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From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore.
After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write - that of her stillborn brother, Wulf - by her mother's gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways. In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.
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Reviews
Celebrated Ottawa-born writer Kuitenbrouwer . . . blurs the line between fiction and autobiography in her new novel about Kathryn, a middle-aged woman who makes the devastating but necessary decision to leave her marriage and family. She escapes to her childhood home in Southern Ontario to learn more about the story of her stillborn brother, but her aging parents instead put her to work sifting through their "archive" - endless boxes with generations worth of keepsakes and photographs - in the pig shed. Family lore about an 18th-century ancestor hired for the American Civil War as a substitute soldier commingles with observations about truth, memory and reality.
Firmly and deliberately established in the realms of auto-fiction (simply put, a fictionalized autobiography, though a full definition is a wonderful rabbithole to spend an afternoon in), the novel, however, shifts almost imperceptibly into the realm of myth and folklore. Rain, for example, begins the day of Kuitenbrouwer's arrival, and doesn't stop for weeks, the land growing soppy, then flooding outright, isolating the house and its residents. In addition, Kuitenbrouwer's investigation into her brother soon comes to incorporate stories of a selkie (a being who can shift between seal and human forms, by donning and shedding their skin) in the family. . . . Rich with the true stuff of imagined lives, and the imagined stuff of true lives, "Wait Softly Brother" is a glorious enchantment indeed.
"Wait Softly Brother is a suspenseful, complex and unusual work with writing both captivating and intelligent."
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