Jan 12 2009
Away by Jane Urquhart
Couldn’t sleep last night - so instead, I sat up and finished the novel I have been reading lately. Not the one I am supposed to be reading this week - that would be Wacusta, which I am to have read by Wednesday afternoon. But at least, if nothing else, I was reading from the right syllabus 
Away, by Jane Urquhart is the last book on the “Making of Canadian Early Books” reading list… all of the rest of the books for this one course are in fact “early” - but the prof decided to add this one even though it is not. I am looking forward to getting there. I like CanLit - but especially contemporary CanLit.
Published in 1993, Away is the story of three generations of an Irish family. Part of the novel takes place in Ireland,and the remainder in Canada, where members of the family wound up as a result of the potato famine in the 1840s. It provides a strong sense of the geographies of their surroundings, and the characters are engaging.
My only complaint is that Mary, the protagonist that I most strongly identified with up and left her children, and we don’t see her again until she is returned to her family seven years later, after her death. The nerve! Killing off my favourite character!!
Urquhart’s prose is beautifully rendered from beginning to end.
This is a book worth reading, and I am already looking forward to reading it again when it comes up in the course later this semester.
I hate when they kill off my favorite character. With Willa Cather, it tended to be the ONLY character I liked, but it’s the same principle.