On Veil Creek - Gaylene Dutchyshen - ★★★★

AUTHOR: Gaylene Dutchyshen

GENRE: Family Drama

PUBLICATION DATE: November 28, 2024

RATING: 4 stars.

In a Nutshell: A character-oriented family drama set in a small Canadian prairie town. Fast pace, flawed people, interesting plot, plenty of triggers, a few too many characters. Good for those who like stories exploring the murkiness of human emotions.

Plot Preview:

When Marissa Nychuk gets a phone call, she doesn’t expect to hear that her estranged mother is on her deathbed. With too many painful memories of the past, Marissa isn’t sure if she wants to make the long journey back home to Veil Creek. Her elder brother Tommy, who hasn’t visited his mother ever since he left the house forty years ago, is equally conflicted. But could this be one last chance to get an apology from an abusive mother? Can they finally put the trauma of the past behind? Is reconciliation easy when there are too many untold secrets and suppressed brutalities?

The story comes to us over multiple timelines in the first-person perspective of Marissa and the third-person perspective of Tommy.

Bookish Yays:

🍁 Marissa and Tommy – the two characters who narrate the story to us. Neither is made out to be a flawless hero, unlike so many other protagonists of character-driven novels. Both are hurting as well as hurtful. I loved Marissa’s relationship with her brother Tommy as well as with their father.

🍁 The other characters, whether the rest of the Nychuk family to their life partners, friends and townspeople. Most are complex grey characters, making it difficult to decide whether to root for them or not. Clay (Marissa’s partner) and Emily (Marissa’s sister-in-law) are the two bright lights in an otherwise bleak depiction of humankind.

🍁 The depiction of farm life in a small town on the Canadian prairie – a new setting to me and hence, very interesting.

🍁 The whole story has a strong undertone of reality, even if such situations aren’t ordinary or common.

🍁 Themes of dysfunctional family, parental abuse, intergenerational trauma, complicated sibling dynamics, and negative evangelicalism depicted well.

🍁 The presentation through multiple timelines divided across sections instead of alternating between past and present. It is easier to keep track of the story this way, even though I would have liked to know more about some events during the missing time gaps.

🍁 Most chapters are divided into two halves, with the first half coming in Marissa’s first person POV and the other coming from Tommy’s third person POV. The sections are neatly demarcated, never confusing me about who was narrating. (The use of distinct grammatical POVs for the two narrators was a sensible decision.)

🍁 Smooth and fast-paced writing, despite being a character-oriented story.

🍁 The ending – an apt one for such a story. I’m not sure if it will work for everyone as some things stay unexplained and not everyone gets justice. But I liked its true-to-life approach. There were a couple of convenient coincidences, but nothing too farfetched. Best of all, no extended infodumps.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🍂 There are too many characters at the start. Though they are introduced clearly, it takes time to remember all the names and their interconnections. Plus, some basic essentials such as character ages and location aren’t clarified right away. Even the “present time” isn’t indicated as 2017; readers need to work it out after they see the timeline for forty years before. None of these are major issues, but they add needless hurdles to the reading experience.

🍂 While the blurb does offer hints of tragedy and dark secrets, the title and the cover look quite soothing. The actual content is quite grim, and some of it might be triggering as well. I was a bit unprepared for the extent of the darkness as I only knew that the book had ‘adult themes’. Thankfully, the most troubling parts are kept off the page and referred to later without going into lurid detail.

🍂 Marissa and Tommy don’t always sound their age, especially in 1977 when they were just eleven and fifteen(?) respectively. Marissa is said to be precocious, so this could explain her mature behaviour to some extent. Plus, their circumstances might have made them grow up before their age. But as they sound the same throughout the book, I wish the writing had indicated the change in their ages better through their voices.

All in all, I have no major complaints about this indie Canadian work. I liked the story, though the darker parts kept me from loving it more. It does not make for easy reading for its themes and triggers, but the mellow writing and fluid pacing definitely help.

Recommended to those who enjoy literary mysteries and dysfunctional family dramas. Do pay heed to the triggers list. This book isn't for those looking for a relaxing read with likeable characters.

My thanks to author Gaylene Dutchyshen for providing me with a complimentary copy of “On Veil Creek”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Content triggers: Rape, suicide, parental death, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, physical abuse, paedophilia, alcoholism.