All the quiet places

All the quiet places

Brian Thomas Isaac

Book - 2021

"It's 1956, and six-year-old Eddie Toma lives with his mother, Grace, and his little brother, Lewis, near the Salmon River on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in the British Columbia Southern Interior. Grace, her friend Isabel, Isabel's husband Ray, and his nephew Gregory cross the border to work as summer farm labourers in Washington state. There Eddie is free to spend long days with Gregory exploring the farm: climbing a hill to watch the sunset and listening to the wind in the grass. The boys learn from Ray's funny and dark stories. But when tragedy strikes, Eddie returns home grief-stricken, confused, and lonely. Eddie's life is governed by the decisions of the adults around him. Grace is determined t...o have him learn the ways of the white world by sending him to school in the small community of Falkland. On Eddie's first day of school, as he crosses the reserve boundary at the Salmon River bridge, he leaves behind his world. Grace challenges the Indian Agent and writes futile letters to Ottawa to protest the sparse resources in their community. His father returns to the family after years away only to bring chaos and instability. Isabel and Ray join them in an overcrowded house. Only in his grandmother's company does he find solace and true companionship. In his teens, Eddie's future seems more secure--he finds a job, and his long-time crush on his white neighbour Eva is finally reciprocated. But every time things look up, circumstances beyond his control crash down around him. The cumulative effects of guilt, grief, and despair threaten everything Eddie has ever known or loved. All the Quiet Places is the story of what can happen when every adult in a person's life has been affected by colonialism; it tells of the acute separation from culture that can occur even at home in a loved familiar landscape. Its narrative power relies on the unguarded, unsentimental witness provided by Eddie."--

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Subjects
Okanagan Indians > Fiction.
Families > Fiction.
Day laborers > Fiction.
Off-reservation boarding schools > Canada > Fiction.
Imperialism > Fiction.
Okanagan Valley (B.C. : Region) > Fiction.
Bildungsromans.
Domestic fiction.
Fiction.
Genres
Bildungsromans
Domestic fiction
Fiction
Published
[Victoria, BC] : Brindle & Glass, an imprint of TouchWood Editions [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Brian Thomas Isaac (author)
Physical Description
277 pages : map ; 22 cm
Issued also in electronic format
ISBN
9781990071027
Contents unavailable.

1964 Just as the logging truck rounded the bend, Eddie and Lewis took off running. They made it all the way across and up the bank to the fence before the truck even made it onto the bridge. The driver gave a blast of his air horn and the support timbers creaked when he crossed the bridge. The logs sticking out the back of the load wobbled like spaghetti. They lingered to watch the cars go by. Eddie always found it hard to find anything fun to do after school. Plenty of jobs waited for him but nothing to hurry home for. He laughed when Lewis made faces at a staring woman. A Volkswagen bus filled with laughing girls and boys looked like they were having fun as they went speeding by. The brothers stepped through a stretched square of page-wire and walked down the trail. When they topped the hill above Grandma's, Eddie was the first one to spot the car parked at the door. Lewis ran on ahead but stopped at the door to wait. Eddie tried to remember if he'd ever seen the car before. It looked like the one he had seen in a Yakima street when his mother had punched the driver. Years ago--but the car still looked new with its shining paint and gleaming chrome. They walked in to see a man sitting at the kitchen table. He had long sideburns and greased hair that drooped down over his forehead in an Elvis-style waterfall Eddie had seen in a magazine. The man stood and jammed his hands into his pockets. His white shirt with upturned collar was unbuttoned down below his chest and tucked into blue jeans, and each of his brown shoes had a coin tucked into a strip of leather across the instep. Grace came out of her bedroom. "It's about time, you guys. I told you before to get right back here as soon as you get off that bus." She rubbed the back of her left hand with her fingers and nodded to the man beside her. "Anyway, this is your dad. This is Jimmy." Eddie wasn't sure he heard correctly. "What?" "I said, this is your dad."   --from All the Quiet Places Excerpted from All the Quiet Places: A Novel by Brian Thomas Isaac All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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