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The Mountain and the Valley
The Mountain and the Valley is an affectionate portrait of David Canaan, a sensitive boy who becomes increasingly aware of the difference that sets him apart from his family and his neighbours. David’s desire to write is the secret that gives this haunting story its detailed focus and its poignant theme.
Set in the years leading up to World War II and against the backdrop of the Annapolis Valley’s natural beauty, The Mountain and the Valley captures a young man’s spiritual awakening and the gradual growth of artistic vision.
Set in the years leading up to World War II and against the backdrop of the Annapolis Valley’s natural beauty, The Mountain and the Valley captures a young man’s spiritual awakening and the gradual growth of artistic vision.
304 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
December 8, 2011
My favorite Canadian novel of all time. Buckler is able to capture moments so beautifully. His writing is poetic and so clearly draws images that the reader wants to savor and cherish.
October 17, 2016
I loved this book both for the quality of the writing and the sensitively drawn characters. This book touched me at a deep personal level which is the reason I give it 5 stars.
The story is centred on a family and the community they live in within a valley. The valley is where they all live but it the mountain that represents their own struggles with personal demons and fears. Each one is scarred and flawed in some way and yet each one is needed.
David feels things painfully because he overthinks things. His intelligence does not compensate him for physical weakness (a heart condition from birth possibly) until at the end of life when he recognises that he also has something to give.
The story is separated into sections, the title of each signifying the major theme of that section.
The story is centred on a family and the community they live in within a valley. The valley is where they all live but it the mountain that represents their own struggles with personal demons and fears. Each one is scarred and flawed in some way and yet each one is needed.
David feels things painfully because he overthinks things. His intelligence does not compensate him for physical weakness (a heart condition from birth possibly) until at the end of life when he recognises that he also has something to give.
The story is separated into sections, the title of each signifying the major theme of that section.
July 17, 2024
This novel contains a particular little excitement for me because the setting is the Annapolis Valley, in Nova Scotia, where I grew up. For many years, this was the only novel I’d encountered with this setting.
The protagonist, David, is a sensitive boy who struggles with his rural, "idyllic" upbringing and wants to know a larger world, do other things. He wants to write. All of this made this novel special to me.
Ernest Buckler is not much talked about anymore but was an old-school sort of writer — quiet, private, not interested in self-promotion.
The protagonist, David, is a sensitive boy who struggles with his rural, "idyllic" upbringing and wants to know a larger world, do other things. He wants to write. All of this made this novel special to me.
Ernest Buckler is not much talked about anymore but was an old-school sort of writer — quiet, private, not interested in self-promotion.
March 21, 2017
The author's loving description of the farm in the Annapolis family, along side his lyrical description of the natural features in the mountain and the valley, enhance this moving story with the twin themes of family and loneliness.
August 10, 2020
A beautiful, devastating book. Part of the reason I initially began this book because of its particular fetishization by those that I know. It is undoubtedly both beautiful and devastating at the same time, yet I struggle and am (irrationally I know) angered by the sensitivity and subtleness of this work that ends with what feels like unnecessary death. Perhaps I feel this way because the rural community Buckler describes feels so much like my own or because the alienation that David sometimes describes feels so familiar.
The scene between Joseph and Martha right before Joseph dies is particularly wrenching — in its simplicity and soft description more than anything that’s ever actually spoken between them. The beautiful natural descriptions that Buckler uses, which pass flawlessly from living creature to landscape, make the emotions brought through them even more intense.
The scene between Joseph and Martha right before Joseph dies is particularly wrenching — in its simplicity and soft description more than anything that’s ever actually spoken between them. The beautiful natural descriptions that Buckler uses, which pass flawlessly from living creature to landscape, make the emotions brought through them even more intense.
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April 5, 20208.2/10
RTC
RTC
November 5, 2019
I understand that this is a "Canadian classic", but I honestly wonder whether or not that's simply because we don't have much of anything else in our cultural canon. This was not an enjoyable book in the slightest. In fact, I spent most of the time being completely disgusted by what I was reading.
It seemed like Ernest Buckler was attempting to write Anne of Green Gables but "for men". It has many of the same story beats and follows a coming-of-age narrative, but the tone is infinitely more bleak and depressing. Not in a way that conveys some sort of greater meaning though. It feels like Buckler was trying to make a grand statement about what "manhood" was and the disappointing reality of having to grow up and be responsible.
