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Having taught elementary and high school students of the Tahltan and Nuu-Chah-nulth First Nations, Jennifer Manuel has fashioned a debut novel about a woman who has lived for forty years on the periphery of a First Nations community as a nurse in a medical outpost, thereby gaining intimate knowledge of local secrets. Weeks from retirement, Bernadette hears the news over VHF radio that Chase Charlie, the young man she has loved like a son, has gone missing. Without any immediate family of her own in a world "too small for secrets," she must come to terms with her middle ground in The Heaviness of Things that Float (D&M $22.95).
The Heaviness of Things that Float won the 2017 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Manuel has also published two middle-grade sports novels: Dressed to Play (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2020) and Head to Head (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2021), which was nominated for The Red Cedar Awards in 2021. Her young adult novel, Open Secrets (Lorimer SideStreets, 2021), addresses grooming in the music industry.
In the 1990s, Manuel, a non-Aboriginal woman, worked for the Ktunaxa Treaty Council in eastern British Columbia, during which time she chaired a national committee on Aboriginal archives, advocating alongside Ktunaxa, Cree, and Mi'kMaq groups for the repatriation of all archival photographs depicting sacred First Nations' activities. She then worked for three years alongside non-profit Aboriginal groups in Vancouver's Eastside to develop and deliver education to vulnerable adults, later expanding this work to include the Native Women's Association of Canada.
Manuel's activities in Vancouver led her to work as a teacher of Aboriginal children in Kyuquot, a small boat-in-only community on on the northwest corner of Vancouver Island where she was adopted by the John family. The elder Kelly John gave her the name aa ap wa iick which means, "Always speaks wisely." Manuel has since done graduate work in Aboriginal education. Much of her fiction examines the relationship between Aboriginal students and a non-Aboriginal teacher. A mother of three, she is the daughter of Lynn Manuel (1948-2010), who published books for children.
In The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted (D&M, 2023), a new teacher, Molleigh Royston moves to Tawakin—a remote Nuu-chah-nulth community in the Pacific Northwest—bringing good intentions. However, as she struggles to understand and help her students, doubts begin to accumulate—including doubts about her own motivations. Things escalate when three students start behaving strangely and Molleigh makes a serious cultural transgression, triggering a series of disturbing events in the village. Giant boulders are placed in front of Molleigh’s house, furniture moves mysteriously and flowers erupt in flame. This story about the complexity of hope and the limits of good intent, offers a grave look at how the education system fails remote Indigenous communities, leaving Indigenous students, with all their brilliance and resilience, in the hands of transient educators.
***
The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted by Jennifer Manuel (D&M $24.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2023)
In her previous novel, The Heaviness of Things That Float (D&M, 2016), Jennifer Manuel set her work in the fictional, isolated community of Tawakin on Vancouver Island’s northwest coast, an awkward distance by sea or air from Port Hardy. Those familiar with her acclaimed first work will recognize some of the characters and the same rugged land- and seascapes in this new book, The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted, set chronologically a little earlier.
Once again, there’s a mystery involved and Manuel’s observant eye evokes details drawn from her own time as a schoolteacher working among the Nuu-chah-nulth. Indigenous customs, anecdotes and myth are depicted with nuanced regard for the protocols of sharing First Nations imagery from life along the coast. We’ve got a storyteller in control of her materials.
Foregrounding all this is Tawakin’s Indigenous differentness. Entering into the story is the novel’s 39-year-old schoolteacher protagonist from suburban Vancouver, Molleigh Royston. From the inclusion of Nuu-chah-nulth language phrasings that one receives during childhood, to the intimidating darkness of the omnipresent forest surrounding her, life as a teacher among the hundred souls of this fishing village, Molleigh intuits, also obliges being a learner.
