For as long as I can remember, I've loved a good bear story. And, for almost as long, the writing of Alice Hoffman. In The Red Garden, Hoffman weaves generations of Blackwellians with the bears on the outskirts of their lives. A totem animal, a creature of myth and reality, the bear shadows the stories of Hoffman's human characters, and creates an unbroken thread down through the centuries of the town of Blackwell, Massachusetts—that twins to the ties of love, courage and family connecting her characters.
“You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,” Virgil said to me after one practice. “It’s like watching you walk into a secret place that no one else knows how to get to.” Hockey is the saving grace of young Saul Indian Horse’s life. Lost to his family and orphaned in his grandmother’s arms, eight-year-old Saul is discovered at an icy railroad stop in northern Ontario and stolen away to spend the next six years at St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. “St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world,” Saul remembers. He saw children die of abuse or suicide, with whatever they had to take themselves away from hell on earth: a pitchfork; rocks to weigh down a dress in water; rope to swing from the rafters of a barn. Anything, even death, was better than the despair of suffering the school’s daily humiliations. It is a hockey ice rink, built at St. Jerome’s during Saul’s second winter, that saves him. In the years that follow, the crack of light o...
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