***2025 Summer: Murder Across Canada***
Prince Edward Island
The author has Acadian heritage, which she draws on to inform her characters, as well as PEI history and legends. Her mother gave her an article on a male ancestor, in which his wife Madeleine is mentioned merely as the stepmother to his children. Taber decided to give Madeleine her story. I learned things, notably that the British expelled some Acadians back to France. I confess that I only remembered those who ended up in Louisiana (hence the Cajuns) or returned to the Maritime provinces.
There are three timelines, of three women in the family line: Raina in the present, Celeste in 1864, and Madeleine during the expulsion of the Acadians (1759). I liked Raina, our modern day police officer, who sees a ghostly ship that draws her. She resists, knowing that the living cannot board it. She has devoted herself and her career to staying away from the ocean. Not an easy task when you live on a tiny island. She returns to her home town to investigate a missing person and, on her first night back, handcuffs herself to the bed to prevent wandering off to join the ghostly crew.
I enjoyed the Madeleine chapters too. As I say, I learned Acadian history. But I also got to see Madeleine deal with her version of the Sight and trying to coexist within the Catholic faith. It's a life full of tragedy, but there's hope there. It's the Celeste timeline that I didn't care as much about. I actually counted the Celeste chapters at one point to convince myself that I could hack reading the rest of the book. This character and her sister were based on a historical newspaper item in Charlottetown, during the negotiation of Confederation.
There are pluses and minuses to this novel. On the plus side, I liked the family history aspects and the paranormal details. The minuses for me were the stilted writing and the rather wooden character development. There was a lot of telling instead of showing, especially about what the characters were feeling. Raina and her mother were able to overcome a lot of emotional history far too easily, to my way of thinking. The third person POV distanced me from the women's experiences and made the story feel more like a news article or textbook. Nevertheless, there were flashes of better things here and there in the text (Raina desperately handcuffing herself to the bed, for instance).
Taber has potential. This title appears to be her first published fictional work (she has several nonfiction titles). I have no doubt that she will continue to write, gain experience, and improve the emotional intelligence in her fiction.
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