Today I’m thrilled to be bringing you my conversation with award-winning writer Leslie Shimotakahara about her new novel SISTERS OF THE SPRUCE, set during World War One in Haida Gwaii (then known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) and loosely inspired by her grandmother’s experiences, and how the spirit of Charlotte Bronte’s classic JANE EYRE both infuses the novel’s atmosphere and also helped inspire its protagonist.
Leslie tells me about her long history as an avid reader, the story behind her memoir THE READING LIST (in which a wayward academic learns to love reading for pleasure again), how she first came upon JANE EYRE, what it felt like to encounter the novel again years later, and I also mention the fascinating bit of historical detail in SISTER OF THE SPRUCE that blew my mind!
About SISTERS OF THE SPRUCE:
World War One is in high gear. Fourteen-year-old Khya Terada moves with her family to a remote, misty inlet on Haida Gwaii, then the Queen Charlotte Islands, in northern British Columbia, known for its Sitka spruces. The Canadian government has passed an act to expedite logging of these majestic trees, desperately needed for the Allies’ aircrafts in Europe. At a camp on the inlet, Khya’s father, Sannosuke—a talented, daring logger with twenty years of experience since immigrating from Japan—assumes a position of leadership among the Japanese and Chinese workers.
But the arrival of a group of white loggers, eager to assert their authority, throws off balance the precarious life that Khya and her family have begun to establish. When a quarrel between Sannosuke and a white man known as “the Captain” escalates, leading to the betrayal of her older sister, Izzy, and humiliation for the family, Khya embarks on a perilous journey with her one friend—a half-Chinese sex worker, on the lam for her own reasons—to track down the man and force him to take responsibility. Yet nothing in the forest is as it appears. Can they save Izzy from ruination and find justice without condemning her to a life of danger, or exposing themselves to the violence of an angry, power-hungry man?
Drawing on inspiration from her ancestors’ stories and experiences, Shimotakahara weaves an entrancing tale of female adventure, friendship, and survival.
Leslie Shimotakahara's memoir, The Reading List, won the Canada-Japan Literary Prize, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the KM Hunter Artist Award. She has written two critically acclaimed novels, After the Bloom and Red Oblivion. After the Bloom received a starred review from Booklist and is Bustle’s number one choice in “50 Books To Read With Your Book Club,” while Kirkus Review praised Red Oblivion for displaying “virtuosity in this subtle deconstruction of one family’s tainted origins.” Her writing has appeared in the National Post, World Literature Today, and Changing the Face of Canadian Literature, among other anthologies and periodicals. She completed a PhD in English at Brown University. She and her husband live in Toronto’s west end.
Episode Seven: Leslie Shimotakahara