The Back of the Turtle

Thomas King's book has 99 short chapters that jump between half a dozen story-lines involving different locations and even time periods. The challenge is determining how all these characters and places fit together. All this by way of saying that the book does not lend itself to casual browsing.

There's a large conglomerate located in downtown Toronto, its president, and his support staff involved in Genetic Manipulation and the tar sands; a west coast reserve; and a ghost reserve where a disaster killed all the residents. Worked into the story are current events such as the duck kills in Northern Alberta and water poisoned by tar sands operations. It's left to the reader to tease out where all these disparate threads are headed.

We have:

1. Sonny who lives in the run down Ocean Star Hotel.
2. Mara the Indian woman who has come back to Samaritan Bay.
3. Nicholas Crisp who frequents Beatrice Hot Springs.
4. Gabriel Quinn the Biological Scientist who walks away from his job in Downtown Toronto to return to his place of birth.
5. His boss Dorian Asher, CEO of Domidion and his female assistant Winter who work in Toronto.
6. And finally the dog who fully qualifies as a character in this story.

And since this is fiction not real life it all resolves to a satisfying happy ending.