Product Description

Set in seventeenth-century Canada, an evocation of North American origins highlights the men and women who struggled to adapt to the new world even as they clung to the one they left behind. Reprint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #500448 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-26
• Released on: 1995-09-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
'Her prose has a supple, lit-up sensuality that constantly makes the reader stop and read again as in a fine piece of poetry' Marina Warner

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Customer Reviews

Charming and Moving
I can but echo the other favorable reviews already here: this book is one of the most magical and delightful I know of. The society and civilization of Quebec in 1697 are so remote from our own that this story might as well be classified as fantasy, and it makes us entirely absorbed in the life and times of the people in the city. The story is told in the 3rd person and the central character is Cecile Auclair, a girl of 12, who lives with her widowed father, the town pharmacist.

I can well understand why some younger readers do not like it. It does indeed use some "French words," and there is not a lot of "action." Older readers will not mind this.

I was given this book in 1967. It was the senior Religion prize at my Jesuit high school. Readers should be aware that some appreciation for the viewpoints and beliefs of the Catholic Church, as it was in 1700, will help in savoring this book.

A magical excursion into a long lost world
Willa Cather was a lapsed Protestant who wrote two of the greatest novels of the twentieth century dealing with Roman Catholic characters: this novel and the even greater DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. This book is many things at once: a magnificent historical novel, a wonderful depiction of an adolescent growing up, and a wonderful evocation of a world that none of us can visit any longer. I do not know what possessed this midwesterner to write a novel about 17th century Quebec, but I am delighted that she did. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.

Nostalgia for a past way of life
Auclair, Cecile, Mother Juschereau, Pierre Charron, Jacques, Jeanne Le Ber, Comte de Frontenac, Bishop Lacal-- Just to say these names is akin to the satisfaction one experiences crunching a potato chip or savoring a delectable morsel of chocolate. There is a connection here between the written word and one's senses that is rarely found these days and when one does find it one desires to cherish the moment. Reading Cather makes me wistful for the past. I want to see the rock of Quebec. I want to live in a town that is flanked by wilderness where the only connection to "civilized" Europe is by the arrival and departure of massive sailing ships. I also want to believe as the people in the novel believe, in the mystic wonders of a religion that extols the virtues of deceased missionaries and cloistered hermitess'. In short Cather has convinced me to travel-- back in time if I could-- to see what Cecile and Auclair see or even what Cather herself saw that so moved her to write such a beautiful history. I only wish I could read more. Each character she introduces could be the protagonist of their own novel. A wonderful, simple, novel that makes you want to get up off your seat and go!