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Wolf Pack of the Winisk River

by Paul Brown

It might be a tad cynical, but it’s all the same difficult to shake the impression that Wolf Pack of the Winisk River, the first book from Belleville, Ontario, author Paul Brown, was written to satisfy a market segment. Normally, this would not be the case for a book-length narrative poem – which, sad but true, typically has no market segment whatsoever – but Brown’s book, which chronicles the journey of a wolf pack along the Winisk River to Hudson Bay, seems tailor-made for that most crucial of YA markets: the public-school curriculum.

This is perhaps not entirely surprising. Brown is a retired schoolteacher, and he’s delivered a book that might be useful in English or language-arts classes, or as support material for science, nature, or ecology programs. It wouldn’t be an issue at all if only Wolf Pack of the Winisk River were a stronger book in its own right.   

At a narrative level, the book functions well enough. The pack’s epic journey north is marked by hunts, periods of hunger, painful losses, and emotional reunions. It’s an occasionally exciting story, the sort of “nature lite” that will be familiar to those old enough to recall episodes of Hinterland Who’s Who. Brown stops short of anthropomorphizing his wild characters, but he comes close, given the emotional content and the breathless nature of the narrative voice.

As a poem, though, Winisk River doesn’t impress. Free verse isn’t a licence for lazy metaphors and clichés, a fact that is perhaps more important when writing for younger readers. “They tough it out// they spit in the face of winter” is, sadly, typical of much of the writing, and makes Brown’s novel difficult to recommend, regardless of how appropriate it might seem for course adoption.

 

Reviewer: Robert J. Wiersema

Publisher: Lobster Press

DETAILS

Price: $10.95

Page Count: 92 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-89755-010-6

Released: April

Issue Date: 2009-5

Categories:

Age Range: 10+