Reviewed by Carlyn Schellenberg
Among many other awards and nominations, Winnipeg writer Joan Thomas received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book for Reading by Lightning, and her second novel, Curiosity, was longlisted for the 2010 Scotia Bank Giller Prize. What Thomas’s latest novel, The Opening Sky, shares with the previous two are young female protagonists. In Reading by Lightning, a pubescent girl bored with her rural Manitoba life may have found an escape in England. In Curiosity, an illiterate and poor English preteen’s discovery of a dinosaur skeleton alters the course of her life. The Opening Sky’s nineteen-year-old Sylvie accidentally gets pregnant, and must suddenly attempt to deal with the sobering responsibilities of motherhood.
The Opening Sky, divided into three parts with titled chapters, starts with Sylvie right before she finds out she is five months pregnant with her new boyfriend Noah’s daughter, and ends less than a year later. While the novel is told in third person, paragraphs shift in perspective and time. We get perspectives from Sylvie; Aiden, Sylvie’s therapist father; and Liz, Sylvie’s mother, who works at Planned Parenthood and who Sylvie has detached herself from.
Sylvie, a strong-minded student living in University of Winnipeg dorms, decides to keep her baby, and eventually moves back home with her parents. When the pregnancy is revealed to both families, Liz realizes that she knows Noah’s mother and stepfather from long ago. Characters tied to the fetus are each connected to each other in different ways, and past rivalries come into play. The presence of this newborn—and everyone’s differing views on what should be done about it—stirs marital problems for Liz and Aiden, and for Noah and Sylvie. Relationships are tested and lovers become strangers.
While Reading by Lightning and Curiosity take place a century and two centuries ago, respectively, The Opening Sky is set right in the present. Throughout the novel we do get flashes of salient moments of the previous decade in the characters’ lives, which slowly reveal justifications for tensions and secrets.
Both of Thomas’s previous novels take place in England, with Reading by Lightning set partly in Manitoba, while The Opening Sky occurs primarily in Winnipeg, with some scenes transpiring in Minnesota, rural Manitoba, and Kenora.
The most inviting aspect of this novel is its realistic portrayal of family life. The characters are people we know, and their predicaments are thus easy to empathize with, so that we’re drawn into the story.
Aiden, missing something in his life, is full of existential questions. He reaches for connections with people, even goes out with one of his patients because he enjoys his company, a trait he finds scarce among people he knows. Aiden’s void is evident in this passage in which a patient has told him she doesn’t know if she can be honest in their session: “Thank you, Christine, he thinks as he types. You could spend all night at a party, standing by a bay window with a glass of wine in your hand, and you would count the evening special if you had just one moment like that, one moment of true connection with another human being.”
Liz feels her marriage is stale and finds relief by flirting with an old friend. Sylvie feels suffocated by her mother, and lashes out in less than mature—but perhaps warranted—ways.
Thomas has situated herself as a master of dialogue; not one conversation in this novel is unconvincing. In the dialogue below, Sylvie and Noah’s extended family members are visiting the baby and the exhausted Sylvie. Sylvie has a decreasing loss of say in the conversation and, symbolically, her choices narrow as well:
Patti: And how are you, sweetie?
Sylvie: I’m fine.
Liz: She is doing just great. We are so proud of her, the way she is handling everything.
Patti: I’ll tell you the secret, Sylvie. Eat, sleep, poo. Forget everything else. Be a mother grub.
Maggie: It’s so important, breastfeeding. If you can keep from supplementing, even just a little. They’re seeing a lot of necrotizing colitis in preemies, and it’s all from using cow’s-milk-based formula.
Liz: This baby is not that premature.
Aiden: When Sylvie was born, I was reading Rousseau. I had the idea our kid would eat the instant she was hungry, sleep when she was tired, follow the lead of her own desires, and be a happy child of nature.
Patti: And how did that work out?
Aiden: Aw, who remembers those early days?
Patti (cackling): I bet Liz does!
George: So, kid, when you off to Africa?
Noah: I’m not going. I’m working at Presley Point again.
George: Didn’t you get into the program?
Noah: I got in but I turned it down.
George: Hey dude, that’s sweet! You can work my booth at the Folk Fest.
Patti: You’re pale, though, darling. Did you lose a lot of blood?
Liz: It always makes the recovery harder, doesn’t it, when the mom has to have a Caesarean. Not every woman can have the luxury of a home birth.
Patti: At least she didn’t have to go through labour first. I was in hell for sixteen hours when Troy was born. Back pain – did any of you girls have back pain? Oh God, I practically chewed his daddy’s hand off! Turns out I was fully dilated but it wasn’t enough – well, look at the size of me – and then all of a sudden they’re wheeling me into surgery. And here the suction thing breaks down, and by the time they get that little bugger out of me, the doctors are wading through blood. Those cloth booties they wear? They were absolutely soaked.
