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WORK TITLE: Pearly Everlasting
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COUNTRY: Canada
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PERSONAL
Born March 26, 1974, in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada; married.
EDUCATION:University of British Columbia, M.F.A. (creative writing); University of New Brunswick, Ph.D. (literature and critical animal studies).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer of fiction and poetry.
AWARDS:Fulbright Scholar.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories and poetry to literary journals, including Canadian Geographic, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Prairie Fire, and the New England Review.
SIDELIGHTS
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Tammy Lynn Armstrong is a Canadian writer of novels and poetry. A Fulbright Scholar, she was educated at the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick, studying creative writing and critical animal studies. Her first poetry collection, Bogman’s Music, published in 2002, was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General’s Award.
In 2024 Armstrong published her U.S. debut novel, Pearly Everlasting, set in a remote lumber community in Depression era New Brunswick. When Pearly Everlasting Hazen was born in 1920, her father, the cook at a lumber camp, found an abandoned baby black bear and brought it home. Pearly’s mother adopted the bear, named Bruno, as her son and nursed both Pearly and Bruno at her breast. Pearly and Bruno grew up together as brother and sister, so when Pearly was 15 and the camp got a cruel new supervisor, Heeley Swicker, who overworked the men and abused Bruno, Pearly got angry. When Swicker was found dead with his face mauled, Bruno was blamed, and Swicker’s nephew sold Bruno to an animal trader.
As Pearly searched for Bruno, she found herself outside the lumber camp for the first time in her life. When she rescues him, the two face more trials trying to return home. “The adventure brims with folklore and superstition, as Pearly musters the courage to overcome her fears, and there are many lighthearted moments,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Commenting that Armstrong paints a vivid picture of life in a lumber camp, Joanna M. Burkhardt in Library Journal called the book: “A charming and highly recommended story about family ties, the embrace of the natural world, and love.” Writing in BookPage, Carolyn Cates explained: “Told in a lyrical voice…, Pearly Everlasting is at times hauntingly beautiful, at times sad, yet also laugh-out-loud funny in other moments. There’s a dose of fairy-tale magic in the woodland setting.”
Armstrong told Christine Palka at University of British Columbia School of Creative Writing that the story was inspired by a real-life event. In the late 18th century, nature photographer William Lyman Underwood photographed a woman nursing an orphaned bear cub along with her newborn daughter. Also, Armstrong’s own grandfather worked in the lumber camps during the Depression. She said: “I like to think Pearly Everlasting offers space for other ways of being in the world… I wanted to apply some pressure on how rigid we can be with how we believe the world is ordered. Bruno helps show this.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, October 2024, Carolyn Cates, review of Pearly Everlasting, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2024, review of Pearly Everlasting.
Library Journal, September 2024, Joanna Burkhardt, review of Pearly Everlasting, p. 76.
Publishers Weekly, August 5, 2024, review of Pearly Everlasting, p. 38.
ONLINE
UBC School of Creative Writing, (June 27, 2024), Christine Palka, “Alum ’00 Tammy Armstrong Discusses Latest Novel Pearly Everlasting.”
Author spotlight: Tammy Armstrong
Author Spotlights
Tammy Armstrong is the author of two novels and five poetry collections. Her debut collection, Bogman’s Music (Anvil, 2001), was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent book is a poetry collection titled Year of the Metal Rabbit, which was published by Gaspereau Press last fall. In what follows, Armstrong discusses her writing practice, what she loves about living in southwestern Nova Scotia, new books she’s looking forward to, and more.
How long have you been writing? What drew you to writing in general, and poetry in particular?
I suppose, like many writers, I’ve been writing in some way since I was young. Before I started school, I’d sit on the kitchen counter while my mother cooked and she’d say, “Tell me a story or make up a song,” and so I would. I never had a sense of being “drawn” to writing until I submitted a manuscript to UBC’s Creative Writing Department. I was an undergrad and wanted to switch out of the English department, but was unsure where to go. Before that, writing was just something I did, and I didn’t see it as anything beyond that. I didn’t have aspirations to publish books; that wasn’t something that I felt to be in my reach until I was in my mid-20s.