In post-colonial times, any work by a non-Indigenous author addressing or portraying First Nations peoples and their cultures is bound to receive a critical eye. Yet, if we look beyond knee-jerk dissonance to a deeper understanding of BC’s colonial legacy and its manifold hurts, we’re likely to find messages of significance in this quintessentially West Coast story. There will be pain, yes, often the legacy of a grim colonial history; yet readers can expect authentic portraits of real communal joy as well, especially among the women and elders of Tawakin, and of an everyday resilience in the face of marginal economic circumstances.
Molleigh has been there just over a month. She has seen a seven-year marriage collapse and her prior artistic career fail to ignite. Her possessions are a scattering of cardboard boxes. Teaching, she admits, was “a late career choice.” In Indigenous communities like Tawakin, she realizes, it means “being on call twenty-four hours a day.” Chase Charlie, a roustabout character from Manuel’s earlier novel, expresses it from his point of view, “Teachers always leave, will you stay?”
Borrowing from her earlier novel, Manuel categorizes outsiders who work on the Reserve as either “Users, Runners, or Saviours”—some already leap-frogging into better positions elsewhere; others wanting to escape their old life; some that yearn to feel good about “saving” First Nations people. Molleigh briefly considers whether she might be a little of all three. Beset by doubts in an unfamiliar environment rich in secrets, her test is to imagine what actually belonging to a place like Tawakin could involve. Teaching there means “trying to figure how to out-teach the broken lines, the frowns, the fears.” Unaccountably, she’s also nervous about the forest surrounding her. She imagines returning to the city.
Challenges begin when Molleigh is faced with a menacing, possibly neurodivergent student, Hannah, whose pit-bull mother fends off any attempt at a medical evaluation. It’s an uneasy stalemate. For relief, Molleigh sketches portraits of her students that she hopes might inspire them someday to ideas beyond a life of fishing and logging.
Meanwhile, Mr. Chapman, the school principal and another newcomer, thinks that he brings hope. He jokes with students and believes people become the stories they hear. Experienced in Northern BC education, Chapman has a proprietary air with a biblically cadenced speaking style. Yet his personal life remains closed.
When an unsettling story arises about a nearby island that children are not allowed to visit, inevitably Molleigh is drawn into a taboo-breaking mission there. Manuel’s basic elements are now in play. Weird things happen, and Molleigh clicks in and out of an old, disturbing memory. There’s an intimation of possible sexual abuse, never specific, but a lingering suspicion. At a gathering, an elder with inner-seeing ability explains things, declaring there’s bad energy present, “dark … sharp as broken glass.”
It’s not for reviews to retell the story. Manuel’s prose kicks into overdrive with her accounts of typical daily incidents at Tawakin that are genuinely enlightening—a spooky tale for kids about The Basket Lady; the way an isolated community rallies in an emergency; how a schoolteacher learns from a pupil why children’s stories are make-believe, “Because they make you believe.” Then, after sorrow, there’s a traditional shell-gathering expedition where Molleigh connects with the village women, finding joy within their sadness—an event that leaves her questioning how she’d survive in any other place “where there is no marveling, no celebrating, no sharing.” And finally, there’s a shared secret and an answer; with problems like Hannah, how does a wavering teacher find a way to stay?
Good mysteries need false leads. Within an atmosphere permeated with myth and Indigeneity, Molleigh encounters her share. There’s the reality of unresolved trauma that can torment like a night-cramp. There’s a necessary cleansing (brought about because Molleigh does something inappropriate) that some may find believable and confusing. Credible endings often need a villain and a means of knotting things back together, but not everything follows that maxim in this tale; there’s deep beauty and a waft of “feel-good” too, that some may find a bit too easy. Yet equilibrium is bound to follow stormy weather. Reconciliation between people is like that, it’s a wind that has to trade both ways if it’s to succeed. But we’re in Tawakin here; sometimes what you find will not be what you were seeking; sometimes, what you will find cannot be sought. 9781771623193
Poet and author Trevor Carolan was a professor of English at University of the Fraser Valley for many years.
