Lisa’s brother, Jimmy, has gone missing. The fishing boat on which he was serving as a deckhand has sunk and its whereabouts are unknown. The book begins with the family preparing to go look for him, and it weaves its way back and forth from the past to the present as Lisa explores her childhood and teenage memories. The story is set in Kitamaat, not to be confused with Kitimat, and Lisa and her family are Haisla. This book is a rich introduction to Haisla culture, particularly the language and the food, and all of the characters leap off the page. I especially loved Ma-ma-oo and her independence, and the relationship between Lisa’s parents and how they related to their children. This was an excellent book, and I definitely recommend it if you’re looking to try Eden Robinson’s work but don’t want to commit to a trilogy. ( )

A third of the way through Monkey Beach, I felt like I forgot how to read. You know when you get anxious and start to question whether you know how to breathe? It was like that, but cultural.

As of this writing, I know that this is because Eden Robinson’s writing is excellent. She reels us in on the first page with Lisamarie’s description of the interminable waiting for news of her missing brother, Jimmy. The story itself takes place in the present, and she uses digression into the past to stitch together the numerous story lines that brought her home to Kitimat, BC, and put her brother on a fishing boat off the coast. She has this way of talking about both beautiful and horrible things without ever explicitly describing them with words.

I think it is that ability that made me question whether I understood the book. The early part of the novel are stories from Lisa’s childhood, which brought to mind growing up in the 80s with my cousin, whose mom was Tsimshian. Her dad (my uncle), like me, was white. I was told that they couldn’t get married because my aunt would lose her Indian status. That was just the beginning of the ways that my cousin’s and my lives were inherently different. So, as I read, I was simultaneously aware of knowing my cousin, but not knowing her life; getting the words, but not getting the book.

In my frustration, I wanted to reduce it to an excessively expository narrative with a disordered storyline that didn’t always move the plot forward. But I had this feeling that Robinson was being intentional with her style. Why though?

By the end, I was no closer to the answer. I did not know what Eden Robinson meant by this book. I mentioned my frustration to a friend and she pointed to me to this lecture (https://archive.org/details/podcast_big-ideas-audio_nick-mount-on-eden-robinsons_1000339542491) by U of T professor Nick Mount that made me realize that the Monkey Beach may be written in English, but it isn’t English literature. It seems so obvious now, but the story is bound up in the Haisla cultural traditions and the history of Indigenous oppression in Canada. Therefor, it’s analysis must include these perspectives. Mount says:

“[Lisa] is giving us her story out of order and in pieces because that is the state in which her history has been left by the residential school system [. . .] By making the plot difficult to follow, by making the lessons difficult to read, what Robinson is doing is making the reader undergo the same experience that the Native has had to go through of reconstructing the past from fragments.”

And that is how, in 57 minutes, I went from not getting it to partway through Robinson’s book of short stories called Traplines. I recommend them both. 5/5 stars. ( )

Umm, this was a strange one, interesting enough to keep me reading.

Basically, it is a circular story of a Haisla girl coming of age, intertwined with a passing of age.

You'll find in it what I thought well executed youthful angst, rebelliousness, impetuousness, and naïveness, portrayed with imagination bordering on bizarre because life can be perplexingly boring.

Any more than that I'll leave you to ponder in reading the book. ( )

Loved the pace and the timeline shifts. A good example of 'show not tell' and a complex natural and human environment. Very poignant. And not quite resolved in a very satisfying way. I had never heard of it before I picked it off the shelf for it's intriguing cover but I'm not surprised at all that it has been a set text for other reviewers. ( )

Absolutely fabulous book! I struggled a bit with appreciating the ending despite normally feeling good about things being left ambiguous. I guess I was more invested in the characters than I normally am (which speaks to the character development). Would read again in a heartbeat. ( )