Book Reviews

There's No Place Like Home

Mavis Reimer (Editor)
Home Words: Discources of Children's Literature in Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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Reviewed by Benjamin Lefebvre

This outstanding collection of essays, part of the Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press since 1999, ably demonstrates the ways in which the field of Canadian children’s literature has evolved in leaps and bounds since the publication of earlier foundational studies such as Sheila Egoff’s The Republic of Childhood in 1967, Judith Saltman’s Modern Canadian Children’s Books in 1987, and Elizabeth Waterston’s Children’s Literature in Canada in 1992. Spearheaded by Mavis Reimer (Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood) and bookended by her comprehensive introduction and a thoughtful afterword by Neil Besner, the volume consists of ten original essays contributed by twelve active participants in the field and its adjacent disciplines, most of whom teach or have taught at the University of Winnipeg and are affiliated with the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, which Reimer directs. The contributors met for annual working meetings over three years and continued to discuss each contribution through an online listserv, making for a unique collaborative structure for humanities research.

The volume is principally concerned with the concept of “home” as a cultural signifier in a wide range of texts for young people published in Canada in both official languages. While the individual chapters all consider “home,” along with its counterpart “away,” to be material, physical, psychological, and ideological concepts, the wide range of theoretical models, research methods, and outcomes makes for a thematically coherent volume that opens up further questions or pursuits instead of purporting to finalize the discussion. The chapters themselves highlight the impossibility of a unifying structure, particularly in Reimer’s discussion of the depiction of homeless youth in YA fiction and in Louise Saldanha’s chapter on books by Canadian writers of colour, who adopt a range of strategies to negotiate Eurocentric imaginings of “home” and “away.” Dans deux chapitres en français, on découvre jusqu’à quel point le roman québécois pour jeunes aborde l’antithèse « ici/ailleurs » différemment de leurs équivalents anglophones, qui semblent s’éloigner du home à la recherche d’aventure ailleurs. Danielle Thaler et Alain Jean-Bart tracent l’effet de cet enjeux dans le roman historique situé en Nouvelle-France, où l’on retrouve « les représentations de la triade coloniale fondamentale : le colon, le coureur de bois et le Sauvage. » Quant au roman contemporain pour adolescents, selon Anne Rusnak, c’est plutôt le away qui envahit le home, et non l’inverse.

Further counterpoints can be found in Doris Wolf and Paul DePasquale’s chapter on Aboriginal picture books by Aboriginal authors and in Perry Nodelman’s discussion of young adult novels by non-Aboriginal authors that include Aboriginal presence. Whereas texts by non-Aboriginal authors tend to co-opt their Aboriginal characters under the banner of a form of multiculturalism that flattens difference in order to prop up a liberal fantasy of a harmonious nation, picture books by Aboriginal authors tend to do the reverse, privileging Aboriginal viewpoints and communities while challenging the ethnocentrism of mainstream publishing in Canada, using a genre whose nineteenth-century origins coincide with a surge of empire-building efforts from Britain.

While the contributors cover a tremendous amount of narrative ground, the volume leaves a number of crucial gaps for subsequent critics to address. The selection of primary texts strikes a welcome balance between mainstream and non-mainstream, between canonical and undervalued, work in English and work in French. Further investigation in the area would now need to consider “home” and “away” in relation to such topics and areas as sexuality (including the coming-out narrative), religion/spirituality, and ability, as well as in a growing amount of work published in Canada for Canadian readers but set elsewhere, such as Deborah Ellis’s Breadwinner trilogy, and in the plethora of texts that feature child protagonists but target an audience of adults. On aimerait également voir davantage une étude soignée des romans pour jeunes par des écrivains francophones hors-Québec, soit en Acadie, en Ontario et au Manitoba. In both what it accomplishes and what it leaves open for future researchers, Home Words has become the latest foundational study in a dynamic and interdisciplinary field—both book and field are highly recommended.

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This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #200 (Spring 2009), François Ouellet. (pg. 184 - 185)

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