Book Club 2nd Edition

We have two reviews for this awesome book!

Our January book “In Winter I Get Up At Night” by Jane Urquhart proved to be an excellent discussion generator.  Nine of us met at Kathy’s to share our impressions of Emer, who is the narrator, and the numerous other characters introduced in the novel. Through Urquhart’s beautiful descriptions of Saskatchewan in all seasons and mostly in the early 1920s and 1950s, we get a feeling for what it was like for newcomers to settle in this vast country.  Subtly, Urquhart explores “Colonialism, scientific progress, and sinister effects of forces trying to divide societies.”
– submitted by Leslie Horsman

In Jane Urquhart’s “In Winter I Get Up at Night” the protagonist Emer, an itinerant music teacher, reminisces as she drives to rural schools in Saskatchewan. She recalls her year in hospital as a child with severe injuries from a prairie windstorm and the characters she met there – fellow sick children, nuns who had come from Europe to build the hospital, the two doctors who tended her (Dr. Angel and Dr. Carpenter) and the mysterious Conductor (? death) who lurked ominously. She also remembered the secret relationship she had with a famous man of science who used her anonymity to escape the public adulation he dreaded.

The story touches on many aspects of prairie settlement – the use of education to homogenise immigrants, intolerance of differences and even the presence of the Klu Klux Klan in 1930s Saskatchewan.

Most members enjoyed the book although at times it seemed fractured – perhaps a reflection of Emer’s shattered body.
– submitted by Kathy Lowe