The book lacks any kind of realistic feminine perspective whatsoever. I would know, you know, being a woman, and knowing that I have never once in my whole life thought the way that any of the female characters in the novel do. All the girls were either docile and brainless wives, shrew harpy women, infantilized to the point of concern, or whores. It was possibly the least relatable text I've ever encountered. I was talking to my mother about it and she actually said that she had the exact same experience when she read the book in university herself. The male characters are near constantly talking/thinking about their genitalia, how horny they are, and peeing. I wish I was lying, it was so painful to have to get through. I have no understanding of why this was included, I don't believe Buckler wanted me to, and honestly, I don't want to myself.
Spoilers past this point:
There were a few points where, if I had not had to read this for a class, I would have abandoned the book completely.
1.) There are several instances of sexual assault. The brother's girlfriends are always uncomfortable with the idea of having sex with them, but they keep insisting to the point of coercion. If you read the book and want to argue this point with me, you're already part of the problem, I'm not sorry.
2.) When the older brother of the family, Chris, complains in his thoughts about how his wife doesn't seem as pretty or sweet after she just had a miscarriage. We're supposed to be sympathetic towards this man who repeatedly forced himself on this girl and then is depressed when he is forced to take responsibility for these actions and marry her, "trapping" him.
3.) The main character's girlfriend dies of cancer and he then has sex with her mother. Once again, I wish I was making this up, I am not.
TLDR: Just because something is old and has come to be a "classic" by proximity, that doesn't mean that it is any good. Ernest Buckler put a "No Girls Allowed" sticker on this book and I'm glad to let him just have it, because I would like to distance myself as much as possible from this awful, awful story.
It seemed like Ernest Buckler was attempting to write Anne of Green Gables but "for men". It has many of the same story beats and follows a coming-of-age narrative, but the tone is infinitely more bleak and depressing. Not in a way that conveys some sort of greater meaning though. It feels like Buckler was trying to make a grand statement about what "manhood" was and the disappointing reality of having to grow up and be responsible.
The book lacks any kind of realistic feminine perspective whatsoever. I would know, you know, being a woman, and knowing that I have never once in my whole life thought the way that any of the female characters in the novel do. All the girls were either docile and brainless wives, shrew harpy women, infantilized to the point of concern, or whores. It was possibly the least relatable text I've ever encountered. I was talking to my mother about it and she actually said that she had the exact same experience when she read the book in university herself. The male characters are near constantly talking/thinking about their genitalia, how horny they are, and peeing. I wish I was lying, it was so painful to have to get through. I have no understanding of why this was included, I don't believe Buckler wanted me to, and honestly, I don't want to myself.
Spoilers past this point:
There were a few points where, if I had not had to read this for a class, I would have abandoned the book completely.
1.) There are several instances of sexual assault. The brother's girlfriends are always uncomfortable with the idea of having sex with them, but they keep insisting to the point of coercion. If you read the book and want to argue this point with me, you're already part of the problem, I'm not sorry.
2.) When the older brother of the family, Chris, complains in his thoughts about how his wife doesn't seem as pretty or sweet after she just had a miscarriage. We're supposed to be sympathetic towards this man who repeatedly forced himself on this girl and then is depressed when he is forced to take responsibility for these actions and marry her, "trapping" him.
3.) The main character's girlfriend dies of cancer and he then has sex with her mother. Once again, I wish I was making this up, I am not.
TLDR: Just because something is old and has come to be a "classic" by proximity, that doesn't mean that it is any good. Ernest Buckler put a "No Girls Allowed" sticker on this book and I'm glad to let him just have it, because I would like to distance myself as much as possible from this awful, awful story.
August 5, 2024
"The Mountain and the Valley" set in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley during the first 30 years of the 20th Century became an instant classic of Canadian literature upon its publication in 1954. It remains today a sacred cow in Canada. I hated it and was relieved as I read other reviews on the GR website that share my low opinion of the work. Like most of the other GR negative reviewers, I was appalled by Buckler's treatment of sexual relations involving minors.
"The Mountain and the Valley" nonetheless has numerous partisans who package it as a Canadian Bildungsroman in which the tragic early death of the protagonist, David Canaan, prevents him from realizing his artistic potential. The blurb on the back cover of the McClelland and Stewart edition that I read describes the novel in these terms: "David Canaan, a young man coming of age in the Annapolis Valley in the years before the Second World War grows from being a sensitive boy into an articulate young man increasingly aware that is desire to write that sets him apart from his family and neighbours."
In all due respect to McCelland and Stewart, which launched every Canadian author of note from Gabrielle Roy to Margaret Atwood, this description is absurd even if it does align with Buckler's own view of the novel. David Canaan, is nonentity who misses the role call of life. Once he realizes this he loses his sanity and falls fatally from the summit of his beloved mountain.
As a second quibble is that Canaan does not die in anticipation of WWII. Rather he is having doubts about himself and is wondering if by not serving in WWI, he missed an important opportunity to do something of significance.
I see no reason for anyone living outside of Canada to read "The Mountain and the Valley" . Canadian readers still should read it has been accorded a place of honour in the history of our literature. One simply has to have read it in order to pose as an authority on CanLit.
"The Mountain and the Valley" nonetheless has numerous partisans who package it as a Canadian Bildungsroman in which the tragic early death of the protagonist, David Canaan, prevents him from realizing his artistic potential. The blurb on the back cover of the McClelland and Stewart edition that I read describes the novel in these terms: "David Canaan, a young man coming of age in the Annapolis Valley in the years before the Second World War grows from being a sensitive boy into an articulate young man increasingly aware that is desire to write that sets him apart from his family and neighbours."
In all due respect to McCelland and Stewart, which launched every Canadian author of note from Gabrielle Roy to Margaret Atwood, this description is absurd even if it does align with Buckler's own view of the novel. David Canaan, is nonentity who misses the role call of life. Once he realizes this he loses his sanity and falls fatally from the summit of his beloved mountain.
As a second quibble is that Canaan does not die in anticipation of WWII. Rather he is having doubts about himself and is wondering if by not serving in WWI, he missed an important opportunity to do something of significance.
I see no reason for anyone living outside of Canada to read "The Mountain and the Valley" . Canadian readers still should read it has been accorded a place of honour in the history of our literature. One simply has to have read it in order to pose as an authority on CanLit.
January 31, 2024
An artist is always struggling against himself, attempting to create a balance between the beliefs that he or she imposes on the world, and conveying, in an honest format, what is truthfully observed. The Mountain and The Valley encompasses these struggles, that of a writer who at times imperfectly distills his work with a sort of withdrawal into himself, at others, causing the reader to reflect on the beauty outside.
We overlook moments of the author’s self-fixation as Buckler beckons us with the integrity of thought and the meticulous subtleties of his craft, toward the inner world of his characters and their motivations. We examine through the author's writing the horrors of times passage while grasping what it means to live in a world like his own.
Buckler has an exquisite way of making thoughts feel familiar. The vibrancy with which he permits life to be observed, and the stark occurrences of mishap or tragedy, carry in them the pulse and afterweight of real event. The writer causes us to reflect on our relationship to time, family, and the yearning for individuality, which is sought in the thick of youth, fused with the quaint and emanating thrills of life outside, of nature and eventual freedom in adulthood. The novel catches the subtle inflections of the speech and pallor, the grace and simplicity of a world unlike our own. We learn to honour a past which we know not ours, yet somehow we are linked to it, in the way that a tree belongs to the seed out of which it perseveres.
There is a kind of introspective countryside wisdom in the way Buckler sees, an obsession with the texture and substance of his secluded world. Landscapes and nature play an overwhelming role in the story, and the way passages read is like the slow, leisurely way in which village life is lived. The writer is not afraid to combine objective reality with inner contemplation, to offer an understanding of the world wrought from the interplay between both spheres.
The richness of his story is in the nuances of characters, the gestures or subtleties of thought which make people themselves. The storytelling is so simple and idiosyncratic that, unlike many novels one would read today, we don’t anticipate what’s to come. We spend much more time fixating on landscape, memory, or the exquisiteness of the author's mental insights. When something pivotal does take place, it comes upon us like a car we didn’t see coming as we cross into the lane.
People in the story are joined by beliefs and habits which only their time or geography can invoke, the town living like one large, estranged family rather than a divided community. Buckler has an understanding of human nature which transcends the limitations of the place he depicts. His relationship with nature gives it soul, and his comprehension of the human mind captivates and lures.
The story depicts the pride and disappointment of a boy's youth, the private dilemmas and painful growth which accompany the child who is uncertain about his future, yet who learns eventually to adapt to unforeseen shifts in his family's dynamic due to time, growth, death and complacency. Buckler carefully preserves the mystique and wonder of childhood, the ambiguity and pleasure which fill the palette so seamlessly in youth. His work is a study of the unique quarrel with life, one which ultimately finds assurance and grace in solitude.
We overlook moments of the author’s self-fixation as Buckler beckons us with the integrity of thought and the meticulous subtleties of his craft, toward the inner world of his characters and their motivations. We examine through the author's writing the horrors of times passage while grasping what it means to live in a world like his own.
Buckler has an exquisite way of making thoughts feel familiar. The vibrancy with which he permits life to be observed, and the stark occurrences of mishap or tragedy, carry in them the pulse and afterweight of real event. The writer causes us to reflect on our relationship to time, family, and the yearning for individuality, which is sought in the thick of youth, fused with the quaint and emanating thrills of life outside, of nature and eventual freedom in adulthood. The novel catches the subtle inflections of the speech and pallor, the grace and simplicity of a world unlike our own. We learn to honour a past which we know not ours, yet somehow we are linked to it, in the way that a tree belongs to the seed out of which it perseveres.
There is a kind of introspective countryside wisdom in the way Buckler sees, an obsession with the texture and substance of his secluded world. Landscapes and nature play an overwhelming role in the story, and the way passages read is like the slow, leisurely way in which village life is lived. The writer is not afraid to combine objective reality with inner contemplation, to offer an understanding of the world wrought from the interplay between both spheres.
The richness of his story is in the nuances of characters, the gestures or subtleties of thought which make people themselves. The storytelling is so simple and idiosyncratic that, unlike many novels one would read today, we don’t anticipate what’s to come. We spend much more time fixating on landscape, memory, or the exquisiteness of the author's mental insights. When something pivotal does take place, it comes upon us like a car we didn’t see coming as we cross into the lane.
People in the story are joined by beliefs and habits which only their time or geography can invoke, the town living like one large, estranged family rather than a divided community. Buckler has an understanding of human nature which transcends the limitations of the place he depicts. His relationship with nature gives it soul, and his comprehension of the human mind captivates and lures.
The story depicts the pride and disappointment of a boy's youth, the private dilemmas and painful growth which accompany the child who is uncertain about his future, yet who learns eventually to adapt to unforeseen shifts in his family's dynamic due to time, growth, death and complacency. Buckler carefully preserves the mystique and wonder of childhood, the ambiguity and pleasure which fill the palette so seamlessly in youth. His work is a study of the unique quarrel with life, one which ultimately finds assurance and grace in solitude.
June 9, 2015
Wonderful to read this again. It is a quiet story with a kind of deafening urgency to it. David Canaan, the protagonist, is "born with the condition of universality in him". He is an adaptable young man and highly sensitive to his family and the rural community that surrounds him. But he is struggling to develop his own voice as an artist: "When David closed his eyes at night, all the strange horde of imagination swarmed, seething, into his brain - the bewildering multiplicity of memory, the teeming variety of perception, the infinite permutations of speech". Also, the book has (what I'd still rate) one of the warmest descriptions of a family advent and Christmas ever written. It is a moment of sheltered childhood suspended in time for us to look at.
November 15, 2012
One of my favourite Canadian Lit books. If I would have rated this after the first time I read it, I would have given it 5 stars - then, I was young and impressionable. After a second, more analytical read, I still think it is a beautiful and well-written story, but it could flow a little better.
Everything about this book is subtle, which convey's the sense of lose and loneliness all the more readily.
Spoiler: there is a death at the end of this novel that is utterly beautiful in its description and sentiment. Utterly sad too - but then all my favourite books are melancholy ones. I cried after the first time I read it, not sure I did so after the second...
Everything about this book is subtle, which convey's the sense of lose and loneliness all the more readily.
Spoiler: there is a death at the end of this novel that is utterly beautiful in its description and sentiment. Utterly sad too - but then all my favourite books are melancholy ones. I cried after the first time I read it, not sure I did so after the second...
April 15, 2008
I was required to read this book for a Canadian Literature course in University. It became of one my favourites. I could really relate to some of the feelings that David has about life.
June 30, 2016
Confusing and startling. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.
June 5, 2021
Bought this for university well over a decade ago, read a few chapters, got bored, moved on with my life. Finally got back to it, and though it still has that slow pastoral pace, I guess I'm a more patient guy nowadays, because I quite liked it.
You do get the sense Ernest Buckler has painstakingly mined his own life experiences and rural upbringing to create the framework for this narrative, and the story has that sort of poetic coming-of-age impressionism that can be nice enough, but not necessairly that interesting on first glance.
Once you get into it, however, you realize that the book isn't so much about what it was like to grow up in rural Nova Scotia pre-WWII, as it is a very earnest attempt to articulate a universal human experience both broad and narrow, big and small. I know that's the goal of most books, in a way, but it really seems to be the focus here. This is the book's central conflict, in fact, embodied completely in its main character, David: a desperate need, not only to understand life as it really is, but to communicate that understanding to others in a way that softens the sometimes unbearably isolating feeling of just being alive in this world.
I found something rather admirable about that attempt, to be honest; and though it doesn't always hit, when it does it's quite stunning.
You do get the sense Ernest Buckler has painstakingly mined his own life experiences and rural upbringing to create the framework for this narrative, and the story has that sort of poetic coming-of-age impressionism that can be nice enough, but not necessairly that interesting on first glance.
Once you get into it, however, you realize that the book isn't so much about what it was like to grow up in rural Nova Scotia pre-WWII, as it is a very earnest attempt to articulate a universal human experience both broad and narrow, big and small. I know that's the goal of most books, in a way, but it really seems to be the focus here. This is the book's central conflict, in fact, embodied completely in its main character, David: a desperate need, not only to understand life as it really is, but to communicate that understanding to others in a way that softens the sometimes unbearably isolating feeling of just being alive in this world.
I found something rather admirable about that attempt, to be honest; and though it doesn't always hit, when it does it's quite stunning.
September 13, 2018
It feels rude to give a book fewer stars because the protagonist is the worst, but also the protagonist is the worst. Language is lovely, but pettiness runs through the novel like an underground river.
April 28, 2013
About the most quintessentially Nova Scotian Book I have ever read.
June 10, 2014
One of the most hauntingly beautiful books I have ever read of how our lives are wasted in dreaming and never actualized.
March 8, 2016
They made us read this book in high school in New Brunswick and I hated it.
March 11, 2019
Read this in high school, well worth the re-read !
February 4, 2024
This was my dad’s favourite book. I think it reminded him of himself, I can see why he loved it so much.
October 17, 2022
If I were to describe this book in one word, it would be “vibes”. Like this book is 80% mood, 20% everything else. If that is not your thing, I would not recommend this book as even when I love slow, descriptive books, this one still took me a while to get through.
My edition is published as a “New Canadian Library Classics” from @mclellandandstewart, it follows David Canaan, growing up in the rural Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia before WWI, the relationships and turning points of his life, and his growing desire to not be a farmer, but to be a writer. This is told in a series of short, interconnected stories through his life, not unlike “Lives of Girls and Women” by Alice Muno. But in this case, it feels very meta, as David himself is writing, and takes great personal pleasure in getting a mood just right, and in writing a perfect description of an event.
But if I may say, this book shocked and wrecked me. The descriptions of a feeling are actually perfect. I’d read a description of how David felt in a certain situation, described in great detail through allegory and metaphor, and agree completely. “Yes” (I’d say to myself), “that is EXACTLY how that feels”. And that is very impressive for a writer to accomplish, and I can’t say I’ve really felt that way before. But the problem was it really hurt. The book is sad at parts, and because of the literally perfect mood descriptions, it is a very visceral sadness. But then there are happy and peaceful parts too, and those made me feel legitimately joyful, until Buckler STEALS IT AWAY (crying face). My chest tightened at the embarrassing parts, and if it was bad enough, made me feel nauseous.
This book is an emotional trip. If you want to read it, give it time, give yourself space. But I absolutely would recommend it for the pure viscerality of the experience. I have said “this book give me all the feelings” plenty, but I’ll never say it again after reading this book.
My edition is published as a “New Canadian Library Classics” from @mclellandandstewart, it follows David Canaan, growing up in the rural Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia before WWI, the relationships and turning points of his life, and his growing desire to not be a farmer, but to be a writer. This is told in a series of short, interconnected stories through his life, not unlike “Lives of Girls and Women” by Alice Muno. But in this case, it feels very meta, as David himself is writing, and takes great personal pleasure in getting a mood just right, and in writing a perfect description of an event.
But if I may say, this book shocked and wrecked me. The descriptions of a feeling are actually perfect. I’d read a description of how David felt in a certain situation, described in great detail through allegory and metaphor, and agree completely. “Yes” (I’d say to myself), “that is EXACTLY how that feels”. And that is very impressive for a writer to accomplish, and I can’t say I’ve really felt that way before. But the problem was it really hurt. The book is sad at parts, and because of the literally perfect mood descriptions, it is a very visceral sadness. But then there are happy and peaceful parts too, and those made me feel legitimately joyful, until Buckler STEALS IT AWAY (crying face). My chest tightened at the embarrassing parts, and if it was bad enough, made me feel nauseous.
This book is an emotional trip. If you want to read it, give it time, give yourself space. But I absolutely would recommend it for the pure viscerality of the experience. I have said “this book give me all the feelings” plenty, but I’ll never say it again after reading this book.
July 17, 2024
I'm still figuring out what I think about this book. Yes, the writing is lyrical, poetic. Also repetitive.
The main character's life was so sad and gruelling throughout. In constant pain, not well, still having to plod on and support the family farm while everyone else escaped...I so wanted him to rebel and flee, but it was completely outside his limited character's mind or agency to do so. And so he looks at the mountain. Again and again. And the fog. And the damp.
I adored the theme of the grandmother hooking a rug filled with stories - it reminded me of my mother-in-law's bed quilt made of all sorts of old pieces of material, all with memories attached. It made for a good linking of the stories, and the unreliable narrator added a bit of action. Because there wasn't much action in this story.
The quietly depressing tale of life in the rural Annapolis Valley, NS, was one I could relate to, as well. Beautiful place, often dimmed by small thoughts, small meannesses...
I'm all for lyrical writing but I felt the author was a mite too enamoured of his voice. Way too much description for me.
The main character's life was so sad and gruelling throughout. In constant pain, not well, still having to plod on and support the family farm while everyone else escaped...I so wanted him to rebel and flee, but it was completely outside his limited character's mind or agency to do so. And so he looks at the mountain. Again and again. And the fog. And the damp.
I adored the theme of the grandmother hooking a rug filled with stories - it reminded me of my mother-in-law's bed quilt made of all sorts of old pieces of material, all with memories attached. It made for a good linking of the stories, and the unreliable narrator added a bit of action. Because there wasn't much action in this story.
The quietly depressing tale of life in the rural Annapolis Valley, NS, was one I could relate to, as well. Beautiful place, often dimmed by small thoughts, small meannesses...
I'm all for lyrical writing but I felt the author was a mite too enamoured of his voice. Way too much description for me.
January 24, 2020
Oh my goodness, I can't believe I read this 4 years ago and didn't remember one bit of it as I re-read it this week....I will give it the same rating as then....3 stars.
It is such a sad, dark, hope-less and rambling story....David Canaan grew up in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia....a very clever boy with a heart condition and later a head injury that keeps him in constant pain.
He is always thinking and analyzing every thing he does, feels or sees. He just doesn't seem to fit in with family, friends and others except when he makes jokes which are usually sex-related. WWII takes many of the men in the valley to Europe; some never return, of course and this leaves an understandable pall over the story.
I am a 'read every word' type of reader but couldn't do so in this book.....so many poetic descriptions which, to me, didn't add anything to the plot.
It is such a sad, dark, hope-less and rambling story....David Canaan grew up in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia....a very clever boy with a heart condition and later a head injury that keeps him in constant pain.
He is always thinking and analyzing every thing he does, feels or sees. He just doesn't seem to fit in with family, friends and others except when he makes jokes which are usually sex-related. WWII takes many of the men in the valley to Europe; some never return, of course and this leaves an understandable pall over the story.
I am a 'read every word' type of reader but couldn't do so in this book.....so many poetic descriptions which, to me, didn't add anything to the plot.
May 29, 2019
Read this for our latest book club. It was not well received, particularly. The writing was appreciated-and some parts of the story-like Ellen's rug-making and her stories that flowed from that-but on the whole it was found to be depressing. The discussion arising from it was good. None of us are spurred on to read anything else by Buckler, but we are glad that we did read it, since it was so well-received when it was published and is considered a classic. It certainly did capture the era after WW1 and into WW2, and all the changes to rural life that ensued.
December 1, 2019
This is the second, maybe third time I've read this book. The writing in my opinion, is exquisite. If I ever forget what a Christmas morning, or summer day felt like when I was young I would reach for this book.
June 12, 2021
What this book lacks in pace, it more than makes up for in character delivery. Set in mid twentieth century rural Nova Scotia. I will seek out more books by Ernest Buckler.
September 21, 2023
This book is permeated by a layer of sadness. It was a hard read.
April 17, 2024
beautifully written
September 4, 2025
there goes a lot of wasted reading time down the hole. i have not hated a book this much in a long long time. ouch.
May 2, 2023
I loved the vibes of this novel, and some of the imagery both in terms of nature itself and metaphors abt life, love, and growth, were absolutely fantastic. I did not necessarily appreciate David as a character since he feels a bit too pessimistic(?).
Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews