 Today on to Book of Books, we're talking about Grey Dog by Elliot Gish. This is a book that I got sent to me by ECW Press, so thank you very much. There's another ECW Press book coming up. This was out on the 9th of April, so just out now. While proving catalogs of new books, Grey Dog caught my eye because of the contradictory nature of its cover. I was hoping that it would have something to do with some sort of body horror, some animalistic nature transformation, and I wasn't exactly right, although there is some sort of body horror if you count the use of dead animals within the story. So yes, if you're not a fan of dead animals being littered about, it's, you know, a typical forest walk amount of dead animals is not, uh, uh, Agostina Basterica amount of dead animals. So, yeah. Anyway, stark nature of what almost looks to be like a woodcut lent itself to the description of the book taking place in the 1900s. So it had this botanical dark academia flavor just from the illustration on the front. I liked the choice of fonts, even though they kind of clash a little bit, but they are simplistic and they do work with this plain white text on the blood red cover. I liked the idea of heading into a story where you thought it could be Anne of Green Gables on one hand and an unreliable narrator on the other. Much to my delight, the author is from the east coast and did find inspiration in Lucy Modern Montgomery's works, the Anne of Green Gables, and her other series, which I've not read and I really ought to. Then, of course, having the proof of an unreliable narrator in the summary that Ada Bird, school teacher, will lose her grip on reality while cast aside in the 1900s, woodland countryside grabbed my attention. I wore grey eyeshadow and have grey nails and a grey shirt in honor of grey dog today. Isn't that fantastic? Now we begin with Ada finding a diary that is blank that would have been gifted to her by her now deceased sister. Ada decides that this would be a great time to start a diary as she's being drafted to teach in a one room schoolhouse in the countryside. Ada has been a teacher for several years. She is unwed, she is a spinster, and maybe not the best teacher because she dislikes it so much, but would like it if she could focus on the thing that she likes to teach the most natural science, the science of the natural world, flora and fauna. Part of that stems from her spending so much time outside as a youth, and we hear quite a lot about her youth, her dislike of her father, her love of her dead sister, and now she's found herself quite alone in the world and we hear a lot about that too. From the back of the book, the years 1901 and Ada Bird's spinster schoolmarm amateur naturalist accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowery Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself when no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past, riddled with grief and shame, has never seemed so far away. But then Ada begins to witness a strange and grisly swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed fawn, and soon believes that something ancient and beastly, which she calls the gray dog, is behind these visceral offerings which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory begins to fail. Ada takes on the wildness of the woods and begins to wonder, which is more dangerous, the gray dog or herself. I really love a good, well-written summary, don't you? I found this book really well put together, and you're pulled through the story, not in a three act formula, but in a diary. So the three act formula, or 14 act formula, the screenplay formula, whatever goes out the window, although it probably would adhere to it if you were to plot the book out against a structure like that. So there's no real saggy middle, there's no like hook or promise of the premise and all of that writerly stuff seems to go out the window because you are really just tugged along reading this woman's diary and it sells itself like that, you become quite immersed in it like that, which I think means it works. So as I said, there's no saggy middle, there's no twist ending that you're looking forward time to figure it out. It just pulls you along into the story like a good story should. So I think that the exciting scenes within this book come as a surprise in both of my favorite scenes. I was not expecting what I was about to read at all in either case. And when she goes in sort of a work related excursion on the other side of the river, the bad side of town so to speak, and how it unfolds is just so dark and so dangerous feeling. It just is a fantastic scene within the book and it happens closer to the end, definitely past the halfway point. Not long after that there is a scene, which is the next one that I did not expect at all and it happens during a snowstorm. So being from Northern Ontario, I have an affinity with the snow. I have a strange relationship with the snow. I hate the snow. I hate it. I fear the snow. And as you should, you know, it's a scary, terrible thing. It's the most dangerous animal we have here. And I think that the mentions of the snow so far within this story are kind of benign. Like you know like what the snow in winter is about living in Canada. It's not until it's showing up in literal droves on your doorstep that it poses a real danger and you sort of wake up to the danger of the snow all of a sudden one day like we all actually do and in this book it does it quite beautifully. And it's such a critical scene in the character of Ada as well. It's a scary and awkward scene because of the style, the writing changes within her diary and it's just a very tense, sad, broken and scary scene that happens and I just absolutely loved it. And it