parents' tiny general store. In her twenties she paid monthly instalments for a home study writing course and wrote a handful of unpublished children’s stories. Then life intervened and she learned how to write about other topics during a decade spent running a weekly newspaper. After selling the newspaper in 1994, she moved to a small farm and spent the next fifteen years building fences, working at assorted day jobs, taking university courses by correspondence, and learning how to write fiction.
Her writing education has included workshops at Island Mountain School of the Arts, Fernie Writers Conference, and Sage Hill Writing Experience. Additionally she studied English and Creative Writing at B.C.’s Open University and the University of Northern British Columbia.
When not writing, Maureen gardens, growing much of her own food, runs for the fun of it, dabbles at the guitar and pencil sketching, and reads, reads, reads.
She lives on a farm near Valemount, British Columbia on the traditional territory of the LLheidli T’enneh and Simpcw First Nations.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 16, 2022
Cambium Blue is the 2nd novel I've read by author, Maureen Brownlee, and once again I was caught up in the locale, the lives, and the characters portrayed in this story, a story set in a small town, complete with politics, gossips, friendships and loyalties. Also, the struggles both personal and community, and the strengths found to overcome, to survive. I love that this author proudly sets her stories in BC, Canada. I learn new things each time about a place I thought I already knew so well. I will definitely be recommending this book for others to read, and watching for #3.
April 1, 2022
This book was a delight to read. It documents the challenges facing small forestry-dependent British Columbia communities in the early 1990’s, while telling the stories of three very different characters who are forced to deal with life changes forced upon them. I enjoyed the very realistic descriptions of small town life and politics as much as I loved the very compelling stories of each character.
January 13, 2023
In the midst of a dreary, slopping winter on the west coast of Canada, CAMBIUM BLUE is almost comforting in its rich, accurate reflection of small town life!
A young single mom, a widowed newspaper publisher, an aging junk collector. Cambium Blue is a story beginning in winter at 4 a.m. A woman faces down her lover, who threatens to blow her brains out in their shabby trailer home in a “crappy little mill town” called Beauty Creek, in northern British Columbia. The couple has been trying to make a home here for the past few months but then, the mill shuts down and threatens to uproot them once again. Having promised her two small girls that they would never move again, Stevie risks her life as she rebels against her partner, as if her choice to stay in Beauty Creek, her refusal to move yet again, will make any difference.
“Kurt cracked open the shotgun.” The tension of a well-wrought scene puts the reader squarely in Stevie’s court, and after she calls his bluff, she puts away the bullets, then the gun and practically pushes him out the door. Now it’s suddenly up to her to provide for her two girls. With no financial support, and no drunken binges from an unreliable man, the story sets off.
The second character, Nash Malone, is vintage eccentric: an old-timer, a junk collector who haunts the garbage dump for cast-offs, gadgets, bottles, metal contraptions and second-hand clothes. It’s almost Christmas. You can taste the dreary and feel the chill. Small town gossip reveals a new council has recently decreed some visual standards around eyesores, specifically targeting Malone’s junk heap.
Then there’s Maggie Evans, the stubborn publisher of The Beauty Creek Chronicle, succeeding her now-deceased husband Hank. Evans’ inheritance of the paper is complicated by its precarious financial condition. But off in the near distance is news of a potential new development with the sale of the Timberline Motel. Maggie makes efforts to sell the paper, knowing she’d need the infusion of interest provided by the hoped-for development. She hires Stevie, who has recently signed up for a course in computer literacy.
Then, a cast of characters rolls out, including Beauty Creek itself: “too small, too hick, too far from everywhere and most outrageous of all, bereft of a shopping mall.”
The rest of this review can be found on New York Journal of Books, here: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
A young single mom, a widowed newspaper publisher, an aging junk collector. Cambium Blue is a story beginning in winter at 4 a.m. A woman faces down her lover, who threatens to blow her brains out in their shabby trailer home in a “crappy little mill town” called Beauty Creek, in northern British Columbia. The couple has been trying to make a home here for the past few months but then, the mill shuts down and threatens to uproot them once again. Having promised her two small girls that they would never move again, Stevie risks her life as she rebels against her partner, as if her choice to stay in Beauty Creek, her refusal to move yet again, will make any difference.
“Kurt cracked open the shotgun.” The tension of a well-wrought scene puts the reader squarely in Stevie’s court, and after she calls his bluff, she puts away the bullets, then the gun and practically pushes him out the door. Now it’s suddenly up to her to provide for her two girls. With no financial support, and no drunken binges from an unreliable man, the story sets off.
The second character, Nash Malone, is vintage eccentric: an old-timer, a junk collector who haunts the garbage dump for cast-offs, gadgets, bottles, metal contraptions and second-hand clothes. It’s almost Christmas. You can taste the dreary and feel the chill. Small town gossip reveals a new council has recently decreed some visual standards around eyesores, specifically targeting Malone’s junk heap.
Then there’s Maggie Evans, the stubborn publisher of The Beauty Creek Chronicle, succeeding her now-deceased husband Hank. Evans’ inheritance of the paper is complicated by its precarious financial condition. But off in the near distance is news of a potential new development with the sale of the Timberline Motel. Maggie makes efforts to sell the paper, knowing she’d need the infusion of interest provided by the hoped-for development. She hires Stevie, who has recently signed up for a course in computer literacy.
