Indian Horse

White society's treatment of the original aboriginal residents of North America constituted variations on two themes: assimilation or annihilation, a process that came close to succeeding. The Christian Church was more than complicit in abetting this process. In their missionary zeal Jesuits brought Christianity to the heathen and with it European disease. In their hubris missionaries failed to understand that a people's theology is tied to their culture and way of life. The dislocation that these priests began was continued by the residential schools. Traditional life was hard and children were allowed to be children and physical punishment was unknown as was mental cruelty. Children forcibly removed from their parents were forbidden their own language and religious practices. Many were physically and sexually abused. Several generations of this system produced a cohort who had lost their traditional heritage, their language, culture, and myths; drank too much; ate unhealthy diets, and suffered from alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes.
The Old Ones, elders, who still remembered the traditional values were spurned by their offspring who shamefully rejected the Old Ways. Children were torn between their grandparents values and their parent's beliefs. Should the dead for example be buried in a traditional manner or be placed in expensive coffins and exposed to the ministrations of priests whose schools exposed them to the diseases that killed them in the first place.

Wagamese makes all this plain in an engaging manner in a story that makes compelling reading. The story is filled with tragedies and heartache, this is no child's fairy tale.

Wildest Dreams

Book nine in Robyn Carr’s Thunderpoint Series. Introduces Ironman Blake Smiley. Not sure how a pro triathlete affords a million-dollar home; those endorsements and sponsorships must be lucrative. Hearing about the training, supplements, diet, and exercise schedule this lad endures makes his life sound more like a science experiment than an actual living person. Elite athletes are anything but amateurs these days.

This being a romance he has to have a love interest. Blake moves in next door to Grace and Troy. We continue to hear about most of the other residents of Thunderpoint. Somehow after 9 books the story ends rather abruptly.

A New Hope

Book 8 in the Thunderpoint Series continues the series as if this is one extended story continuing with the wedding we ended with in book seven. The focus simply shifts to another couple.

What has always made these books worth reading is the fact that the action takes place inside a community in which all the characters are given equal attention. The world they live in isn’t just background, it becomes real  in our minds.

One quibble, the dog on the cover should be a Great Dane like Ham, Sarah’s dog....

One Wish

Book 7 of Robyn Carr’s Thunderpoint series. As the book begins we meet Grace, the florist shop owner introduced to us in The Homecoming but it’s as if we are meeting an entirely new individual, or learning new aspects of her life barely hinted at in the previous book. Troy, the high school teacher with interests in skiing and river rafting, was introduced in Book 6 as well but here the focus has shifted to their relationship. The timeline continues seemlessly taking up where Book 6 left off.

Romance is not my normal genre so there are conventions here that are new to me. One of them seems to be that the happy couple go through perilous trials on the way to marital bliss but that ending always seems to be inevitable. Somehow it doesn’t seem realistic to me that every liaison have a happy ending however....

It is the character development and the sense of place that makes these novels worth the read. These people seem real to us, they are not cut out figures who end up in twisted bedsheets with clothes scattered along the way.

The Homecoming

Robyn Carr’s Series of Romance Novel’s set in Thunderpoint, Oregon near Coos Bay is a better than average set of novels or I wouldn’t be reading them. I’ve visited the area and loved it. Her characters are well developed and continue to appear in succeeding editions. In short these aren’t cut out figures used as a means of writing about bedroom gymnastics. It’s there of course but these people have lives outside the bedroom.

That being said this particular entry is totally predictable, the outcome telegraphed from the opening chapters. Boy next door is best friends with girl next door. Fails to appreciate his true feelings and hurts hers. Years later they reconcile. This isn’t a spoiler, the plot is self-evident from the beginning. What make the book worth the read is the fact that both the lovers in this tale have professional lives and family and friends who interact with them. Thunderpoint is a small town and everyone knows everybody.