doesn't happen, you know, they don't catch your attention with big fireworks explosion near the beginning or the middle or the end. They just rely on us getting to know Ada so that this scene has a lot more impact because we are frightened along with her. And I think it just has a lot more impact later on in the story. It's just very elegant to have placed it where it is. Now, the setting, of course, is the countryside where the snow is extra dangerous and that's really what it's all about. It is the 1900s, so there isn't a lot to do in a small community. It's probably a community of about 200 people. I think we get to know about two dozen at the outside, including all the kids she teaches. And I think they say in the book that it's definitely under 500, but it might be as little as 100 people. I don't know, it's a very, very small town and there's some sort of grouser probably, but everyone seems to just go to church in school. Everyone goes to town for anything that they need. There's the church in the school and a few farms and people's houses. So what more do you need? You know, anything that you need in town, which is Portsmouth, where the train station is and I'm assuming the larger grocers and any sort of tech shop general store, all that seems to be in Portsmouth, which seems to be quite a drive away. Once in a while, they have a harvest festival of some sort, dancing, hunting, other pastimes and gossiping. That's mostly what they do in this town. So gossiping is like number one pastime in any small community. And I grew up in a town. I think the population was something around 3,000 for the larger area and maybe 300 for the small village town. So I can relate to this. So having these long dirt roads, long walks, driving snow that keeps you from getting too far in the winter, sweltering heat in the summer and it makes you wish you were dressed lighter, I guess, all the time. The boring times of one small church and this little community and even the more boring times in the small schoolhouse really spoke to me. The sorts of environments described I walked these sorts of roads and sat in that little tiny church and visited the ruins of, admittedly, the one room schoolhouse. Although I did spend quite a bit of time as a really little kid in the Women's Institute building, which was a one room schoolhouse converted to a community center type place where they had a piano and singing books and arts and crafts supplies and held Women's Institute meetings. Are you a member of the Women's Institute? If you are, definitely drop a note in the comments because not many people are anymore. And if anything, more people should be. So in a small community, even today, that sort of thing doesn't really change rapidly in the countryside. But having the experience communicated to me through aunts and uncles, my grandmother and people like that, I understood what it was like to live in the time of these one room schoolhouse realities, sort of like when everyone had horses and not many people had cars. So I can really picture it through photos of my grandmother's youth who was born maybe 10 years after the story was set. And then my great-grandmother's photos who lived exactly through this period and was about the same age as Ada Bird. I have to say, she maybe looks a little bit like her. It's tough for me to picture Ada Bird, but we'll touch on that in a minute. Ada Bird, of course, is the main character. And her father, she has a deceased sister named Flory, who she talks about often and thinks about it twice as often. And she comes to live with the Greers. Mr. and Mrs. Greer are characters. And they have first names, many people do. But Ada doesn't really mention them. So I will let you discover them as you read this book because they're not mentioned very often and used to a certain effect. And that's part of the quirks of Ada's character. And she doesn't use someone's name. It comes with a lot of emotion when she does the rare times in her diary. She becomes friends with the pastor's wife, Agatha, whose name is used quite often up until a certain point. And she's mentioned a lot in this book. I don't quite remember the name of the actual town, but Portsmouth, which I mentioned, sort of becomes a character in itself because anything important comes from or goes to Portsmouth. Mrs. Kinsley lives down the road and no one in town seems to like her and she's being shunned for whatever reason, which you do get to learn along with Ada. Mrs. Castle is the local Puritan and she seems to live also just down the way. Everyone lives just down the way as do the children. The children in the class are also introduced to us one by one. There's 15 of them or something, almost a count of disciples, so maybe there's 12 or 13. But yeah, you get to know all the kids as well who normally go by their first names and they're just introduced through their relationships and the families that they belong to. Children and the families in the town being described. I just think it's so meaty, it helps you feel grounded as she's feeling out her new post as the teacher there. One of the first people that she meets in town is this little girl in the forest called Muriel. Muriel ends up being one of her students. She lives on the wrong side of town on the other side of the bridge and you get to know quite a bit about what people think of people born on the other side of the bridge. There is a distinct demarcation line in the middle of this town. Now I'm sort of mixing the setting and the characters here but they do become very entwined and I think that the relationship between the people and the setting and the way that the setting influences people is found very much within Muriel. She's a bit of a wild child, yet she