So look out boy you’re heading for the mainland
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 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.