Stillwater
A Novel
- Publisher
- Tidewater Press
- Publication date
- May 2023
- Subjects
- Comparative Cultures, Culinary Arts, English: Creative Writing, Family and Society
- Themes
- body, mind and spirit, cultural teachings, family, religion
- Grade Levels
- 10 to 12
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781990160202
- Publish Date
- May 2023
- List Price
- $22.95
Where to buy it
Descriptive Review
Sixteen-year-old Lizzy loves science; she even has her own microscope. Her father is a nurse who, when COVID changes the world, refuses to be vaccinated. He follows the principles of the Seventh-day Adventists and tries to protect his family by taking them to Stillwater, an enclave of SDA believers. So, Lizzy must leave the special school where she’s been guided by her science teacher, a woman helping her complete high school so she can pursue higher education, a path deemed inappropriate for females.
When Marie, Lizzy’s mother, is badly injured in a car crash, Lizzy’s well-intentioned actions cause Marie to become addicted to painkillers, medicines that are strictly forbidden at Stillwater. When Zach, her younger brother, begins exhibiting a strong fondness for another boy, Lizzy knows there will be trouble and kidnaps her mother and brother in a desperate kind of rescue. Family secrets and tensions abound in this exciting book. Stillwater’s vegan recipes appear at each chapter’s end.
Cautions / Content Warnings: Followers of evangelical religions could be offended by doubts expressed, some of which could be construed as blasphemous.
Other End Matter: None
Images: None
Bibliography: No
Index: No
Evaluator: Heidi G., K-12 Educator, BC Books for Schools
About the author
Contributor Notes
Darcie Friesen Hossack is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers with roots in the Mennonite and Seventh-day Adventist communities. A career food writer and editor of the online WordCity Literary Journal, her short story collection, Mennonites Don’t Dance (Thistledown Press), was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading Evergreen Award for Adult Fiction. A resident of northern Alberta, Stillwater is her first novel.
Excerpt: Stillwater: A Novel (by Darcie Friesen Hossack)
Prologue
Remember the day you punched the wall? You were tall enough to miss my head so your fist left a hole in the plaster. For as long as we lived in that house, I used it to measure my growth. Dad, I’m here with you now as the nurse comes in to check your oxygen and listen to your lungs. When she’s finished, she draws your covers back over you, and you’re so small you barely make a shape.
Some days I go home and sit in my empty bathtub. Everywhere else is too big, and I need to feel the walls around me. They keep me from breaking apart and scattering. Although, if I did that in there, I might just slip down the drain.
I’ll remember to put the stopper in next time.
In the bathtub, with the door closed and the light off, I’m underneath our basement stairs again. You never once found me there. Is it because you never looked? I wonder that now. Maybe you were glad when I disappeared. When you no longer had to harden yourself to make sure I didn’t grow up too soft.
This morning, I drove past our old house and remembered the day the washing machine was full of blankets and became unbalanced and made a terrible noise. When Mom, Zach and I all came running down the stairs, there you were, sitting on top of the lid, laughing and trying to keep the machine from shuddering its way across the room.
That should have been a good memory. But you got angry. You thought we were laughing at you. You didn’t know all you had to do was open the lid.
I still have the Messages to Young People you gave me for my baptism. The same copy that was given to you for yours. I brought it with me to school, Dad. It’s the only thing I have that belonged to you, otherwise I would dig a hole and bury it in our old backyard, next to all the birds and other things I found dead or killed, having lost their breath of life.
There are more things down there than you know. The neighbours’ cat that got hit by a car and the neighbours didn’t care. The casserole Zach made that you said tasted like sin. Mom’s wedding watch and the pretty blue church shoes you bought me once when you took me to the mall, and then got mad because I liked them too much. They’re all under the rhubarb. The shoes are still in their box. I never wore them. Not even once.
You know what I buried at Stillwater.
Editorial Reviews
". . . a delicious story of simmering cultural tensions that boil over during the pandemic. In turns irreverent, funny, deeply moving and heart-wrenching . . . " GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist
". . . a compelling exploration of family, liberation . . . and food." ANDREW UNGER, author of Once Removed and The Unger Review
“Darcie Friesen Hossack’s Lizzy grabbed hold of my heart right from chapter one. A fierce hero at war with her upbringing, with her father’s ideology, and with the society she does not yet have the power to escape, Lizzy inspires me . . . Stillwater reminds me that even with damaged wings, we can learn to fly. We must. Go, Lizzy!” ANGIE ABDOU, author of In Case I Go and This One Wild Life
“Seventh-day Adventists are rarely represented in literary fiction. And when the Adventist church does get a mention in serious literature, the depiction is often unflattering. Darcie Friesen Hossack’s recent novel Stillwater offers a damning portrait of an Adventist community that is also thoughtful, nuanced, and insightful.. . . like all good fiction, Stillwater deals not in abstractions but in specifics. The detailed evocation of the story’s Adventist and Mennonite communities—right down to the recipes—is what makes this novel powerful and memorable.” TRUDY J. MORGAN-COLE, Spectrum magazine