Kathrene Sutherland Gedney PinkertonCritiques

This novel of a white family moving to the far north of Ontario to run a trapline is "a book of its time" (1940) but excuses only go so far, and the casual racism is disturbing in the 21st century. The author's attitude towards the Ojibwe people is even-handed insofar as they are portrayed as balanced characters in the story, but in the mouths of her white characters there are frequent disparaging comments: "You don't want to look like a wild Indian", the mother tells 14 year old Anne, trying to trim her hair before they visit the HBC post. A lot of information about What Indians Are Like is proffered by the HBC man, the government representative who arrives to hand out the $5 per person annual treaty payment, and other white "experts"; one has to suppose the author is expressing viewpoints she finds acceptable because nobody contradicts any of it... and I really never figured out why the dad gave up a job with the government and took his family to the wilderness to live a subsistence life on a trapline, or how that was supposed to help forward his ambition to start a fur farm. No surprise that the Ojibwe paterfamilias already trapping fur in the area wasn't best pleased with the situation.½

Great book!

a little slow getting started but she she seems such a warm person that she takes you with her. as with her other book they suddenly stop this thing they seem to love, sell up and? it's hard to find info about her, so..... i wish her daughter would write/had written a memoir.½

i read a thirty minute condensation in reader's digest.

read an excerpt in r'sd 20 best books. will read the whole book. excellent book. sad ending--after all their work, they get restless perhaps because all construction work is done, and decide to leave. i don't think they ever came back.