Books & Audiobooks
As we continue to profess our love for all things Canadian, I thought it would be the perfect time to suggest a beautiful new Canadian read. Moon Road by Sarah Leipciger is one of my favourite recent examples of well-crafted Canadian Literature. It offers up so many good things: rich character studies, a road trip across Canada, and a very satisfying unveiling of a mystery from years ago.
Moon Road tells the story of Kathleen and Yannick, one-time spouses but long since divorced; what brings them back together is a possible break in the cold case of their missing daughter, Una. That description may make this sound like a run of the mill mystery; however, it is far from that. In fact, it reads much more as an exploration of who these two characters are and the grave impact that losing their daughter has played on them over the 19 years since they last spoke.
The chapters fluctuate from present day Kathleen and Yannick on their way to British Columbia where Una was last seen, to travelling back two decades in the past and walking in their daughter’s shoes in the days leading up to her disappearance. Sometimes I find with books like this, that take on two different perspectives and time periods, one of the storylines is much more successful. Here, however, I was totally enthralled by both the plot of the parents and the child. Kathleen in particular is an authentically lived-in character, somewhat unlikeable but also completely relatable. The years of uncertainty and grief would most certainly weigh down a person in the ways that they have Kathleen.
Leipciger’s writing is also wonderfully descriptive about what it is like to drive across the country. She gives us road trip snapshots of the giant Canadian goose statue in Wawa, that the prairies stretching out as flat and far as the eye can see, and the CPR trains chugging by as their trip ebbs and flows from province to province. Though the author now lives in London, England, Leipciger was born in Peterborough and spent her teenage years in Toronto. She later moved to Vancouver Island to study Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Victoria, so she clearly knows of the country she writes. For anyone who has visited these disparate parts of Canada you will easily be able to envision the locations and stops that Yannick and Kathleen visit along the way. If you have never made that long haul across our nation, you may now feel like you have. While Moon Road addresses weighty themes such as loss and grief, I found it to be a fascinating read that kept me intrigued until the very end.