Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

2. Motorcycles & Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011)

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass sees Nanabush himself riding onto the Otter Lake reserve on a vintage motorcycle to fulfill a promise to an old friend and shake up the lives of the chief and her son.

While reading this book, I couldn't help but think what a great television mini-series it would make. I know the area where the story is set, and I could picture the land and the people so easily. The story is full of memorable characters and snappy dialogue, and it would be a perfect addition to my favourite genre of the Quirky Small Town. I even started mentally casting the roles.

However, the reason I spent so much time thinking about this story in terms of another medium is because it didn't work for me as a novel. I'm not overly familiar with the author's other work, but I wasn't surprised to learn that this was his first adult novel and that he's primarily a non-fiction writer and playwright.

The storytelling fell flat for me. It's frustrating because the story is bookended by sections with a very engaging narrator's voice, but for the bulk of it, that voice disappears and we're left with an overly omniscient but ultimately charmless point of view. Backstory, motivation, and feelings are clunkily and redundantly described at every turn, and it often seems as though characterization is broken solely for the purpose of getting a good zinger in. In addition (a publishing issue rather than the author's), my copy of the book contained several typos and flubs that further kept me from closing my editorial eyes and just enjoying the thing.

Motorcycles & Sweetgrass is full of some great ideas, and if philosophy, plot, setting, or characters are more your gateway into a book than narrative is, you may well enjoy it. I'm glad to have read it and to have had the opportunity to take away its ruminations on modernity and tradition, but it was a struggle for me to finish, and I can't see myself reading it again.