Hunting Down Home

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

From the enigmatic start of this haunting, atmospheric fiction debut, McNeil envelops readers in a stark and stunningly different world. Seven-year-old Morag knows what grandparents are, but for a long time is unaware that she has parents. Her father is glimpsed once in a passing pickup truck (along with his wife and children); her mother is known only through the projected images of slides sent home from her exotic travels. Abandoned to the care of her maternal grandparents, Morag lives on a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia where farming keeps the family just above the poverty line. Still only in their 40s, Morag's grandparents' lives have been informed by the unforgiving landscape, the scars of lost dreams and ambitions. Morag's grandmother is a bitter woman forever enveloped in a fuggy cloud of cigarette smoke, and Morag gravitates to her hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, fiddle- and accordion-playing grandfather. They share a peculiar affinity and rare moments of affection as he teaches her the rules of hunting and warns her: "never trust anyone." As her grandparents' ever-violent relationship begins to worsen and Morag becomes a pawn in their deadly tug of war, she achieves a painful maturity in the destructive cycle of family breakdown. Canadian-born McNeil, who now lives in London, has a fierce, ironic eye, a tensile prose style alive with startling imagery and an ability to render both domestic chaos and the renewing hope of a Canadian summer with poetic ease. To her credit. she resists the temptation to tidy everything up, leaving Morag's mother as much of a puzzle to the reader as she is to Morag. As Morag tries to sort out the dichotomies of life in a home "where uncertainty was predictable"--the possibility of loving one's tormentor, the terrible beauty of the land, the voluptuous self-pity of men mourning lost opportunities--there emerges an awareness of herself as a conscious being, capable of making choices that readers will applaud. Agents, Jane Bradish-Ellames of Curtis Brown U.K.; Anna Ghosh at Scovil Chichak Galen in New York. Author tour. (June) FYI: In 1997 McNeil won the Prism International Fiction Competition and was nominated for the 1998 Journey Prize for Fiction in Canada. She is the author of two Rough Guides. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Karen Shepard

[O]n the whole, McNeil does a wonderful job reminding us of what a young girl's perceptions are like, what kind of contradictions and heartbreaking simplicities they encompass...And she does a fabulous job of rendering bonds of family as the complex things they are: forever offering both comfort and bondage.
— USA Today

Kirkus Reviews

An able debut from Cape Breton–born, now London-based McNeil detailing the frayed edges of civilization on that battered edge of Nova Scotia, and particularly the way those tatters lash a young girl into growing up before her time. Seven-year-old Morag lives with her grandparents and great-grandmother in a big Cape Breton farmhouse, but no house would be big enough for this bunch. Her hard-drinking grandfather, Sandy, is an accomplished, popular musician when he's able to put his demons to work for him; when he's not, he abuses his wife Christine and manages to run whatever heap he's driving off the road. Morag has never known anything else since her mother Bridget left her when she was a baby to go off to Africa—from where she and her grandparents receive occasional letters and boxes of slides—and since her father doesn't seem to know she exists. She puts up with a lot: taunts about being fatherless from her classmates, and pressures at home that range from Grandpa's increasing preference for her company over Grandma's to her great-grandmother's lording it over them as the owner of the farmhouse. A showdown between Sandy and Christine results in him packing up Morag and taking her "to Mexico"—a euphemism that turns out to mean every member of his family from Ohio to Vancouver. One after another, each boots him out and tells him to take Morag home. Which he finally does. The home situation, however, isn't improved by the fact that great-grandmother sells the house out from under them; the trailer they move into only allows their wounds to fester, until it gives rise to one last confrontation, in which Morag steps in front of a rifle aimed by a drunk, enraged Sandy athis wife. Strong stuff, often adeptly and sensitively handled, but even so the characters are remote, with the mother-in-Africa situation remaining particularly mysterious.