Ooh, sounds all deep and Can-Lit dark, doesn’t it? But the story transcends these sound-bite assessments. Picking snippets at random from the first page of a Google search on Monkey Beach yields these comments: “(C)ombines both joy and tragedy in a harrowing yet restrained story of grief and survival…” “(F)illed with intense landscapes…” “(A)ddresses issues related to race, historic oppression, and the clash between cultures in a coming-of-age ghost story…” “(A) story about childhood, family, loss, grief and life on a 21st century Native-Canadian reserve…” This would have been a solid 10, but I docked the half point because the story fell into cliché right near the end, after brilliantly flouting expectations most of the way through. Part of the time (most of the time) the words flow effortlessly and reading them is like riding the crest of a perfect wave occasionally the reader is tumbled out of complacence and, gasping a bit from the shock, needs to go back over what has just been read, to readjust to what’s just been thrown at you.
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