Touch

Starred review from January 31, 2011
Returning home on the eve of his mother's death, an Anglican priest is haunted by memories of his far northern Canada hometown and its intertwined history with his family in Zentner's eerie, elegiac debut. Sitting by his mother's bedside, Stephen recalls his childhood of 30 years earlier, watching the men fell trees and float the logs downriver before the winter freeze. Stephen's father, Pierre, was a logger despite his mangled hand, but after Pierre and Stephen's sister die in an ice skating accident, only stories remain of him, and Stephen later passes these along to his own daughters just as stories of Jeannot, Pierre's father who left Sawgamet when Pierre was an infant, were kept alive as family lore. Soon after Pierre's death, though, Jeannot, a town founder, reappears and insists he has returned to find his wife, though she's been dead for years. The tales he tells Stephen—of golden caribou, malevolent wood spirits, and a winter that lasted so long it buried the town in snow until July—are woven in so seamlessly that the reader never questions their validity. The rugged wilderness is captured exquisitely, as is Stephen's uncommon childhood, and despite a narrative rife with tragedy, Zentner's elegant prose keeps the story buoyant.

March 1, 2011
This survival story streaked with elements of magic realism is set in the Far North in the early twentieth century. Narrated by Stephen, recently returned to his childhood home in Sawgamet, a once-prosperous mining town, it is a multigenerational story set on the eve of Stephens mothers funeral. He details the great tragedy of his youth, when his sister broke through the ice while skating and his father went in after her; for months, their bodies could be seen beneath the ice, their hands reaching toward each other. He also recalls his larger-than-life grandfather, Jeannot, founder of the town, who returned one summer after a long absence to tell his grandson tall tales of a golden caribou, a singing dog, and a fetid monster. Jeannot also told him of the treacherous weather, blinding cold and snow that trapped men for weeks, and of the desperate measures needed to survive. Calling up both the brutal conditionsthe snow almost becomes another character in the storyand the tough men who wrestled with them, Zentner tells a lyrical tale conveying both the beauty and the danger of the wilderness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)