I probably have suspicions about language that brought me to writing, slant-wise, as well. I had to go through the ITA program in grades one and two. ITA was a ludicrous, 1960s literacy project based on synthetic phonics and short hand, with a symbolic alphabet of 43-45 characters—none of which accounted for regional accents. On the page, it looked like Chaucer, the Jabberwocky, and the Cat in the Hat got together over drinks and co-wrote a book for children. Parents couldn’t read it and were therefore shut out of their kid’s first years’ of literacy. I could already read and write when I started school, but I was reprimanded for spelling even my name in conventional English or reading books written in conventional English. In this way, English became subversive to me. I learned that writing exercises my mother made me do at home, were not the exercises I did at school. It was all very Cold War. In grade three, we were told to forget ITA and learn how words were really spelled. You can see how there’s now a generation out there with terrible spelling skills. I came away from that project with a distrust for rigid systems, but also with a better understanding that there is no one-way to approach language. It has shape-shifting qualities.
Having said all that, I came to poetry through music as well. I wasn’t exposed to much poetry when I was younger, but I had access to a lot of records and so songwriters, to some degree, have influenced how I think about language and form. I’m thinking of writers like Gordon Lightfoot, Bobbie Gentry, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt. Each of them, in their own way, manage to endow marginal characters, edge lands, and difficult experiences, with a sense of grace that other, lesser writers might overlook or dismiss. I also grew up in the 90s and there were many, many wonderful songwriters recording then, as well.
How do you know when a poem is done?
Finished is always a feeling, isn’t it? I never know, really, but I have a sense when the snags are sanded down, when nothing jumps out of the frame. If a line or a word bothers me each time I read a piece, if a stanza is balancing badly on three legs, then I know I’ve got to go back and fix it. When I feel that everything is resting or moving as it should, where it should, then I’m ready to move away from it.
While I wrote the collection over six-seven years, I wanted to compress many of those experiences into a seasonal/annual wheel. Over those years, I lived in four cities in two countries, I travelled to another six countries, and saw firsthand austerity riots in Athens, mega forest fires in New Mexico, and Colorado’s flash floods, which tore through our little town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains—with devastating results. I saw the yards of old boats that African migrants risked their lives in to reach Sicily. And my husband and I drove from Colorado to Nova Scotia five times in two years. All the people I met and all that I saw in those years made my sense of the world strange. It made everything feel displaced and misplaced.
While all of this shifting was happening, I was also finishing up my doctoral dissertation, which explored how animals disrupt poetry with their presence. So, I suppose the “metal rabbit” is that juxtaposition between all things outside the animal (in my case a lot of cars, and planes, and urban living) and all things which give space to the animal (in my case the sea birds and seals now, and the mountain cats, bears, rattlesnakes, mule deer, coyotes, and rabbits I shared my yard with in Colorado). This is why there’s so much shape-shifting in the collection, I think. When you pass by things quickly, or see them through glass, they can trick your eye. They can become something they’re not.
What do you do when you have writer’s block?
Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” And I adopt that sort of gentle handling, when it comes to how I think about writing. I come to the page every day, but some days might be puttering or reading or taking notes, and that’s okay. I’m not a fast writer, so I don’t have daily word count expectations or unachievable goals. With things the way they are right now, I feel inadequate with words. So I’ve been spending time reading Anna Akhmatova and letters written during the Spanish Flu, though I have to keep reminding myself that I am reading from the other side of that pandemic and the letters are from the centre; there was no ending for the writers yet, there was only being inside of it.
I also love how various art forms speak to each other. Lately, I’ve been really interested in visual artists, such as Andrew Wyeth, Andrea Kowch, Linden Frederick, and the Russian architect Alexander Nerovnya. All their work orbits around houses, in a sense. I think seeing how others translate the world in other mediums is both a humbling and inspiring way to spend an afternoon.
Do you have any writing rituals?
More habit than ritual, I suppose, but I like to take the first hour every morning to read some poetry or some fiction, especially something that challenges my own preconceptions of writing. I always have a hot cup of Yorkshire tea beside me when I work. And I always write under a quilt that a friend made for me some years ago. I write in an armchair by my window so I can spy on the bird drama that unfolds daily from the English Walnuts outside. When I’m editing, I like to use these really nice metallic gel pens that I bought in Latvia a few years ago. I haven’t been able to find them anywhere since, so I suspect I’ll miss them when they’re gone. I wish my dog would come hang out in my office with me, but he’s afraid of stairs and refuses to make the trip up to my room. That’s a German Shepherd for you.
