The Holding [Paperback]

This book was just what I was looking for. As a woman, it is sometimes hard to find books about the 'realness' of women. This book is fabulous. Following the lives of two women who lived almost 150 years apart in time, it blends the right amount of history and human emotion. You relate to the characters: you admire their strengths , and you sympathize with their struggles. They are strong and independent, yet vulnerable and endearing. An excellent read. This is a book that I will keep and re-read --- just so I can go back and re-visit the characters. I very much look forward to Merilyn Simonds next book.

In Merilyn Simonds's debut novel, THE HOLDING, two women living on the same piece of land decades apart are faced with emotional and physical isolation, and find strength in self-reliance.

In the 1800s young Margaret MacBayne, along with her family, leaves her Scottish fishing village in hopes of taming the wilderness of Canada and finding prosperity and happiness. Margaret and her three brothers lose their father directly upon landing in the New World, and their mother dies in childbirth soon after. When her brothers depart for logging camps each winter, leaving Margaret alone in the Canadian bush, she must find the physical and emotional strength to survive. She does survive, flourishing with the help of a Native woman who befriends her, protects her and teaches her traditional herbalism. When her brothers bring home a man to help on the homestead, Margaret falls unexpectedly in love. Soon her happiness is destroyed by a tragic accident, and the MacBayne family is splintered forever.

In the late 1990s Alyson Thompson, pregnant and alone while her moody and mysterious partner Walker is working at a logging camp, also deals with tragedy and loss. While exploring her land, the former MacBayne holding, she finds the remains of Margaret's garden and cabin, and within it, Margaret's journal. Alyson, a creative gardener, connects with Margaret's loss and the work she loved. Unbeknownst to Walker and her best friend, Alyson begins to revive Margaret's long-dormant garden and finds it a healing enterprise. Still, she must confront difficult truths about Walker and their future together.

Simonds artfully moves back and forth between the two perspectives of Margaret and Alyson, and intertwines them well. The land is the first connection between the two, but Margaret and Alyson share much more than simple geography. Both are women alone, even while in the company of men. Each has to navigate the space from loneliness to solitude. And each woman thinks about revenge in attempts to right wrongs done against them.

THE HOLDING is a story about creativity and emotional resources in the face of sadness and loss. It is about the innate and awesome courage of women. It is also about the fragility and importance of female friendships, as well as the joys and pains of love.

Simonds's book is romantic, mysterious and atmospheric, and the almost abrupt ending lends to its potency. Beautifully written, THE HOLDING is a thoughtful and poignant first novel.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

The Holding is about two women, both living in different centuries, forever drawn together by the landscape around them and by the hardships they are forced to endure. This is a lovely, symbolic and highly literate novel that exposes the troubled inner lives of its main characters and recounts with a startling precision, how these women struggle to survive against seemingly insurmountable odds.

In the mid 1800's Margaret MacBayne travels to Canada from Scotland with her mother, father, and three brothers. The MacBayne's are sad to leave behind Pittenweem, a small provincial town by the sea, but the hope of a better life in the new world spurs them forward. Upon arrival in Ontario, they are separated from their father, and faced with the death of their mother; Margaret and her brothers struggle to make ends meet in up north in Madawaska.

In the early 1990's Alyson Thomson has forsaken the hustle and bustle of city life for the wilds of Ontario, she and Walker, her disconsolate and melancholy ceramicist husband hope to further their artistic endeavors and obtain artistic inspiration by living in the wildness. Pregnant and desperate for a child, Alyson is devastated when she learns that Walker is prepared to a job up north for the winter. Finding herself alone and isolated, with the first of the season's storms brewing, the young woman finds unexpected solace in the hidden writings of Margaret.

Author, Merylin Simonds steadily draws the reader into the drama: Alyson and Margaret, although separated by generations, form an unlikely bond, anchored by the beauty of the earth around them. Alyson separated from Walker, and now questioning the validity of her marriage is smudged with unresolved sorrows of the past. Although their relationship seems to have lost much of its early passion, anticipation at his homecoming is like a "ragged ebb and flow" that wears at her heart. While Alyson struggles, Margaret is forever bound by the restraints of her time, unable to own property, she becomes like an "orphan in the wilderness," deserted by her brothers, left to tend the oxen and the fire.

Both these women exist in a landscape that is riddled with risks and temptations. Margaret registers such shock at this new country, and she realizes that it is life in the bush that is steadily changing her, bearing on her more heavily than the sea by Pittenweem. In the forest she finds no relief, "nothing in the landscape is familiar not the bald, grey rock, not the endless towering trees. Not the stillness of the wind nor the awful heat of the sun."

The novel is a horticulturalists delight, constantly pungent and always mysterious, the medicinal uses for herbs and flowers meticulously researched by the author. The prose is fluid and languid, purposefully reflecting the natural beauty of the landscape. Time periods change and the perspective constantly shifts, the author's voice moving back and forth between Alyson and Margaret, their new world inevitably forcing them to change and to grow.

Margaret eventually finds inspiration - and a certain freedom - in an unexpected friendship, while Alyson is forced to confront some difficult questions about her marriage. Essentially a story about the lives of women, love, loss, and also one's place in the world, The Holding is also about the land and the earth, and the people who work tirelessly to stake out a life for themselves in such harsh wilderness, carving out ranches, homes and barns. It's also a haunting tale of two spirited, and strong women of frugal and careful means, who ache to find happiness in a seemingly uncaring world. Mike Leonard January 06.

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