10 books like North of Normal

A true story of myth, madness, and greed, The Golden Spruce is one of those books that has hauntingly stuck with me since I read it. It’s the story of a forestry worker named Grant Hadwin who committed a bizarre act of environmental violence in Haida Gwaii and then mysteriously disappeared under suspicious circumstances. The book traces the life and career of Hadwin in an attempt to explain what possessed him to cut down a 300-year-old mystic golden Sitka Spruce known as Kiid K’iiyas, which has been a sacred part of the Haida People’s oral history for generations. John Vaillant’s description of the psychology of the man and the beauty of the wilderness in which Hadwin spent his life left such an impact on me that when I visited Haida Gwaii I hiked the trail to the now fallen sacred tree.

The gentle pacing of this story is so powerful. As his dying wish, Eldon Starlight, a war vet who has a fractured relationship with his soft-spoken 16-year-old son, Franklin, sends for his boy to take him to the mountains so he can be buried sitting up and facing east, in the Ojibway warrior way. I felt as if I too was moving step by step through the complex emotions as the estranged father and son navigated their way through the Canadian wilderness on the journey to heal past traumas and their relationship. The fact that such subtle writing can be so profound is something I think all readers will appreciate in this Canadian gem.

I randomly found The Break in a bookstore and was drawn in by the cover, which features a light-skinned Indigenous woman wearing a black dress covered in florals. It immediately reminded me of a ceremonial dress that was taken from White Earth long ago and now sits in a museum in Washington DC.

There is grief in the many removals and losses Indigenous people have endured through the years, and real human consequences that echo down the generations. But I feel fuller and wiser when I get to explore this through other’s perspectives.

There are many characters to keep track of in this book, but it is gratifying to get lost in their journeys, gleaning insights and teachings from their stories.

Xatsu’ll chief Bev Sellars spent much of her childhood in a Canadian Indian residential school called St. Joseph’s Mission and in a hospital to treat the tuberculosis she contracted while at the school. This is her first-person account of how the trauma of being taken from her family and community impacted not only her, but every member of her family for three generations. It also discusses her path to healing. The title refers to the fact that in an attempt to strip the children from all sense of their culture and identity, they were referred to by a number rather than their names. I studied the impact of the Canadian Indian Residential School system as part of my social work degree and read many books on the subject but this personal account resonated most profoundly for me.

A book I’d wanted to read for a long time, but it wasn’t until later in life I was able to get it. When I was just on the early stages of my writing career, my now longtime friend, Marty, said he had a spare copy of Cabal laying around and offered to send it to me. Marty was my writing mentor at the time as he’d been writing horror for many years previous, and his work is inspiring. So, knowing I was getting a book in the mail from my mentor, to whom I hadn’t met in person yet, was very exciting. The book itself was a tired secondhand copy (which I was told it was) yet this gave it more special meaning. Even the cover was a little torn and it was a pocket edition. So, I sat back with this little book, which I still have as… show more.

Following a newbie on her first big adventure always thrills me, and Meaghan’s account of riding her bike from northern BC to Baja, Mexico, accompanied by her equally inexperienced sister, brought me back to my own bicycle travels, 30 years earlier.

What changed, and what remained the same? We shared many of the same struggles: fear of bears and bicycle breakdowns, for starters, and trusting the road to whip our bodies into shape.

Traveling with a cell phone and online access to couch surfing were luxuries I couldn’t have imagined in 1978, but clocking the miles still mightily tests body, spirit, and a tight budget.

Meaghan is funny and vulnerable, engaging the senses in every aspect of her learn-as-you-go odyssey along the Pacific Coast. 

Another book with a delicious cover. I have long since lent my copy out and it never made its way back to me, but I remember the distinctive image of a woman in a black mask. Fairy tales offer dark female characters with a complexity that lends itself to further exploration. Zenia is the Robber Bride of the title and you don’t have to know the fairy tale to guess the story. Three friends share their accounts of how Zenia betrayed them in different ways. The reader forms a vivid picture of Zenia, but also the individual narrators. And there is a thrilling contemporary element to the narrative that propels the story. 

Now that’s a question that can be answered in a few sentences. Here’s goes…

This is among the finest examples of the true-crime genre. It’s an enthralling, pacey, and ingeniously structured account of the murders committed on both sides of the Atlantic by Dr. Neill Cream, a Scottish-born Canadian whose medical career served as camouflage for his psychopathic misogyny.

Macabre though the subject matter is, Jobb never wallows in that side of things, preferring to use the story as a vehicle for his vivid and insightful portrait of late nineteenth-century society.

Toews is a Canadian writer, not Midwestern, but I’m from Michigan and we tend to lump Canada in with us whenever possible. My list, my rules. The book takes place in the adorable town of Algren with heroine Knute and her daughter Summer Feelin’ as well as a cast of other quirky lovable small-town characters. Toews has the ability to write sweet and funny small-town stories without pandering to stereotypical character tropes. Whenever I think of this book, I think of the peaceful feeling it gave me one summer, reading on my porch steps or leaned over my grocery cart in line for checkout, whenever I had two free minutes to read. Toews later fiction is quite a bit darker and she does that well too, but I always love to sink into her earlier works when I want something feel-good.

Nobody for my dollar moves between front story and back story better than the Canadian author Alice Munro, whose 2013 Nobel Prize was recognition not only for the brilliance of her career but also for the possibilities of the short story as a form.

The final story in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” is among the most lasting fiction I’ve read, a meditation on memory and its limitations, as well as the compromises people make to help those they love and have hurt.