What’s the biggest misconception about being a writer?
I’m not sure . . . maybe the misconception is how much work goes into writing a book, how much of yourself you have to put into it, for years. I read a while ago an analogy to this (can’t remember where), that said something like, can you imagine an architect building a beautiful home and then having to put it on a flatbed truck and move it around, asking if anyone wants to buy it? Writers work on projects for years with very few assurances that they’ll ever see publication. I think all the foolishness with social media tends to skip the hard work because everyone just wants to see the result. Here’s a photo of me after all the hard work’s been done. But we also learn from mistakes and disappointments, and these are, sometimes, the most vital means of achieving a goal, or realizing that we were reaching for the wrong goal. When I look around at all my bookshelves, I see them in terms of years and years of very hard work, so I quietly celebrate and appreciate them in that way.
What’s great about writing in your part of Nova Scotia?
It’s very quiet and kind here. I live in a village where my husband and I may be the only full-time residents not connected, in some way, with lobster fishing. My neighbours not only welcomed us here—no familiar ties, just a couple of vagabonds from away—they’ve also taught me a lot about the landscape, as well as the wildlife. I’m much better with my shorebirds now and my neighbours know, if they see me, I’ll have questions for them about something or other. I’m privileged to be able to live in a rural area by the water, with so many beautiful beaches nearby, and I say a little thank you every day for being able to wake up here and spend my days writing. I’ve always felt that I write from the edges of the country anyway, so I’m happy here, where I can watch the tides and weather change. It’s also the second longest address I’ve ever had.
Are there any books coming out this year that you’re excited about?
I’m looking forward to reading quite a few books, when our world find its balance again. In fiction: Edward Carey’s The Swallowed Man; Anne Louise Avery’s retelling of Reynard the Fox; and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. In non-fiction: Cassie Chambers’ Hill Women; and Lives of Houses, edited by Hermione Lee and Kate Kennedy. And in poetry: Molly Spencer’s If the House; Bruce Snider’s Fruit; Peter Gizzi’s Sky Burial; Linda McKenna’s In the Museum of Misremembered Things; and Sinéad Morrissey’s Found Architecture. . . . seems to be a bit of a theme here . . .
What’s next for you?
I’ve been working on a novel for a few years now that takes place in New Brunswick lumber camps in the 1920s. I’m also working on a new poetry collection.
Alum ’00 Tammy Armstrong discusses latest novel Pearly Everlasting
June 27, 2024
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Interviewed by Christine Palka, Creative Writing
Tammy Armstrong’s latest novel Pearly Everlasting is now available in Canada and will release in the US on October 7. Pearly Everlasting is based on Armstrong’s manuscript “Ursula” that won the HarperCollinsPublishersLtd/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction in 2022. In a narrative sown with rural folklore and superstition, Pearly Everlasting is an enchanting woodland Gothic about the triumph of good over evil and the forgotten beauty of the natural world.
Armstrong is the author of five books of critically acclaimed and award-winning poetry and two novels published in Canada. She is a graduate of the UBC School of Creative Writing’s Master of Fine Arts program and holds a PhD from the University New Brunswick. Her first poetry collection, Bogman’s Music, written during her MFA at UBC was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
We spoke with Armstrong about her experience working alongside HarperCollins and CookeMcDermid Literary Management to prepare her novel for publication.
Could you tell us a little about your book and what inspired you to write it?
Pearly Everlasting follows Pearly and her “brother,” Bruno—a runty black bear—who are raised together in a Depression-era lumber camp in New Brunswick. Not long after their sixteenth birthdays, a camp boss, set on exploiting the woodsmen, despite the dangers inherent in that sort of hard labour, sells Bruno to a travelling animal act. Pearly, who has never been outside the camps, treks through fifty miles of winter woods to rescue Bruno. It’s a story about greed and poverty. It’s a story about love and kinship and resilience.
Initially, my inspiration came from an article my mother gave me, shortly after I’d finished my PhD: an excerpt from the nature photographer William Lyman Underwood’s memoir, Wild Brother. The memoir recalls meeting a woman in a Maine lumber camp in the late 18th century nursing an orphaned black bear cub along with her newborn daughter. What an image! Underwood goes on to describe his years’ long friendship with Bruno, the bear, after he was placed in a New England animal sanctuary.
