Frenchtown Summer

This 30 chapter prose poem, rich in metaphorical language, details one summer of Eugene's life in Frenchtown. Cameos of family members are fluently drawn and relationships clearly delineated: his father's distant, enigmatic presence; his mother's tenderness. Eugene's contemporaries are by turns confiding and cruel - here Cormier draws the landscape of childhood most powerfully. It is the mocking disbelief of Eugene's friends which occasions his father's unexpected support in confirming his sighting of an orange plane in a neighbour's yard. This is a short book but one seamed with shrewd obser-vations of the minutiae of family and community life and the particulars of familiar surroundings. Frenchtown Summer may not be a landmark in Cormier's work but it is a poetic reminder of his remarkable control of language and consummate skill as an observer.