Aiden: All right, everybody – time for bubbly!
With perfection in dialogue comes hilarious little moments that you just can’t make up – or maybe you can. Many instances in The Opening Sky conjure genuine comic relief.
In this passage, Liz recalls a silly habit of her swim coach: “When she was in high school, in synchronized swimming, her coach would stand on the edge of the pool in a tangerine Speedo and chant, ‘Synch or swim, synch or swim,’ which made no sense whatsoever.”
In another, Sylvie’s ailing grandfather receives his Christmas present. “For her grandpa she bought a beehive for a family in Ethiopia. He studies the card for ages, though he can’t read it and doesn’t get the concept.”
The novel is rife with vivid descriptions, the most unsettling regarding Sylvie’s body post-pregnancy: “Her bra is stuck to her where milk leaked and dried; it’s like peeling a Band-Aid off a wound. The baby snuffles under her shirt, clamping toothless gums on the soft skin where Sylvie’s breast and armpit meet, and starts to suck like a lamprey eel. Sylvie pries her loose and arranges her properly, enduring the first painful chomp on her sore nipple.”
With so many flawed and layered characters, The Opening Sky had this reader wondering who to root for: Sylvie, the troubled and irresponsible, yet very dedicated, new mother, whose anger and secrecy from her parents is arguably justified? The sometimes petty Liz, who wants the best for her daughter but shoved a wedge between them long ago? Mary, Noah’s mother, who makes everyone feel worse about themselves (or is it just Liz?) and asserts her own selfish desires into Noah and Sylvie’s decisions, though her actions seem somewhat vindicated? Noah, the sympathetic yet absent father who isn’t even there when Sylvie goes into labour? Aiden, who would be fully likable if it wasn’t for his annoying tendency to force people into awkward conversations with him and slyly provoke them? Perhaps the fragile newborn Faun is the only character we can truly cheer for.
The novel is really about identity; knowing people and yet not knowing them; and making mistakes and never knowing if you’ll be able to fix them. The Opening Sky provides us with gripping moments, and is a pleasurable and emotionally satisfying read for adults, young and old – or anyone striving to exist these days.
McClelland & Stewart| 368 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0771083921
‘The Opening Sky’ by Joan Thomas
Book Reviews
Among many other awards and nominations, Winnipeg writer Joan Thomas received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book for Reading by Lightning, and her second novel, Curiosity, was longlisted for the 2010 Scotia Bank Giller Prize. What Thomas’s latest novel, The Opening Sky, shares with the previous two are young female protagonists. In Reading by Lightning, a pubescent girl bored with her rural Manitoba life may have found an escape in England. In Curiosity, an illiterate and poor English preteen’s discovery of a dinosaur skeleton alters the course of her life. The Opening Sky’s nineteen-year-old Sylvie accidentally gets pregnant, and must suddenly attempt to deal with the sobering responsibilities of motherhood.
The Opening Sky, divided into three parts with titled chapters, starts with Sylvie right before she finds out she is five months pregnant with her new boyfriend Noah’s daughter, and ends less than a year later. While the novel is told in third person, paragraphs shift in perspective and time. We get perspectives from Sylvie; Aiden, Sylvie’s therapist father; and Liz, Sylvie’s mother, who works at Planned Parenthood and who Sylvie has detached herself from.
Sylvie, a strong-minded student living in University of Winnipeg dorms, decides to keep her baby, and eventually moves back home with her parents. When the pregnancy is revealed to both families, Liz realizes that she knows Noah’s mother and stepfather from long ago. Characters tied to the fetus are each connected to each other in different ways, and past rivalries come into play. The presence of this newborn—and everyone’s differing views on what should be done about it—stirs marital problems for Liz and Aiden, and for Noah and Sylvie. Relationships are tested and lovers become strangers.
While Reading by Lightning and Curiosity take place a century and two centuries ago, respectively, The Opening Sky is set right in the present. Throughout the novel we do get flashes of salient moments of the previous decade in the characters’ lives, which slowly reveal justifications for tensions and secrets.
Both of Thomas’s previous novels take place in England, with Reading by Lightning set partly in Manitoba, while The Opening Sky occurs primarily in Winnipeg, with some scenes transpiring in Minnesota, rural Manitoba, and Kenora.
The most inviting aspect of this novel is its realistic portrayal of family life. The characters are people we know, and their predicaments are thus easy to empathize with, so that we’re drawn into the story.
