Alaska Highway Two-Step by
Caroline Woodward, Polestar
Press Ltd., 176 pp., paper.

HIS BOOK has by far

one of the most ap-

pealing front covers of
the year.

A lone VW van trundies along
the highway, heading into a
backdrop of alluring blue-green
alpine forest.

In the distance, angular snowy
peaks point into an etheric blue
sky. A moose bellows in the
foreground.

The back cover promises ‘an
engaging tale of a woman on the
road to adventure.’ But once in-
side the novel you realize it's just a
mirage hiding a desert of the imag-
ination.

Author Caroline Woodward
begins with an interesting premise:
a slightly eccentric freelance jour-
nalist faxes her perplexing psychic
dreams to The Canadian Bureau of
Premonitions.

The bureau's director, Norman,
collects these dreams full of
swollen rivers and drowning
animals and analyses them
alongside dreams of other con-
tacts, in an attempt to predict nat-
ural (or, in this case, unnatural)
disasters.

DAVE SEYMOUR
MANAGER

Barbara Black
BOOK REVIEW

is it any wonder that the
dreamer-journalist whose visions
help avert disaster is named Mer-
cy?

The opening chapters of this
novel crackle with Woodward's
colloquial, loose narrative style.

At its best, it entertains the
reader and allows instant access to
the character. It is devoid of
pretensions.

At its worst, however, it is rife
with cutesy phrases such as
“Freudian clap-trap notwithstan-
ding” or ‘Last year | ... sent the
Painters into a major twittering
backspin.”’

The superficial tone soon wears
thin. if the flippant narrative were
more deftly handled, allowed
through the cracks some deeper
glimpses of Mercy’s personality, it
might have worked as a novel of

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self-discovery.

As is, it grinds down into banali-
ty and the whole book begins to
read like a shallow person's diary.

Mercy does not really change as
a result of her trip to Alaska. She
merely chatters and natters,
oblivious to what must be the
spectacular surroundings (and she
is supposedly writing a travel arti-
cle...).

Weaving excerpts from Mercy's
late Aunt Ginger’s diary into the

AT OUR COST OR. BELOW -

narrative adds little to the book's
content; Aunt Ginger’s diary en-
tries seem to suffer from the same
one-dimensionality.

Again, the premise here is inter-
esting, but it isn’t developed con-
vincingly. In her diary entries from
the 1930s, Ginger describes her
experiences touring across Canada
with a troupe of young dancers.

She soon realizes that her calling
is ta create original dance works.
She gushes: ‘I want to make

true

dances that would celebrate the
story of this country, Canada, a
new, vigorous, adventurous dance

‘for a country as vast and vigorous

as this!"

In the end, Mercy's visions con-
verge with Ginger’s diary entries in
the Yukon.

The disastrous drama of Mercy's
dreams unfolds before her eyes
and the reader is left wondering. -
what this- lead-up to climax:
was all about.

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