Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson’s first novel, was nominated for Canada’s two largest literary prizes: the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. But Lisa has a special recourse – a “gift” that enables her to see and hear spirits, and ask for their help. She reflects on the many rich episodes of their lives – so many of which take place around the water, reminding us of the news she fears, and revealing the menacing power of nature. When they empty fishing nets together, she pretends she doesn’t feel the jellyfish stinging her young hands – she’s Uncle Mick’s “little warrior.” We watch Lisa leave her teenage years behind as she waits for news of her younger brother. Those who have the most influence on her are her stubbornly traditional, machete-wielding grandmother, and her wild, passionate, political Uncle Mick, who teaches her to make moose calls. Her smart mouth and temper constantly threaten to land her in serious trouble.
In and out of the emergency room as a child, Lisa is a fighter. These ghostly presences may strike the reader as mysterious or frightening, but they provide Lisa with guidance through a difficult coming of age. She recalls the time when she and Jimmy saw the sasquatch, or b’gwus – and this sighting introduces the novel's fascinating undercurrent of characters from the spirit world. As his elder sister, Lisa, faces possible disaster, she chain-smokes and drifts into thoughts of their lives so far. Jimmy is a prospective Olympic swimmer, seventeen years old and on the edge of proposing to his beautiful girlfriend Karaoke. It is the morning after the narrator’s brother has gone missing at sea the mood is tense in the family house, as speculations remain unspoken. The story grips the reader from the beginning. In the first English-language novel to be published by a Haisla writer, Eden Robinson offers a rich celebration of life in the Native settlement of Kitamaat, on the coast of British Columbia. Monkey Beach combines both joy and tragedy in a harrowing yet restrained story of grief and survival, and of a family on the edge of heartbreak.
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