I grew up in rural New Brunswick. Some of my relatives, including my grandfather, worked in the lumber camps as teamsters and blacksmiths during the Depression on into the 1950s. When I was a kid, sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen, these guys would tell tall stories about those years—sometimes making it a bit of a competition to see who could come up with the wildest tales. The bear-baby siblings, my love of animals, my familiarity with Maine, New Brunswick, and lumber camps were the first few threads that sparked the book to life.
Could you share how your studies from your doctorate degree in Literature and Critical Animal Studies from the University of New Brunswick influenced your writing of Pearly Everlasting?
My dissertation looked to how animals disrupt our sense of self, our superiority, our place in the world, and what it means to have ineffable experiences with more-than-human creatures. I explored these questions through literature. Literature, in particularly poetry, is an ideal genre for this sort of analysis because language, while malleable, can be inadequate for describing experience. Anyone who’s had an animal encounter—a moose steps out in front of your car, a rattlesnake on a trail, a monkey at a temple— has discovered there are ruptures between us and them. Life also lies outside language. This sort of thinking influenced Pearly Everlasting. I leaned on my poetry background, weaving some magical elements throughout the novel, as a way to get around some of that ineffability and give Pearly and Bruno’s bond dimension and complexity.
I like to think Pearly Everlasting offers space for other ways of being in the world—as a bear, as a person who’s bonded to a bear, as a young girl isolated in the backwoods of New Brunswick. I wanted to apply some pressure on how rigid we can be with how we believe the world is ordered. Bruno helps show this. He’s not a pet. He’s an autonomous creature with his own perceptions and understanding of place. Anyone with a pet will tell you they understand the animal and the animal understands them, because animals are complex and emotional, just like people. It was these sorts of experiences that I wanted to explore with Pearly Everlasting and Bruno: that inexplicable bond between two creatures with and without a shared language.
Could you share with us a few details on your experience working with the publisher?
Working with the HarperCollins team has been a wonderful experience. I’ve really enjoyed my time with Janice Zawerbny, my editor. I love working with editors because they are such wonderful readers, often seeing what you’re trying to do before you do. It’s a real skill to be able to anticipate how a finished manuscript might look just by reading an earlier draft. Janice and Emily Griffin, my editor at HarperCollins US, have really worked hard to bring Pearly Everlasting to a wider audience and their support is much appreciated. The attention the copyeditors and proofreaders gave to the manuscript was also so professional and careful. There is so much quiet work done behind the scenes in publishing, small or large. That sort of care makes a writer feel very supported.
How have you benefited from literary representation and what are some of its advantages?
I feel very fortunate to have literary representation. Rachel Letofsky, my agent at CookeMcDermid, is so supportive of my work and really champions diversity in Canadian literature. Having her on my team means I can focus on writing and editing while she takes care of the behind-the-curtain business that is the lion’s share of publishing. At the best of times, I find the business side of publishing a bit nebulous, having Rachel explain contracts, advances, territorial rights and so forth is a real advantage. I also really appreciate that she helps cultivate relationships between me, editors, and publishing teams. Because she’s a middle party, she can also ask questions on my behalf, negotiate on my behalf, and she’s also a wonderful editor who can see what I’m trying to do and offer suggestions on how I might get there.
Do you have a special memory or favourite aspect from the process of taking your book from submission to release?
One of my favourite elements of writing is process. After I’d worked through a few drafts and had some conversations with Janice, I could see a few surprising possibilities in the story that hadn’t been clear before. Playing with those threads really opened up the book. These discoveries take time.
Do you have any advice for students or alumni seeking to have their first novel published?
E.L. Doctorow maybe said it best: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Probably the best way to navigate writing a novel is with patience, kindness towards yourself, and trust in the project. Giving yourself permission to just play through your first draft is such a wonderful feeling. Be open to the magic and surprises.
A novel takes time to write. It takes time to meet and learn about your characters. It takes time to map and remap and remap the story, finding links and new paths as you go. There’s a lot of scaffolding and that’s a good thing. Ask yourself questions. Ask questions of your characters. Listen to their answers; they may surprise you. Give your project room to breathe. When you finish a draft, let it sit for a bit before returning to reread it. When you do, read it as you would any other book, with a critical eye. I’d also recommend reading and practicing writing synopses because you will be asked for them.
