Description

As a child, Kate Stong Smythe drew castles. Now she designs condos in Griffintown, a gentrified working-class neighbourhood of Montreal. Single and thirty-five, Kate has strayed far from her dreamy youth. She’s hard-edged and uncompromising. Work leaves no space for love or play. Flipping through the pages of the family genealogy, Kate recognizes the mysterious names that her mother called out on her deathbed, five generations of Stong women; Kate herself is the seventh. Their grim expressions are familiar; the women floated in and out of her dreams when she was a child. Curious, Kate travels to Toronto where she explores her great-great grandparents’ abandoned farmhouse, still standing on the grounds of York University. She tours an even older ancestral home, a log cabin on Black Creek, part of a reconstituted pioneer village. During her visit Kate has an unsettling vision that leaves her confused and increasingly consumed by her ties to the past and the ancestral hardness that is holding her hostage.

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Excerpt

The costumed guide launched into an enthusiastic history of Daniel Stong’s log cabin at Black Creek. Kate half-listened, more interested in the square logs and the tight fit of the dovetail corners. She pictured the original split cedar shingles and the mud Daniel once squeezed into the cracks that were now replaced with mortar.

The guide tapped Kate’s shoulder, interrupting her rumination.

“Can you believe it took Daniel’s father, Sebald, six years to clear twenty acres at Black Creek—and all without title, not even a lease?”

Farming didn’t interest Kate. She was more interested in something else. She turned to face the guide.

“The Stongs were Loyalists. Why weren’t they granted crown land when they arrived at Black Creek?”

The guide smiled, pleased with Kate’s intelligent question. Most of her tours were with restless school children.