***
BOOKS:
The Heaviness of Things that Float (D&M, 2016) $22.95 978-1-77162-087-1
Dressed to Play (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2020)
Head to Head (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2021)
Open Secrets (Lorimer SideStreets, 2021)
The Morning Bell Brings the Broken-hearted (D&M, 2023) $24.95 9781771623193
[BCBW 2023]
The Heaviness of Things that Float won the 2017 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Manuel has also published two middle-grade sports novels: Dressed to Play (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2020) and Head to Head (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2021), which was nominated for The Red Cedar Awards in 2021. Her young adult novel, Open Secrets (Lorimer SideStreets, 2021), addresses grooming in the music industry.
In the 1990s, Manuel, a non-Aboriginal woman, worked for the Ktunaxa Treaty Council in eastern British Columbia, during which time she chaired a national committee on Aboriginal archives, advocating alongside Ktunaxa, Cree, and Mi'kMaq groups for the repatriation of all archival photographs depicting sacred First Nations' activities. She then worked for three years alongside non-profit Aboriginal groups in Vancouver's Eastside to develop and deliver education to vulnerable adults, later expanding this work to include the Native Women's Association of Canada.
Manuel's activities in Vancouver led her to work as a teacher of Aboriginal children in Kyuquot, a small boat-in-only community on on the northwest corner of Vancouver Island where she was adopted by the John family. The elder Kelly John gave her the name aa ap wa iick which means, "Always speaks wisely." Manuel has since done graduate work in Aboriginal education. Much of her fiction examines the relationship between Aboriginal students and a non-Aboriginal teacher. A mother of three, she is the daughter of Lynn Manuel (1948-2010), who published books for children.
In The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted (D&M, 2023), a new teacher, Molleigh Royston moves to Tawakin—a remote Nuu-chah-nulth community in the Pacific Northwest—bringing good intentions. However, as she struggles to understand and help her students, doubts begin to accumulate—including doubts about her own motivations. Things escalate when three students start behaving strangely and Molleigh makes a serious cultural transgression, triggering a series of disturbing events in the village. Giant boulders are placed in front of Molleigh’s house, furniture moves mysteriously and flowers erupt in flame. This story about the complexity of hope and the limits of good intent, offers a grave look at how the education system fails remote Indigenous communities, leaving Indigenous students, with all their brilliance and resilience, in the hands of transient educators.
***
The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted by Jennifer Manuel (D&M $24.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2023)
In her previous novel, The Heaviness of Things That Float (D&M, 2016), Jennifer Manuel set her work in the fictional, isolated community of Tawakin on Vancouver Island’s northwest coast, an awkward distance by sea or air from Port Hardy. Those familiar with her acclaimed first work will recognize some of the characters and the same rugged land- and seascapes in this new book, The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted, set chronologically a little earlier.
Once again, there’s a mystery involved and Manuel’s observant eye evokes details drawn from her own time as a schoolteacher working among the Nuu-chah-nulth. Indigenous customs, anecdotes and myth are depicted with nuanced regard for the protocols of sharing First Nations imagery from life along the coast. We’ve got a storyteller in control of her materials.
Foregrounding all this is Tawakin’s Indigenous differentness. Entering into the story is the novel’s 39-year-old schoolteacher protagonist from suburban Vancouver, Molleigh Royston. From the inclusion of Nuu-chah-nulth language phrasings that one receives during childhood, to the intimidating darkness of the omnipresent forest surrounding her, life as a teacher among the hundred souls of this fishing village, Molleigh intuits, also obliges being a learner.
In post-colonial times, any work by a non-Indigenous author addressing or portraying First Nations peoples and their cultures is bound to receive a critical eye. Yet, if we look beyond knee-jerk dissonance to a deeper understanding of BC’s colonial legacy and its manifold hurts, we’re likely to find messages of significance in this quintessentially West Coast story. There will be pain, yes, often the legacy of a grim colonial history; yet readers can expect authentic portraits of real communal joy as well, especially among the women and elders of Tawakin, and of an everyday resilience in the face of marginal economic circumstances.
Molleigh has been there just over a month. She has seen a seven-year marriage collapse and her prior artistic career fail to ignite. Her possessions are a scattering of cardboard boxes. Teaching, she admits, was “a late career choice.” In Indigenous communities like Tawakin, she realizes, it means “being on call twenty-four hours a day.” Chase Charlie, a roustabout character from Manuel’s earlier novel, expresses it from his point of view, “Teachers always leave, will you stay?”
Borrowing from her earlier novel, Manuel categorizes outsiders who work on the Reserve as either “Users, Runners, or Saviours”—some already leap-frogging into better positions elsewhere; others wanting to escape their old life; some that yearn to feel good about “saving” First Nations people. Molleigh briefly considers whether she might be a little of all three. Beset by doubts in an unfamiliar environment rich in secrets, her test is to imagine what actually belonging to a place like Tawakin could involve. Teaching there means “trying to figure how to out-teach the broken lines, the frowns, the fears.” Unaccountably, she’s also nervous about the forest surrounding her. She imagines returning to the city.
Challenges begin when Molleigh is faced with a menacing, possibly neurodivergent student, Hannah, whose pit-bull mother fends off any attempt at a medical evaluation. It’s an uneasy stalemate. For relief, Molleigh sketches portraits of her students that she hopes might inspire them someday to ideas beyond a life of fishing and logging.
Meanwhile, Mr. Chapman, the school principal and another newcomer, thinks that he brings hope. He jokes with students and believes people become the stories they hear. Experienced in Northern BC education, Chapman has a proprietary air with a biblically cadenced speaking style. Yet his personal life remains closed.
When an unsettling story arises about a nearby island that children are not allowed to visit, inevitably Molleigh is drawn into a taboo-breaking mission there. Manuel’s basic elements are now in play. Weird things happen, and Molleigh clicks in and out of an old, disturbing memory. There’s an intimation of possible sexual abuse, never specific, but a lingering suspicion. At a gathering, an elder with inner-seeing ability explains things, declaring there’s bad energy present, “dark … sharp as broken glass.”
It’s not for reviews to retell the story. Manuel’s prose kicks into overdrive with her accounts of typical daily incidents at Tawakin that are genuinely enlightening—a spooky tale for kids about The Basket Lady; the way an isolated community rallies in an emergency; how a schoolteacher learns from a pupil why children’s stories are make-believe, “Because they make you believe.” Then, after sorrow, there’s a traditional shell-gathering expedition where Molleigh connects with the village women, finding joy within their sadness—an event that leaves her questioning how she’d survive in any other place “where there is no marveling, no celebrating, no sharing.” And finally, there’s a shared secret and an answer; with problems like Hannah, how does a wavering teacher find a way to stay?
Good mysteries need false leads. Within an atmosphere permeated with myth and Indigeneity, Molleigh encounters her share. There’s the reality of unresolved trauma that can torment like a night-cramp. There’s a necessary cleansing (brought about because Molleigh does something inappropriate) that some may find believable and confusing. Credible endings often need a villain and a means of knotting things back together, but not everything follows that maxim in this tale; there’s deep beauty and a waft of “feel-good” too, that some may find a bit too easy. Yet equilibrium is bound to follow stormy weather. Reconciliation between people is like that, it’s a wind that has to trade both ways if it’s to succeed. But we’re in Tawakin here; sometimes what you find will not be what you were seeking; sometimes, what you will find cannot be sought. 9781771623193
Poet and author Trevor Carolan was a professor of English at University of the Fraser Valley for many years.
***
BOOKS:
The Heaviness of Things that Float (D&M, 2016) $22.95 978-1-77162-087-1
Dressed to Play (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2020)
Head to Head (Lorimer Sports Stories, 2021)
Open Secrets (Lorimer SideStreets, 2021)
The Morning Bell Brings the Broken-hearted (D&M, 2023) $24.95 9781771623193
[BCBW 2023]