Do you have any upcoming publications, projects or happenings that you’d like us to know about?
I’ve recently finished a poetry collection and a short story collection. I’m currently finishing up a new novel. So hopefully these will find homes sometime soon.
Tammy Armstrong is the author of two novels and five collections of poetry. Her first book was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Canadian Geographic, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Prairie Fire, and the New England Review, among others. Pearly Everlasting is her US debut novel. A former Fulbright Scholar, Armstrong holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in literature and critical animal studies from the University of New Brunswick. She lives in a lobster fishing village on the south shore of Nova Scotia.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tammy Lynn Armstrong (born March 26, 1974) is a Canadian poet and novelist.[1] She is most noted for her 2002 collection Bogman's Music, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2002 Governor General's Awards.[2]
Originally from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Armstrong was educated at the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick.[1]
Career
Armstrong has published the poetry collections Unravel (2004), Take Us Quietly (2006) and The Scare in the Crow (2010),[1][3][4] and the novels Translations: Aístreann (2002) and Pye-Dogs (2008).[5][6]
In 2017, Armstrong's Hermit God Spot made the longlist for the CBC Poetry Prize.[7]
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (January 2025)
Novel
Translations: Aístreann (2002)
Pye-Dogs (2008)
Short story collections
Bogman's Music (2002)
Unravel (2004)
Take Us Quietly (2006)
The Scare in the Crow (2010)
Pearly Everlasting (2024)
Pearly Everlasting
Tammy Armstrong. Harper, $28.99 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-06-339614-2
A spirited teenage girl sets off through the woods of 1934 New Brunswick, Canada, to rescue the bear she considers her brother in this enchanting U.S. debut from Canadian poet Armstrong (Take Us Quietly). Pearly Everlasting Hazen has been raised since birth by her father, a cook for a lumber camp, alongside an orphaned bear cub named Bruno. Growing up, Pearly listens to her father's tales of a mythical, devil-like creature named Old Jack, whom he believes Pearly will one day meet face-to-face. Life passes smoothly for Pearly and Bruno until she's 15, when a new camp boss arrives and begins working the men at a breakneck pace. When the boss is found dead with his face gouged, suspicion falls on Bruno, and the boss's nephew sells the bear to an animal trader. Terrified for Bruno's welfare, Pearly treks through the icy Canadian wilderness to rescue him. After she reclaims Bruno from the trader, the pair meet a series of challenges as they attempt to return home. Along the way, Pearly worries they'll meet Old Jack. The adventure brims with folklore and superstition, as Pearly musters the courage to overcome her fears, and there are many lighthearted moments, such as when Pearly convinces Bruno to climb into the backseat of a car. This gentle story is sure to win Armstrong fans. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Pearly Everlasting." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 30, 5 Aug. 2024, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804959331/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e4c2dc4c. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Armstrong, Tammy. Pearly Everlasting. Harper. Oct. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9780063396142. $28.99. F
Pearly Everlasting is born in 1920 in a Canadian lumber camp where her father is the camp cook. At the same time, her father finds an abandoned bear cub they name Bruno. Pearly's mother breastfeeds both infants and treats them like siblings. The sensation this causes brings a historian who is collecting backwoods ballads and folk tales. She interviews Pearly's mother on several occasions, taking pictures that later appear in magazines and on the lecture circuit. All is not well in the camp, and when the overseer, a mean-spirited man disliked by most of the workers, is killed, his nephew is quick to blame Bruno, stealing the bear and selling him. Pearly sets off on her only trip "outside" to find Bruno and bring him home. She meets with a world of trouble but finds kind souls who help her rescue her brother. Poet and novelist Armstrong (Pye-Dogs) paints a vivid picture of the rough life in lumber camps of the time, deftly capturing the nature of life in the forest and the love of a girl for her family. VERDICT A charming and highly recommended story about family ties, the embrace of the natural world, and love.--Joanna M. Burkhardt
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Burkhardt, Joanna M. "Armstrong, Tammy. Pearly Everlasting." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 9, Sept. 2024, p. 76. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808228706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a51a7b4. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
By Tammy Armstrong
HISTORICAL FICTION
In 1903, a wildlife photographer ventured into a remote Maine lumber camp to capture the image of a woman nursing an orphaned bear cub alongside her newborn daughter. This true story inspired Tammy Armstrong's debut novel, Pearly Everlasting (Harper, $28.99, 9780063396142), which imagines the life of that girl and that bear, suckled at the same breast and raised as brother and sister in a cabin set deep in the pines.
