‘Meadowlark’ by Wendi Stewart

Reviewed by Dana Hansen

It is a very human tendency to look for reason and meaning in tragedy in order to cope with the terrifying randomness of life’s misfortunes. Wendi Stewart’s notable debut novel, Meadowlark, tells the story of a senseless family catastrophe: the drowning death in an icy lake of a mother and her toddler son. For six-year-old Rebecca Archer and her father, Robert, the loss of half of their family is a devastation that permanently alters the course and substance of their lives.

When the Archers’ car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake in northwestern Ontario in March of 1962, Robert can save only Rebecca from the sinking vehicle. Having made the fateful decision, to drive across the ice-covered lake to reach their cabin late in the winter season, despite being warned against it, Robert is consumed by guilt as he lays his wife and son to rest and returns with Rebecca to their farmhouse. Destroyed not only by the emotional torment of his grief, the formerly robust and able farmer is also reduced physically by the tragedy, having lost his toes and most of his fingers to frostbite. Rebecca heartbreakingly knows that in many ways she’s lost her father, too: “Instead of a family, my father is stuck with me, the teams are chosen and I am the only one left standing. If we were in the yard, he would lift his head, tip his chin as if to say come on, but he has already given up, certain he will never win.”

As the weeks and months pass by, Robert removes all evidence of his wife and son from their home and retreats further into himself, leaving Rebecca at her tender age to parent herself, manage their farm, and keep her memories of her mother alive. She becomes increasingly angry with her father for his weakness and inertia, at times screaming at him in frustration over “the grief he wears like a heavy coat, the grief that has curled his spine and ruined his eyesight so that all he can see is misery and emptiness…” She even experiences fleeting thoughts of hurting her father, though these thoughts only add to the crushing survivor guilt she already feels. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Rebecca’s surprising maturity and perspicacity can seem incongruent with her extreme youth, but as the novel progresses and she grows into her adolescence, instances of jarringly adult insights become less frequent and her voice rings more true.

Meadowlark is not, fortunately, a story without hope. Despite the burden of her circumstances, Rebecca is not doomed to a life of loss and despair. She chooses a different path for herself, one that involves the making of a new kind of family with her friends, Chuck and Lissie. The heart of Stewart’s novel resides in the relationship that forms between the three young people, all suffering from dysfunctional home lives. Together they provide one another with a system of support and acceptance that carries them through their high school years and through the hardships of dealing with broken or abusive parents.

Chuck and Rebecca bond quickly when they meet on the bus on their first day of the first grade, a pair of misfits with heavy hearts. Chuck’s father, Harold, “a lean, mean dog, a scrapper who can fight dirty and whip any opponent, not with strength or skill but with outright meanness,” regards his son as a useless failure and exacts cruel punishments for Chuck’s perceived shortcomings. Harold’s abuse extends to Gran, his aged mother-in-law –a true light in the story – who becomes a sort of stand-in mother for both Chuck and Rebecca, often shielding them from the tyranny of the adults in their lives.

Rebecca and Chuck’s exclusive twosome enlarges in high school to include Lissie, an indigenous girl adopted by a single white woman named Charlotte Smythe. As if Charlotte’s intense perfectionism, unreasonable demands, and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease were not enough for the teenaged Lissie to contend with, she has her own very challenging self-esteem and identity issues. There is a mystery surrounding Lissie’s parentage, and Charlotte cannot bring herself to reveal it. It is this mystery that by the novel’s end will carry not only Lissie, but Rebecca and Chuck as well, out into the world and away from their small town in search of answers.

Ultimately, Rebecca Archer is confronted with an almost impossible decision to make: to stay on the farm and abandon herself to her father’s mournful influence, or to leave behind the parent she used to adore, knowing he might not survive without her, in order to have any chance of her own happiness. Her struggle to do what is right is moving and believable, and we can’t help but admire her courage.

For a first novel, Meadowlark is remarkable for its distinctive, clear-voiced, endearing young characters. While the three adult antagonists – Robert, Harold, and Charlotte – are at times almost caricatures of the stereotypical bad parent, Stewart does not render them completely without sympathy. The novel does lose some ground midway as it digresses into descriptions of minor characters and events at Rebecca’s school. There are also some heavy-handed symbolic references, including the death of Rebecca’s childhood pet, Daisy the horse, just as Rebecca is emerging into her adult years. These flaws, however, are incidental to an otherwise very promising debut.

NeWest | 300 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926455389