Aiden, missing something in his life, is full of existential questions. He reaches for connections with people, even goes out with one of his patients because he enjoys his company, a trait he finds scarce among people he knows. Aiden’s void is evident in this passage in which a patient has told him she doesn’t know if she can be honest in their session: “Thank you, Christine, he thinks as he types. You could spend all night at a party, standing by a bay window with a glass of wine in your hand, and you would count the evening special if you had just one moment like that, one moment of true connection with another human being.”
Liz feels her marriage is stale and finds relief by flirting with an old friend. Sylvie feels suffocated by her mother, and lashes out in less than mature—but perhaps warranted—ways.
Thomas has situated herself as a master of dialogue; not one conversation in this novel is unconvincing. In the dialogue below, Sylvie and Noah’s extended family members are visiting the baby and the exhausted Sylvie. Sylvie has a decreasing loss of say in the conversation and, symbolically, her choices narrow as well:
Patti: And how are you, sweetie?
Sylvie: I’m fine.
Liz: She is doing just great. We are so proud of her, the way she is handling everything.
Patti: I’ll tell you the secret, Sylvie. Eat, sleep, poo. Forget everything else. Be a mother grub.
Maggie: It’s so important, breastfeeding. If you can keep from supplementing, even just a little. They’re seeing a lot of necrotizing colitis in preemies, and it’s all from using cow’s-milk-based formula.
Liz: This baby is not that premature.
Aiden: When Sylvie was born, I was reading Rousseau. I had the idea our kid would eat the instant she was hungry, sleep when she was tired, follow the lead of her own desires, and be a happy child of nature.
Patti: And how did that work out?
Aiden: Aw, who remembers those early days?
Patti (cackling): I bet Liz does!
George: So, kid, when you off to Africa?
Noah: I’m not going. I’m working at Presley Point again.
George: Didn’t you get into the program?
Noah: I got in but I turned it down.
George: Hey dude, that’s sweet! You can work my booth at the Folk Fest.
Patti: You’re pale, though, darling. Did you lose a lot of blood?
Liz: It always makes the recovery harder, doesn’t it, when the mom has to have a Caesarean. Not every woman can have the luxury of a home birth.
Patti: At least she didn’t have to go through labour first. I was in hell for sixteen hours when Troy was born. Back pain – did any of you girls have back pain? Oh God, I practically chewed his daddy’s hand off! Turns out I was fully dilated but it wasn’t enough – well, look at the size of me – and then all of a sudden they’re wheeling me into surgery. And here the suction thing breaks down, and by the time they get that little bugger out of me, the doctors are wading through blood. Those cloth booties they wear? They were absolutely soaked.
Aiden: All right, everybody – time for bubbly!
With perfection in dialogue comes hilarious little moments that you just can’t make up – or maybe you can. Many instances in The Opening Sky conjure genuine comic relief.
In this passage, Liz recalls a silly habit of her swim coach: “When she was in high school, in synchronized swimming, her coach would stand on the edge of the pool in a tangerine Speedo and chant, ‘Synch or swim, synch or swim,’ which made no sense whatsoever.”
In another, Sylvie’s ailing grandfather receives his Christmas present. “For her grandpa she bought a beehive for a family in Ethiopia. He studies the card for ages, though he can’t read it and doesn’t get the concept.”
The novel is rife with vivid descriptions, the most unsettling regarding Sylvie’s body post-pregnancy: “Her bra is stuck to her where milk leaked and dried; it’s like peeling a Band-Aid off a wound. The baby snuffles under her shirt, clamping toothless gums on the soft skin where Sylvie’s breast and armpit meet, and starts to suck like a lamprey eel. Sylvie pries her loose and arranges her properly, enduring the first painful chomp on her sore nipple.”
With so many flawed and layered characters, The Opening Sky had this reader wondering who to root for: Sylvie, the troubled and irresponsible, yet very dedicated, new mother, whose anger and secrecy from her parents is arguably justified? The sometimes petty Liz, who wants the best for her daughter but shoved a wedge between them long ago? Mary, Noah’s mother, who makes everyone feel worse about themselves (or is it just Liz?) and asserts her own selfish desires into Noah and Sylvie’s decisions, though her actions seem somewhat vindicated? Noah, the sympathetic yet absent father who isn’t even there when Sylvie goes into labour? Aiden, who would be fully likable if it wasn’t for his annoying tendency to force people into awkward conversations with him and slyly provoke them? Perhaps the fragile newborn Faun is the only character we can truly cheer for.
The novel is really about identity; knowing people and yet not knowing them; and making mistakes and never knowing if you’ll be able to fix them. The Opening Sky provides us with gripping moments, and is a pleasurable and emotionally satisfying read for adults, young and old – or anyone striving to exist these days.
McClelland & Stewart| 368 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0771083921