CICADA SUMMER

In remote Ontario, a trio under quarantine reflect on their lives.

It’s the summer of 2020 and Husha, a young woman who recently lost her mother, has hunkered down with her grandfather, Arthur, at his remote cabin. Quarantining with them is Husha’s ex-but-apparently-now-on-again lover, Nellie. While the outdoors teem with cicadas, indoors, Husha, Arthur, and Nellie seem to lose themselves in quiet domesticity: Their days are dominated by cooking, bathing, grocery shopping. But Husha happens to have an eccentric little book of stories that her mother evidently wrote before she died, and the trio soon starts reading the stories together every evening. In one, a haunted house consumes a little girl. In another, a woman repeatedly miscarries. As the trio progress through the book, the boundaries between the stories and their own reality seem to fade. As one story asks, “What does it mean to be a haunted place, or to be a haunted person?[Loc 1465]…Is it to fail at holding your story in by its borders, if there are such things as borders?” [Loc 1473] McKeen writes with a competent and lyrical voice, holding the various levels of storytelling as one coherent whole. There is a loveliness to the silvery prose that propels the reader forward. But there is also something limited—and limiting—about her approach, which emphasizes experiments in narrative form over character development and basic emotion. The stories that make up Husha’s mother’s book read almost like responses to writing prompts, with all the attendant variations in perspective, tense, and rhetoric. One longs for something a little more, well, human. What happened between Husha and her mother? What is happening between Husha and Nellie?

An emphasis on form over feeling lends this novel the air of a writing exercise.