Then, a cast of characters rolls out, including Beauty Creek itself: “too small, too hick, too far from everywhere and most outrageous of all, bereft of a shopping mall.”
The rest of this review can be found on New York Journal of Books, here: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
August 1, 2025
2.5/5 ⭐️
I'm sad to say this book disappointed me. Having grown up in a small town in Interior British Columbia that went through a mill closure, the setting of Cambium Blue was all too familiar, from the townsfolk being resistant to change, to the nosy neighbors stirring up controversy over each other's business. However, it was the plot, or lack thereof that was the let down for me.
When the fictitious town of Beauty Creek's mill closes and the mountain pine beetle begins its devastation, I was hoping to read about how the loggers and millworkers are personally affected and how they might cope. There is a glimpse of this in Stevie's story with her partner separating to find other work, but no other character narratives are directly impacted. Instead, the focus is on a struggling newspaper outlet desperate for stories, working to uncover longtime resident Nash Malone's experience in the Spanish Civil War. While I understand this was important for understanding his character in the junkyard debacle, I felt such heavy focus on his past was irrelevant to the book's present setting.
When a shady businessman from Vancouver proposes a fansy ski resort to rebrand Beauty Creek as a tourist town, I was expecting a Corner Gas style reaction of the town all in an uproar over the very idea of change, but there were no strong reactions either way and the whole thing kind of fell off and disappeared among the character subplots without it being properly addressed as happening, or not happening. I wanted this to be the front and center plot that the story revolves around, but it was only ever briefly in the background.
I can say I enjoyed reading the namedrops of BC Interior towns I know and have lived in or visited, but I was hoping for a more plot-centered story, rather than one centered on the intricacies of a few random people's personal struggles, irrelevant to the setting and conflict.
I'm sad to say this book disappointed me. Having grown up in a small town in Interior British Columbia that went through a mill closure, the setting of Cambium Blue was all too familiar, from the townsfolk being resistant to change, to the nosy neighbors stirring up controversy over each other's business. However, it was the plot, or lack thereof that was the let down for me.
When the fictitious town of Beauty Creek's mill closes and the mountain pine beetle begins its devastation, I was hoping to read about how the loggers and millworkers are personally affected and how they might cope. There is a glimpse of this in Stevie's story with her partner separating to find other work, but no other character narratives are directly impacted. Instead, the focus is on a struggling newspaper outlet desperate for stories, working to uncover longtime resident Nash Malone's experience in the Spanish Civil War. While I understand this was important for understanding his character in the junkyard debacle, I felt such heavy focus on his past was irrelevant to the book's present setting.
When a shady businessman from Vancouver proposes a fansy ski resort to rebrand Beauty Creek as a tourist town, I was expecting a Corner Gas style reaction of the town all in an uproar over the very idea of change, but there were no strong reactions either way and the whole thing kind of fell off and disappeared among the character subplots without it being properly addressed as happening, or not happening. I wanted this to be the front and center plot that the story revolves around, but it was only ever briefly in the background.
I can say I enjoyed reading the namedrops of BC Interior towns I know and have lived in or visited, but I was hoping for a more plot-centered story, rather than one centered on the intricacies of a few random people's personal struggles, irrelevant to the setting and conflict.
March 11, 2022
If you like strong women and mountain towns, you will love this book! Three characters on the edge come together as unlikely heroes in an impossible situation. It is 1994. The town of Beauty Creek is under pressure to develop, the pine beetle is destroying the way of life and government plans for 'progressive communities' are coming to a head. A small town newspaper publisher is a dying breed, and the main character Maggie faces mounting pressure to sell. Newly single mom Stevie become her employee. Nash Malone, who as a young man stood up for what he believed in to fight the Spanish Civil War, is not unlike those who are now amassing from around the world to join the fight for democracy in the Ukraine today. Now in his seventies, Nash still wears war wounds on his psyche from the battles he endured as a young man.
Tightly wound, Cambium Blue closes in as the impossible situation builds to tragic results, but what shines through is the love and connection between the characters and the enduring resilience of this mountain community.
There is so much wisdom shining between these pages. A fantastic read!
Tightly wound, Cambium Blue closes in as the impossible situation builds to tragic results, but what shines through is the love and connection between the characters and the enduring resilience of this mountain community.
There is so much wisdom shining between these pages. A fantastic read!
May 20, 2022
This book was given to me by a friend and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters were engaging and the story was well done. Lessons and conflicts in the story were believable, from the lack of self-esteem to the people who will do anything for money, people given a bit of power and wielding it against those who don't deserve it.
June 25, 2022
Loved it! Maureen slowly but surely drew me in, with simple storytelling that deeply opened up her characters. I found myself flipping the page, wondering how each one would evolve through their town’s hard choices. The crusty, unloved Spanish War vet with a poet’s heart touched me, and revealed more of Maureen’s gift with words – she’s a poet as well as a novelist.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
November 7, 2022
I loved the description of the characters in a small bc logging town. They were so real. A younger single mom with two girls, a newspaper editor running the business and a man who was a junk collector and dump retriever. Each character was developed with real emotions and some light moments. I liked her writing but found some of the Spanish war references disjointed and confusing.
January 12, 2023
I really enjoyed this book. Loved the characters. This book took me back to my time as a high school student in a small lumber town in the interior of British Columbia. Lots of parallels for sure. Very well written!
January 1, 2023
Loved this book! Small-town characters that you fell in love with and some that you hated! Really well written!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews