Loved this book . I love these types of books - magic realism. ( )

The characters in this book are one dimensional but likable (mostly). The recipes and glimpses of farm life give historical perspective. The Native American myths inter-weaving with the European understanding of life remind us how similar we are as humans, just trying to make sense of the evil and suffering around us.

The events, (incest, mutilation of animals, murder, mental illness, to list a few) were extreme and to my mind, unnecessary. Does every retelling of childhood have to be truly horrific for us to buy into it? Are authors afraid that if the story isn't disturbing the reader will dismiss it as whining? The more the story clumsily grabbed for my heart-strings, the further I backed away. ( )

This is the story of fifteen-year-old Beth Weeks and her family who live in a remote farming community in British Columbia during the Second World War. A plethora of eccentric and peculiar characters, a reserve of superstitious native Americans (or should that be Canadians?), a wild bear, a dead girl, a smattering of incest and the spirit of Coyote.

One of those books which I particularly love, where nothing much happens, but full of fascinating characterisation and breathtaking descriptions of the landscape. And a constant sense of the spirit world, right there on the edges of your vision where light meets dark.

So impressed I'm going to look out for her other book, charmingly called A Recipe for Bees! ( )

I bought this novel on an impulse buy from my local charity shop. I admit that I haven’t read a truly inspiring contemporary novel in years and I thought that perhaps this random act of book buying might change my luck. Alas, that was not to be.
The narrative is told by Beth, a young girl growing up in the 1940s in a rural village. She is bullied at school because of her appearance and her crazy father. She is bullied at home because of aforementioned mental father. There is a premise underlying the narrative that ‘something’ occurred on the night that her father went to kill a bear, that this ‘thing’ could be the spirit of a coyotee which has now possessed her dad. Which obviously accounts for all the mad behaviour. Examples include: killing Beth’s favourite kittens, making his daughter torture a cow and remove her ovaries, shouting at people a lot and generally acting irrationally.
The feminism in the book is completely overdone. The tribe of women who live on the plantation have a house full of mess and colour, they are happy and love each other, as all women do of course. The part when her dad showed her the cow ovaries and said with a strange smile these are what you have, this is what makes you female – that is truly overdone, and makes this man out to be severely warped. The threat of sexual assault is always near; women can’t even sit in a certain way without encouraging abuse apparently. However, lesbian relationships are obviously the way to go as no women are ever violent are they!
I have to admit that due to the violence and pointlessness of the plot, I failed to finish this novel. ( )

I liked this a lot. ( )

I remember this as painfully dull, enlivened only by an incident of bestiality. Which was disgusting, but the rest of the book was just the usual snivelling by some woman who had never really achieved anything, and so that sex scene rather stood out. Unremittingly tedious. Except for the bit where the boy bums the cow. ( )

Books in Canada
In The Cure for Death by Lightning, Beth Weeks, now an adult, reflects on a pivotal year in her life, the year she turned fifteen. It was "the year the world fell apart and began to come together again," with the Second World War raging in the world at large and the Weeks family war raging at home.
Beth's life had been, by her own account, fairly average, almost idyllic, on a farm in rural British Columbia where she and her older brother Dan attended school, helped with the daily chores, explored the surrounding countryside. All this changes suddenly after her father's almost fatal encounter with a grizzly in the bush. The terrifying experience pushes John Weeks over the edge, changes him into a cruel, abusive man who drowns kittens, cuts the ovaries out of a cow, obsesses about destroying his neighbour's fence, and overall turns his household into a domestic hell with his aggressive sullenness. Eventually, his behaviour ostracizes the whole Weeks family from the community, and this too becomes part of the increasing turmoil Beth has to deal with.

All this, however, is only the surface of a richly layered story. One of Beth's classmates, Sarah Kemp, has been-supposedly-killed by a bear, but there is an air of uncertainty about what might have really happened. Is there something or someone else out there in the bush? Beth often feels as though there is someone following her, and at the nearby Indian reservation the belief is that Coyote, legendary trickster, is on the prowl. The tension increases when children go missing from the reserve.

Meanwhile, the harassment of Beth escalates on every front. Her best friend Nora wants her to run away with her to the city; her mother renders herself oblivious to her developing sexuality; she is attacked by her schoolmates.

In all this turmoil, the one anchor, the sole remainder of Beth's lost reality-almost a character itself-is her mother's cherished scrapbook, her "mother's way of setting down the days so they wouldn't be forgotten." It is a collection of recipes, remedies, newspaper clippings, and funeral notices, an "objective correlative" of sorts to Beth's own memories and subjectivity: "No-one can tell me these events didn't happen, or that it was all a girl's fantasy. The reminders are there, and I remember them all." Anderson-Dargatz sets down these remembrances, in the process tracing Beth's rite of passage to womanhood, with precision and empathy. The result is a powerful novel that, much like Fall on Your Knees, illuminates the myths at work in personal lives. ( )

A Canadian author, first-novel, and it is very good. A novel about coming-of-age for a young girl, Beth, in the interior of BC in the 1940s, told from her point of view in the first person. An interesting and very effective device in her mother's cookbook which contains not only recipes, but articles of interest from the newspapers and magazines, home remedies (the cure of death...) and marginal notes; smudged and smeared over the years, the book grew as Mother inserted more and more pages until in the end it became not exactly a diary, but more a chronicle of her life and concerns. The cookbook, and frequent descriptions of cooking/baking from it in the novel provide a sense of connection and rootedness that Beth would otherwise lack for the memory of her mother and even her father. Beth befriends an Indian girl; has no friends in school which she soon drops out of; suffers the pangs of nascent sexual desire with one of the hired men; suffers with an incestuous father who is finally taken away to a mental hospital (for other actions; an unpredictable, violent, verbally abusive man, wounded physically and mentally in WWI); is not sure how to deal with a mother who cannot handle her husband and talks a lot to her deceased mother; and finally finds love and acceptance with another of the hired men, Filthy Billy, who in the end overcomes the power of the evil native spirit that has entrapped him. Underlying all of this are descriptions of the harshness and sheer physical demands of life on the frontier, which is pretty well what this was, despite it being the mid-40s, and the myth and magic of native tales about evil spirits that inhabit bodies and prey on others, including Beth.

The novel weaves together the coming-of-age of Beth in terms of her sexual and personal maturity, with the struggle for survival on the frontier, the small-mindedness of people, the cruelty of children, the intolerance of whites towards natives, and the magic of spirits beyond the ken of most. It all works very well with wonderful descriptions, a fine weave of the various stories, and good writing. A novel worth recommending.