Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite last wrote for The Toast about Bend it Like Beckham.
Despite liking both books and Canada, I’m not really a CanLit fan. I was never drawn to the genre outside of required reading for school, and I can’t pinpoint where exactly my immersion in my national literary culture went awry. But even though I have fallen down on my CanLit reading as an adult, it was one of my favourites as a tween.
When I was somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, I discovered Kit Pearson, a Canadian author whose books for young people are classics—The Daring Game, Guests of War, A Handful of Time, and Awake and Dreaming are the ones that come to mind immediately—but she has been writing for decades. Pearson’s books are fun, thoughtful, and Canadian to the core. Pearson’s books were the first I read that featured Canada as an important and integral part of their stories and characters, and were my gateway to other quintessential Canadian authors like Bernice Thurman Hunter, L. M. Montgomery, and Jean Little.
My first Pearson book was The Daring Game. In that book, 11-year-old Eliza Chapman chooses to go to boarding school in Vancouver while her parents move “out east” to Toronto for a year. She starts Grade 7 at a posh private school called Ashdown, navigating friendships, looming adolescence, and homesickness. At Ashdown, Eliza meets Helen, an unhappy girl whose parents don’t seem to want her around. Helen is always getting into trouble, and introduces a Daring Game in the girls’ dorm. The dares get progressively more dangerous, going against all school rules, and Eliza has to decide whether she’ll participate and win Helen’s affections, or be the good girl she has always been. As a resolutely Truth-oriented player, I found this dilemma fascinating and terrifying. Will Eliza be brave enough for the Daring Game??
I related to Eliza in many ways, especially her hesitation to befriend someone who was most likely a bad influence, but also one of the most exciting people at the school. Eliza was shy, independent, and bookish like me, but she was also very different. Eliza was a true-blue Canadian in the most Pearsonian sense—white, from “the west,” and generally stoic about everything. Eliza had aunts and uncles who lived across the country, went to a cottage in Alberta during the summer, and was my ultimate icon for all things Canadian. Her WASP-y name and affinity for navy and grey boarding school outfits were qualities that I had never learned from my immigrant parents, and deep down, I knew I never would.
I equated importance with visibility, especially with books, and my logical conclusion from reading The Daring Game was that Pearson’s Canadians were the important kind, the ones who deserved to be written about. And so I used The Daring Game and other Pearson finds to educate myself about what it meant to truly be Canadian, learning that, in most cases, it meant doing the opposite of what I was doing in a multilingual, multicultural city—eating spicy food, being a darker shade of beige than pink, and not knowing where exactly British Columbia was. Pearson’s characters lived in exotic locations (Edmonton, Alberta, was of particular interest to me), ate weird food (liver???), and used strange words like “gabardine,” “dressing-gown,” and “flannelette” that, to be fair, were probably out of date by the time I read them. They talked about the Queen all the time, without any sense of irony. Kit Pearson books were like anthropological studies of Anglo-Canadian society for me, and I ate them up with relish. Even her name, Kit Pearson, reeked of the Canadian spirit that I found so fascinating—what is Kit even short for?
And so in my quest to understand Canadians, I immersed myself in Pearson’s books. I read A Handful of Time, a book about a young girl named Patricia whose famous parents are divorcing, causing a media scandal in Toronto. In order to arrange the terms of their separation, Patricia’s parents send her away from her comfortable life of day camps and libraries in the city (a life that greatly mimicked my own, indoors-inclined upbringing) to Alberta’s cottage country to spend the summer with cousins she has never met. Patricia, homesick and angry, discovers a watch under a floorboard that transports her back in time to when her own mother visited the cottage. She spends the summer “getting to know” her mother through this impossible adventure, and grows more confident in herself as a result. Patricia was another quiet, bookish heroine that I loved, but once again, her environment, her name (Patricia! So close to Patrician), and her snobbery were exotic Canadian qualities.
A departure in tone from these other books was the Guests of War trilogy, featuring Norah and Gavin Stokes, a brother and sister who are sent from their English village to Toronto during World War II as part of the War Guests program. The trilogy follows the pair through five years in Canada, and as the war winds down, Gavin and Norah have to decide whether to stay in Canada with their adoptive family or return to England. Norah is feisty, loud, and decidedly different than Eliza and Patricia, and her perspective as an outsider and a working-class person offered more depth to her observations of the privileged life she is adopted into once she and Gavin arrive in Toronto.
Pearson’s characters are embedded in their surroundings, like Vancouver’s beaches, Alberta’s prairies, and Toronto’s upper-crust Rosedale neighbourhood. In fact, many of Pearson’s protagonists are so entwined with their environment that it plays a major role in their development as people. Usually, this involved each young girl communing with nature and finding herself in the process. During this process, each girl spent a long time at a cottage, which seemed to me to be a small step up from camping, another mysterious pastime. My only comparison for rustic living was seeing labourers building brick huts off the main streets of New Delhi, and they definitely were not doing it for a “natural” experience. In Pearson’s books, nature is a magical place where characters are able to think, reflect, and often change their behavior and personalities just by looking at some water or climbing a tree. As a city dweller, this was very intriguing. I had never before thought about the immense power of nature to help tween girls strengthen their character and embrace changes in their lives, but I really wanted it to happen to me. During my only attempt at camping, I tried to look at a tree, or sit on a rock, and be thoughtful and introspective about my life until that point. I was eight and it rained the whole time, which left me feeling like I had failed Kit in some way because I couldn’t do what her characters learned to do—steer a canoe, go barefoot outside, learn self-confidence. “Real” Canadians reveled in the potential discomforts of the outdoors; I just wanted to go home.
Another important component of Pearson’s books that I felt was lacking in my own life was the separation between children and parents. In The Daring Game, Eliza is separated from her parents for a whole year because she wants to go to Ashdown. In A Handful of Time, Patricia is sent away while her fancy parents work out their divorce terms at home. In the Guests of War trilogy, Norah and her brother Gavin are sent as “war guests” from Britain to Toronto. This was another intriguing element of “real” Canadian life that I saw exemplified in Pearson’s books as something exotic and exciting, despite the fact that often, the children did not want to go away. This separation was usually the catalyst for the communing with nature that I also couldn’t do, and I felt I was missing out on an important Canadian experience if I didn’t get to do it as well. This was quickly squashed by my mother, who found the concept of sleepovers bizarre, let alone summer camp. I remember being furious with her for not letting me go—didn’t she understand that she was making it harder for me to be a real Canadian? Once again, I had failed Kit.
It took me a long time to realize that the protagonists of Kit Pearson books were not icons of authentic Canadian living. As I continued to read her books, and better understand that Canadian identity was a little more complex than I had originally thought, I saw more valuable and applicable aspects of Pearson’s writing than her love for button-nosed Anglo girls with abandonment issues. I realized that I didn’t have to identify completely with the author and her characters to get a lot out of her work, and that Pearson’s ideas about Canadian-ness were more universal than originally met the eye. Her characters are always brave, smart, and interested in the world around them. Pearson’s vision of girlhood is respectful and understanding, but never condescending or silly. In her books, girls are people to be taken seriously.
As I attempt to learn a little bit more about my country through its national literature canon, I can’t help but think of Kit Pearson and how much she taught me about Canadian history and culture. I know she would forgive my ineptitude in wilderness exploration and parental separation, because I related to her books in other ways. Without her, I wouldn’t be inspired to read the work of Munro, Ondaatje, and Davies, which I know I should probably get to sometime. I might even go camping again.
Tags: books, canada, cancon, canlit, kit pearson, Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, reading, something something canada, these books are TIGHT
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Kit Pearson was super important to me as a preteen in an inverse and opposite way: as someone who had been moved out of Ontario a few years before, they were the only written proof I could find that my family’s way of speaking and decamping-to-the-cottage way of life was real to the world. (I bought most of them on trips home, but I managed to find a couple at the library in Texas, meaning my peers had NO EXCUSE not to know that we did have summer in Canada.)
Other than Looking at the Moon, my favourite was Awake and Dreaming, because the feeling of disappearing straight out of your life was the truth of middle school for me.
I’m gonna have to pick these up and read them. My own CanLit affection sprung from picking up a worn paperback copy of Gordon Korman’s “I Want To Go Home!” from a used-book store. I ultimately read, I think, his entire bibliography, which is largely about teenagers who want to live outside adult rules. Also he almost never uses the word “said” if it could be replaced with “intoned” or “remarked” or “shouted”. I used to check four or five of his books out of the library at a time, over and over. Great days.
I have so many feelings of nostalgia for Kit Pearson! I don’t know that I related to the circumstances her characters found themselves in too much either, but I was a weirdo bookworm type and therefore loved stuff like A Handful of Time. When reading her books, I felt like she must be describing the version of Canada that my mother grew up in, which, sort of, except my mother grew up poor so she wasn’t exactly attending private boarding schools. Anyway, I loved Kit Pearson, and I actually think the Guests of War trilogy was my gateway to other historical fiction.
Are there any Victoria, BC Toasties? Kit Pearson does an Awake and Dreaming tour here!!
What? That’s amazing! I may have to go next time I’m in town…
It is only once a year, in June, I think. Plan a trip?!
I went to that a couple years ago! She’s super lovely, and looks exactly how you’d expect her to.
oh great! I’m going with some friends from work. The “secret surprise” at the end has me really interested
That’s amazing! I wish I had known this back when I still lived there.
Wow my 10 year old self is bugging out!
This is a super smart and insightful reflection on the normalizing impact that CanLit can have. And it really points to how thinking of CanLit as a “genre” or a “canon” — dominated by white folks writing about pine trees and canoes — can render it incredibly off-putting. If you’re interested in discovering more about the incredible, multifaceted literatures your country produces, why not give Munro and Davies a miss and try Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl or Rawi Hage’s Cockroach or Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, books that represent Canada as urban and diverse and set in a politically charged present (or future) rather than trapped in a rural and whitewashed past?
Ahhh I’m trying to read books from around the world and I think you’ve helped me come up with more books for the Canada part. Thank you!
Also, Joseph Boyden, or Nalo Hopkinson. Saleema Nawaz’s Bread and Bone sounds like it might be right up Manisha’s alley, as from what I understand from interviews with the author, it touches on a lot of similar themes to this piece (I haven’t read it yet)!
Edited to add: also somehow forgot Thomas King and Richard Wagamese. I would especially recommend Indian Horse as it is the only time I’ve ever found hockey interesting (also the book is powerful and wonderful all around).
This is so timely. I read the Daring Game so many times as a kid, and came across it recently at Value Village, so I’ve been rereading it. Kit Pearson, and L.M. Montgomery’s Emily books probably play more of a role in my Canadian identity than I realized.
Kit Pearson’s books were definitely a huge part of my childhood. My family has been in Canada for quite a while, so I was coming at it from the opposite direction from you: these books actually made me feel like the world I was living in had some relation to the “world of books”, most of which seemed set in the US or Europe which seemed like vaguely unreal places to me as a kid. Awake and Dreaming, on the other hand, was set in my home town, and I could see the house the family lived in from the cemetary my mother used to take us for walks in.
There are two new Kit Pearson books that I would like to recommend to Toasties – “The Whole Truth” and “Nothing but the Truth”. They are a bit more less WASP-y than the earlier works, and more mature. I just had them from the library and read them each twice.
How, HOW did I not know that A Handful of Time and the Guests of War series were written by the same author??? My preteen mind is totally blown.
The Daring Game stressed me out so much because I was such a rule-follower, but I loved it. I also loved the Guests of War trilogy, but I was a sucker for anything World War II.
Helen is always getting into trouble, and introduces a Daring Game in the girls’ dorm
I’m going to seek this out and read it, and be very very happy that I didn’t encounter it as a child, when just hearing of something called The Daring Game would strike me through with a terrible certainty that it would be inflicted on me at the next slumber party.
Thank you for this! When I was a new immigrant in Canada, fresh-ish off the plane from Birmingham (UK), my local librarian gave me ‘The Sky is Falling’ to read, in the hopes that it would cheer me up about being bullied for my accent. In this a context, I returned to her books throughout my adolescence and enjoyed them all, including ‘The Daring Game’. However, I’d never realized quite how WASP-ish her books are; thank you for pointing it out.
On a point of curiosity, has anyone read Jean Little’s ‘Willow and Twig’? An interesting take on Canadian POC meeting Canadian WASPs in a family wrangle.
I’ve forgotten the details of Willow and Twig (I haven’t read it for a dozen years, I’m guessing), and I’m curious now to see how it holds up; I remember really enjoying it, but I also tended to find Jean Little kind of…preachy?
Willow and Twig are mixed race kids, whose mother abandons them in Vancouver; they discover they have WASP family in small-town Ontario, against which their mother had rebelled. Twig has the added complication of being deaf. They make their way there and settle in. Complications and prejudice ensue — there are some memorable scenes with a bitchy flight attendant and a horrible police officer. I do wonder whether Willow and Twig’s Vancouver context might be some sort of veiled reference to the Vancouver East Side missing women issue — in that it seems really easy for them to go off the grid and there’s a horrible police officer who doesn’t seem to care? I’m not a POC (though I do have a disability), so I’m not sure I have a horse in this race, but I’d be interested in the opinions of those who do.
