But at night, Maggie-a born worrier-would count the freckles on her father’s weathered arms, listening for the peal of her mother’s laughter in the kitchen, and never stop praying to keep them all safe from harm. Seasons in their tiny rustic home were peppered with wilderness hikes, building shelters from pine boughs and telling stories by the fire with their doting father and beautiful, adventurous mother. In the sun, the leaves flipped and tossed patterns of light on the rough floor of our fort.A gorgeous, poetic literary debut from award-winning author Frances Greenslade, Shelter is a brilliant coming-of-age story of two strong, brave sisters searching for their mother.įor sisters Maggie and Jenny growing up in the Pacific mountains in the early 1970s, life felt nearly perfect. We didn’t need a roof because the leaves of the aspens formed a golden canopy that flapped around us like tiny flags in the breeze. Each time we went there and sat back in the lemony light of the fragrant trees surveying our work, we thought of something new to add. She writes of constructing a tree fort: “We built a platform between three aspens.

Greenslade’s descriptions of the bush reflect a keen appreciation of the moods, both lyrical and ominous, of the forest. The novel picks up Maggie’s story in the late 1960s, when she is 10, her sister Jenny is 13, and the two girls are living with their parents in a very rustic cabin (no indoor plumbing, no electrical amenities) outside a small town in the Chilcotin - a place where the natural world is both beneficent and an unending challenge. Shelter unfolds through the narrative voice of the sensitive Maggie, a self-described born worrier whose penchant for anxiety seems utterly accurate to this born worrier. And recently the Ontario Library Association included it on the 10-book shortlist for its 2012 Evergreen Awards. by Waterstones, Britain’s largest book chain. Published last summer, Shelter has been selected as one of the 11 debut novels of 2011 in the U.K. And it deals with a dolorous but compelling theme: the loss of home, and of a mother.ĭeservedly, the book’s momentum is picking up.

And there’s a whole lot of bush - the desolate vastness of B.C.’s Chilcotin plateau and the rainforest in and around coastal Bella Coola.īut it would be wrong to dismiss Frances Greenslade’s Shelter as yet another novelistic downer about the catatonically bleak wilds of Canada’s hinterland.įor Shelter is a beating heart of a book, alive with Greenslade’s fierce imagination, her acute descriptions of the natural world, her sure hand with narrative.

Shelter by Frances Greenslade