Saltwater Cowboys

Jack McCarthy thought he had it all. A great job in the mines, an adoring wife, three beautiful daughters, and a home he loved. Then the mine went bust and he was forced to leave behind his home in Newfoundland for the unknown plains of Alberta as he followed his best friend Pete to new job and a new life. Despondent and homesick, everything goes sideways, and Jack can do nothing but watch desperately as his entire life crumbles before him.

I don't have much good to say about this novel. It has the makings of a good story. The possibility is there to tell a moving story of what happens when a few wrong turns lead a person down the wrong road. Unfortunately this book failed in almost every way imaginable. I didn't care at all about what show more happened to Jack, Angela, Pete, Wanda, or just about anyone else in this book. There wasn't a single sympathetic one in the lot. Jack was intended to come across as lost and homesick, instead I just found him spineless and weak-willed. His wife Angela, as the moral compass of the novel, alternated between being an obnoxious control freak and an emotional basket case. As for Pete and his wife Wanda, they are two of the most unlikable, selfish people one could hope to meet.

Furthermore, the story itself was confusing. I frequently found myself flipping back through pages trying to find a connection to what I was reading then and what I had just finished reading. Tangents were inserted with no rhyme or reason. Chapter breaks were strangely placed, breaking the story up in odd ways, showing up when least expected and not appearing where there was a natural break or shift in the timeline. The era in which the book was set was unclear. There were times when I thought the book was set during the height of the mining boom, in the mid nineteenth century. Other times it seemed to be set in latter portion of the twentieth century. It wasn't until the epilogue in which it became clear that the majority of the book took place during the 1980s. I just couldn't find any sense of flow or continuity anywhere in the novel.

I really think the whole book could have benefited with a couple rewrites and a good editor. I wish I could say I enjoyed the novel, but in the end it was such a mess I can only give it two stars for the possibility of what it could have been. I can't say that there is a single person to whom I would recommend the book.

I was provided a copy of this galley in exchange for an honest review. show less

So look out boy you're heading for the mainland

Great Big Sea, Nothing Out of Nothing

In 1985, Jack and Angela take their family from The Rock out to northern Alberta to work in the gold mines. Of course, nothing good comes of it because this is a morose melodrama, like a bad CBC tele-movie from the eighties. If one enjoys melodrama, then Saltwater Cowboys is almost a textbook example of it: exaggerated characters, caricatured villains, sensationalist plans for wealth, sex (although off-page), punishment for said sex (a very graphic detailing of a miscarriage in very stark contrast to the complete non-description of the extra-marital coitus almost immediately preceding it), poverty, despair, the pounding of chests and the falling to the show more knees surrounded by shouts of Why God why?

Okay, that last bit is somewhat of an exaggeration. No one bemoans God directly. But had they, I wouldn't have been surprised.

I am not the audience for melodrama. I almost always choose characters over plot, and the characters here exist only as tools of the plot. Plus the plot is nothing special. The writing is too flowery (is there a page that doesn't have either a metaphor or a simile on it? I can't tell). Almost from the get go, the writing has all those tics that annoy me. Let's take an example: we start off by learning Jack has arctic-blue eyes; for some readers, knowledge like that helps them build the character. For me, I'm like Unless the colour of his eyes becomes a significant plot point later on, I do not need to know about it. And I'm not a fan of the point-of-view used here. It's third-person veers in and out of focus, going down into one person's world, then zooming back out to focus in on another. I would have done a tighter, sole-focused narrative, but that's just me. And as I said, I don't think I am the audience for this book.

The acknowledgements section says she did the Humber School for Writer's Program. I did too, and didn't have a helpful experience, and definitely didn't get a novel out of it. I'm glad Dayle Furlong got a book out of it though. That warmed me up to her and made me want her to succeed. But Saltwater Cowboys read like a first draft that needs serious, and difficult, edits. Or it needs to be made into a bad CBC tele-movie staring Paul Gross. It's that type of thing.

Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong went on sale February 28, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

(Fiction, Atlantic Canadian)

I so wanted to love this novel and it was so promising at its beginning:

The inhabitants of a Newfoundland fishing village shut down by the collapse of the Atlantic fishing industry, move nearly en masse to Alberta to work in the oil field. Their families go with them, which is often not the case.

The part of the book set in Newfoundland rang true, as did the beginning of the time in Alberta but once the author had solidified the setting and, to some extent, the personalities, the plot sadly fell apart.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley. This did not affect my review.

3 stars