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Title: Manitoulin Memories

Author: W. J. Reeves

Narrator: Wyntner Woody

Format: Unabridged

Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-25-14

Publisher: brooklyns best prose

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Manitoulin Memories is a collection of coming-of-age stories set in Canada in the 1950s. They are about a man who's recalling his father and take place in Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada, which is now dead, consumed by civilization. After WW II, tourists came to the island from the States for a summer getaway. Manitoulin Memories deals with those who came and what they found and how they ended up; it makes use of a middle-aged man who returns to the Manitoulin to see how it is and to learn who he was when he lived there. Manitoulin Island is the largest freshwater island in the world which, as a fact, shrinks in significance the more you think about it. On a map, the Manitoulin is a blob of land dividing the southern half of Lake Huron from its North Channel.

Members Reviews:

Mixing Past and Present

In Manitoulin Memories is the story of a man going back to his boyhood home, reliving the memories and finding them in the present in the guise of the people he encounters and the places he sees changed. It's a story of learning what it means not to have to look back. This book will 'take you warmly by the hand' and walk you along, unmindful at times at your confusion, encouraging your confusion at other times so that you might lose yourself in its story. But the writer leaves in all sorts of nuggets of delight in the form of wit, sarcasm and smarm. All in a way that coaxes the reader through page after page with darn good writing.

We have acts of vengeance, acts of heroism, and acts of morality - some of these in the past, some in the present. We have a case full of snakes unleashed on an unsuspecting restaurant. We have a cow's bathroom habits being mistaken for a prolonged case of carsickness. And the cover up of the effects of said cow's habits through the powers of orange juice. We have characters ingratiating themselves, and the author's clear amusement in them, a circumspect 'ho ho' in rich, arch tone as the gluttons gorge and the ignorant blunder. And it's the blunders which act as reflections of the protagonist's discontent with the past: in the past, careless errors and misfortunes were painful realities, and in the future they are harmless mistakes, at times corrected at the cost of nature's demise.

This is a story in the true sense of the word. Its characters are readily understood, and their story is readily accepted. The narrator is both serious and playful, presenting us with a view into the world of Manitoulin as it once was and as it is now, for the reader to feast on.

You Can't Go Home Again

"Manitoulin Memories" traces the slow steady decline of a family from Indiana that moves to Manitoulin Island in search of peace and authenticity, but finds mostly hardship and dissipation. The son Jimmy, now a professor in Brooklyn, returns after thirty years searching for his past, the story unfolding in a series of parallels between the present and the past that reveal a man hungry for human companionship, but pushing it away with sarcasm and indifference borne of growing up too soon. Robbed of his childhood by a mother with multiple sclerosis and a father (whom he obviously adored) that drank, Jimmy does not blame them, but the locals who snubbed his family and the tourists that have overrun Manitoulin Island.