Yeah, I can see what you mean about preachy (she knows how to tug your heartstrings in key places — I still bawl at the end of ‘Mine for Keeps’ every time I read it), though I think she balances it out with humour and insight. A Canadian Dickens, perhaps.
Thank you for this, it’s lovely.
I read a looooot of Canadian YA as a child (Kit Pearson, Janet Lunn, Jean Little, everyone), but Pearson was always my favourite, especially the Guests of War series. Aside from the stereotypical wandering in the woods thing (god, how I wanted to visit the Ogilvies’ cottage!), she always did a really fantastic job of capturing early adolescence, I thought. I still cringe when I think about Norah’s crush on the older cousin.
Thank you, Manisha and The Toast, for solving a several-years-long game of Name that Book. Turns out “girl goes back in time while at summer camp, maybe?” is Handful of Time. Saw that cover and boom!, instant recognition.
Peason is still writing marvelous books and has expanded somewhat from just button-nosed Anglo girls. Abandonment is still an issue though. 😉
Cherrisonne, Jean’s Little’s niece was one of the woman murdered by Picton. http://www.missingpeople.net/they_know_she_was_mu…
And Gordon Korman is still writing – but then he was first published as a teenager.
I loved Kit Pearson books as a kid, and I loved this perspective on them. Thanks for knocking it out of the park again, The Toast!
Also, definitely read Michael Ondaatje, that shit is sexy.
I’m a born-and-raised Canadian and I loved reading Kit Pearson as a kid. And Janet Lunn! And those Tom Austen mysteries (“Murder on ‘The Canadian'”!!). Canadian children’s lit is really superb, and doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Overrated Canadian novelists for grown-ups (MICHAEL ONDAATJE) steal all the attention.
If you like Kit Pearson’s style, you might enjoy an anthology she edited called “This Land.” It’s a collection of short stories and novel excerpts arranged by province, with each province/territory represented. I loved it when I was a kid.
http://www.kitpearson.com/thisland.html
Yes on Thomas King–Green Grass Running Water is amazing. Lawrence Hill is also a good choice.
I remembered that I loooved A Handful of Time as a kid until I got to the part where you briefly summarize the plot, and then I realized that I had confused that book with a probably different children’s CanLit time-travel novel, one involving a root cellar? Yes, it was actually the root cellar book that I loved.
But really, Kit Pearson-esque books never really appealed to me very much. The settings felt so foreign to me (and I was just a Maritimer!) and I loved fantasy far more. O.R. Melling was a favourite for me. Canadians in Ireland travelling into the past or getting involved with the Faerie court? That was far more style.
OH MY GOD SOMEONE ELSE READ THE ROOT CELLAR
fun fact: the only retail job i didn’t hate was working at Chapters, where i would REGULARLY AND VIOLENTLY RECOMMEND THE ROOT CELLAR TO ALL PARENTS WANDERING AIMLESSLY IN THE YA SECTION.
mind you, it was only after about a month of working there that i was finally able to remember the effing title, at which point i just got really excited and would thrust copies into the faces/hands of all my coworkers, regardless of personal space.
I WAS THAT GUY (gal).
#sorrynotsorry
WHAT? I can’t believe it’s actually called “The Root Cellar.” And the thing is, that title was probably the reason I picked that book up in the first place. I think I loved root cellars even before I met that book. I also love potato houses (the kind that they have in New Brunswick up in “badayda” country where the air smells of french fries) and old houses that are still insulated with seaweed.
This is late because I have been busy and SLOW to catch up on The Toast
BUT
I stole my middle school’s copy of The Root Cellar (by which I mean I borrowed it from the library in 6th grade and “forgot” to return it before I graduated 8th grade) because I adored it so much. I still have it hidden in the back of my bookshelf 17 years later because I can’t bear to part with it but am ashamed of the stealing now that I am grown up. I loved time travel books even back then, and it was probably the first thing that ever taught me how intertwined US and Canadian history is. (They never told us that Canada ever had anything to do with the US, when I was in school. Also, Canada is a super foreign place if you’ve never left Florida. I mean, snow? and French instead of Spanish?)
This made me remember that “The Root Cellar” is on my to-read-someday list. I must move it closer to the top.
I read the Guests of War trilogy as an adult, and I have never felt so bereft at the end of a series (even with books that I loved better, or that I thought were ‘better’) to think that these people were fictional and I will never know what happened to them after the series ended.