The incredibly beautiful land and seascapes, places where worlds entwine, are not merely backdrops or stages for action. Life in Kitamaat Village is evoked beautifully and honestly, without being prettified. Yet Monkey Beach is more than a coming-of-age novel. Through Lisa's keen observations, we recognize people who wear their pain on the outside like medals and others who have put their medals away and given up.

She hints at the connection between grief and anger at getting stuck in anger as a way to avoid life. Lisa offers insights on loving families, sibling rivalry, scapegoating, fear, aggression, sexuality, alcohol and drug abuse. Flashing back through those ten traumatic years, Lisamarie relives her childhood, her floundering through puberty, her running away to the city to party-party-party, trying to leave her grief behind her, to block out the things she feels and the things she sees.Īs a coming-of-age story told from the 19-year-old girl's point of view, Monkey Beach is better than good. Jimmy's disappearance triggers Lisa's memories of other lost loved ones - her favorite uncle, Mick, killed in a fishing accident some ten years earlier her aged grandmother Ma-ma-oo, dead in a house fire and a childhood friend who recently committed suicide. Suspense rivets the reader's attention until the very last page. Lisa takes the outboard and travels by water to join them. Her parents fly out to be nearer the search site. Lisa and her parents, Albert and Gladys, wait by the telephone for news.

Jimmy and his boss Josh are missing and feared drowned. As the story opens, the boat Lisa's 18-year-old brother Jimmy is working on is overdue.

Set in 1989 and narrated by 19-year-old Lisamarie Michelle Hill from Kitamaat Village, Monkey Beach is a psychological thriller with supernatural overtones. With Monkey Beach, Robinson makes this territory her own. The award-winning author of Traplines has a legitimate claim to this untold part of the map, around the Douglas Channel between Prince Rupert and Bella Bella on British Columbia's northwest coast. The appearance of these mythical creatures - in reality, in story, in dreams, or in visions - is central to the plot of Eden Robinson's first novel, Monkey Beach. Monkey Beach is a place where Sasquatches are often sighted.

B'gwus is the Haisla name for a Sasquatch, a creature that looks like a 'large hairy monkey' rumored to live in the rain forest of the Pacific Coast.

Eden robinson's monkey beach