has some very dark problems going on at home and one of the highlights of the book or lowlights maybe depending on how you look at it is a climactic moment where Ada goes to the home of Muriel on a teacher-parent kind of call and it's so tense and so dark because we're suddenly on the other side that demarcation line on the other side of the river we've crossed the moving water over the bridge into the wrong side of town and it's you can really feel it that oppressive dark anything can happen sort of nature happens when she visits Muriel's home and you sort of get that idea when you first meet Muriel even though it's very subtle. I think the part of the fun and the sort of vagueness that you get with a lot of these characters is because it's written in a diary format and we're relying entirely on Ada to tell us who everyone is and she keeps getting caught up in her ruminations and her sort of obsessive compulsive stories that she rehashes over and over again and you could imagine that we're hearing about it for the first time but this is something that she's been going round and round with in her mind for so long that what ends up on the page is that and not necessarily people's names or important facts and that brings us to Ada Bird, Ada Bird herself a very interesting character. I sort of have this vacillating image of what Ada looks like and it goes between a very plain, you know Anna Green Gables, someone that looks like my great-grandmother in a grayish kind of dishwater brown hair, kind of plain looking just like a very plain clothes a short waist and a smock or whatever you call it, the outer piece in a long skirt, black boots, like a teacher not ugly or gorgeous, just very plain looking a very average looking a person sort of like the stepsisters maybe from Cinderella if we want to get darker and this sort of hideous thing that's almost surreal or ethereal this creature person or something like from Border by John Lengquist and you know someone that looks very animalistic and surreal, a very interesting looking person and then it goes back to me thinking that she's just plain looking school teacher and there's nothing spectacular about this person so it's really hard to pinpoint because she doesn't like to look at herself in a mirror we don't get much of a description of what Ada looks like and we cannot gauge by other people's reactions what she looks like at all I think not wanting to see herself in the mirror helps some personality too she's always been under the thumb of some authority figure or to a certain extent her more beautiful sister who she on one hand loves very very much but has definitely played second fiddle to in life and death so on top of all of those things being a teacher, she doesn't dwell on what she looks like so we don't get to either I guess in a nutshell, Ada is a teacher she is unwed, she's a spinster she is a girl with a spotted past and while being a pretty good person in her heart of hearts she's had a tarnished reputation tacked on to her through misadventure to put it lightly I think aside from Ada my favorite character is Meryl Agatha is very cool she is the preacher's wife that befriends Ada she's very modern if you're looking for the modern character in this it's probably Agatha Mrs. Greer is really well rounded though there's not a lot there if you want a snapshot of the very perfect 1900s wife it is probably Mrs. Greer she's just a proper woman who takes in borders a lot of the characters do have lives outside of what Ada thinks of them and we don't really hear much of that because it's only about what Ada thinks of them or sees and hears that we hear about so it's left very vague so if you enjoy books like Brahms book notably Sleuthfoot or you enjoy the film The Witch would just take place a good century or so before this book but it has a very similar feel then you would probably enjoy this book if you like that sort of small town Christian something going on and if you liked Harvest Home this is very similar you would really enjoy this book I wasn't expecting much of a heartbeat of a theme that I didn't catch on to until later in the book and I think that the theme is it's hunger very much hunger not hunger in the cannibalistic sense but a hunger in a yearning a soul gnawing hunger kind of sense Ada has this hunger to be loved like many people do or a hunger to find a place in the world in a home a real home and I think she begins the story actually physically hungry so yeah hunger is used in many subtle ways throughout this book and from the first page the tone rings true to the very end of the book and if you enjoy the first chapter or two of Getting to Know Ada through her diary entries then you will enjoy every single moment of this book as much as I did it's a cozy and wonderful novel as noted by a reader who found it a good book to curl up with as did I so yeah I had noticed it out in the wild when ECW offered me a couple books to read the next one up will be Withered another book from ECW that came as a kind of twofer for review copies from Yam insanely happy because those exact books had caught my eye and then when I had an offer from ECW I snapped them up and you should too if you've read Great Dog let me know in the comments I know that some of you have already or if you're in Halifax you can actually catch up with the author doing a signing this very weekend this is their debut novel without April 9th so yeah if you're looking for an author to support at the beginning of their novelist career pick up Great Dog by Elliot Gish she's also written some short stories from what I understand so I might go hunting those as well so I hope you enjoy this particular book thank you very much for watching and have an oaky spooky day