Boundary

Author/Guide: Andrée Michaud

Why a Booktrail?

1967: A holiday hotspot, a calming lake….then a girl ends up dead

ISBN: 978-1843449980
Genre: Crime, Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

It’s the Summer of 1967. The sun shines brightly over Boundary Pond, a lake on the US/Canada border. Holiday makers enjoy the summer, happy and carefree. Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan play in the hot sand. Children run along the beach as the hours tick away to the sound of the radio blaring out the latest hits and the smell of barbecues. Life seems idyllic.

But then Zaza disappears, and the skies begin to cloud over…

Locations

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Travel Guide

Boundary Lake

This is a remote and claustrophobic place to holiday or live. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by haunting woods and the chilling sounds of nocturnal animals, this is a place where log cabins are the only signs of life. Loggers, people who live off the land live here and youngster can roam free, carefree that is until one of the popular girls is found dead.

The wood surrounding the lake proves to be a very strange and eerie place, where not many people go but the animals run free. Where traps are laid to catch them and where strange creatures both human and animal have been spotted. People live around the woods but characters live closer still. Men who have been given names by the locals to describe their behaviour and habits. Neither a place you would want your children nor yourself to be.

This is a world created as if it were a microclimate of fear and isolation. the facade of a holiday but with the reality of something much more horrific, Where children sing songs they’ve heard on the radio, where bats fly out of the caves at night, where local landmarks are named after flora and fauna and a world where people live off the land, where they are the landscape themselves.

The landscape straddles the US/Canadian border and the regular references to the weather, the elements and the soil makes this an earthy, raw and visceral read.

Booktrailer Review

Susan @thebooktrailer

This reminded me like a really grim version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Red Riding Hood. A girl goes missing in a forest but this time is found dead. The shady characters all around are all suspects. Some of them have names like very evil characters. This had me creeped out from the beginning as the writing is sparse and deliberate. Haunting in its simplicity and slow to reveal the full story. But it’s a short novel and so every word counts. It’s sparse and deliberate though and like the wood in the novel, it swallows you up.

This book has won Canada Governor General Award and does stand out for its sharp spiky text. It’s creepy and the fate of the girl is only part of the full story. I liked the way the setting was evoked by the weather and how it sounds, tastes and creates such an atmosphere on the people of the area. The references to Lazy boys and popular songs of the time help to frame this in time. But I’m not sure I’d like to go to Boundary after this. Of course I would really as the author mentions at the end of the novel just how much she enjoys it there. Evil it seems can lurk anywhere.