Pearly Everlasting's mother is a healer, and her father is a cook in a logging camp in the woods of New Brunswick. Her father finds an orphaned bear cub during "false spring," brings it home, and raises "Bruno" as the newborn Pearly's brother. It's hard to say whether Pearly is part bear, or Bruno is part human; either way, they share a powerful connection. Girl and bear ramble through the forest on endless adventures. But when the camp gets a cruel new supervisor, Heeley Swicker, their innocent life is forced to change. Swicker turns up dead, and Bruno is blamed and sold by Swicker's nephew to animal traders. Enlisting the help of her friends Songcatcher and Ebony, Pearly sets out on a quest to the "Outside" to rescue him. Afterwards, she and Bruno must find their way homeward alone through ice and snow, meeting good people, bad people and one cranky and dangerous wild bear along the way.
Told in a lyrical voice (it's no surprise to learn that Armstrong is a poet), Pearly Everlasting is at times hauntingly beautiful, at times sad, yet also laugh-out-loud funny in other moments. There's a dose of fairy-tale magic in the woodland setting: Old Jack, a spirit from the loggers' stories, is always lurking in the shadows and threatening Pearly's world.
This tender tale of hope and the redeeming nature of human kindness is also about coming home, literally and figuratively. At the end of her journey, Pearly remembers all of those who helped her along her way, and writes to them: "I tell them how the trees have grown so big up here on Greenlaw Mountain the spring light lives inside their boughs and rarely comes out to warm our yard. But by summer, the light climbs down and spills itself wide--a carpet Bruno naps in longer each day. This is how we take our days. This is how we make them stay."
--Carolyn Cates
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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Cates, Carolyn. "Pearly Everlasting." BookPage, Oct. 2024, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809058496/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=095cddd8. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Armstrong, Tammy PEARLY EVERLASTING Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $28.99 10, 8 ISBN: 9780063396142
Well-wrought touches of the fantastic enhance this tale of a girl growing up in a Canadian logging camp a century ago.
About the time that Pearly Everlasting Hazen--named for a wildflower--is born in a remote logging camp in New Brunswick in 1920, her father, the camp cook, finds a tiny, orphaned bear cub in an ice-rimmed burrow. He brings the creature home, and his wife nurses her infant daughter and the cub together. As far as Pearly Everlasting and her family are concerned, Bruno is her brother, even as he grows big enough to unsettle strangers. The logging camps where the Hazens live are harsh places; if the work doesn't kill someone, the weather might. Pearly Everlasting's mother, Eula, is a healer who tends workers' broken bones and other wounds, while her husband, Edon, keeps everyone fed. Pearly Everlasting and Bruno--and human older sister Ivy--grow up in this nurturing nest, attuned to the natural world and pretty much blissfully unaware of what's beyond. Their only outside contact is a woman they call Song-catcher, an ethnologist who, with her companion, Ebony, travels around with cumbersome recording equipment to document folk music and tales by people like Eula. The eventual snake in this childhood paradise is a new camp boss, a bully named Swicker, who arrives with a couple of minions and soon has Bruno in his sights. An attempt to bear-nap Bruno and sell him to an animal trader is foiled with the help of Song-catcher and Ebony, but later girl and bear, teenagers by now, stumble upon a murdered body, and Bruno is blamed and confiscated. Pearly Everlasting's harrowing quest to get him back, on foot through the winter woods and then in a town that's a complete mystery to her, is paralleled by the search for the pair by a young man named Ansell, a worker at the camp whose face is strangely webbed with silver scars, the result of a lightning strike. Armstrong, who has published five books of poetry and two previous novels, tells their tale in lyrically striking prose and makes its fairy tale elements work by grounding them in the grim realities and stunning beauties of life in a Depression-era logging camp.
A campfire story about a girl whose brother is a bear becomes a warmly enchanting novel.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Armstrong, Tammy: PEARLY EVERLASTING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883521/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8db550ad. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.