This was a generally pleasant read but that's pretty much it. The characters planned a depth to them and the story seemed a little too drawn out. It might have been better as a tightly edited short story than a novella.

A beautifully written novella set in 1970s Canada.A small Island characters that come alive looking forward to reading more by this author.Highly recommend this gem of a book.#netgalley .#fairlightbooks,

Tom’s life is pretty uneventful. As a young resident of Bear Lake, Canada during the 70’s, there’s not much he can do besides spending time with his best friend, Cormac, and visiting Denis when they’re both bored. However, that changes when the Dovonovitchs arrive in Bear Lake. Their younger daughter, Sasha, captures Tom’s attention and he must do everything in his power to get her attention back. Then, a horrible accident shatters Sasha’s life and shakes the small community to its core.
This book had great characters. I loved how, even though Tom is clearly the main character, the reader gets to follow other people’s story (Sasha and Cindy’s, for example). They were also well-written and developed, which I absolutely loved.
Atlantic Winds had a deeply moving story. It doesn’t give away all the answers but it has a complete story.
I recommend it.

3.5★
“He had been years above Sasha in school and she knew, as everyone knew, that he was much too old to be hanging out at the pool hall, where he was viewed by the kids, despite the cries of ‘Hey Jamie’ or ‘Hey Dencey!’, as something of a vague and troubling warning of what they too might become.”

Jamie Dence - one of those slightly older guys who is kind of daringly attractive to the girls and studied by the young boys to see what “cool” looks like. The story opens with a more boyish boy, Tom, who seems smitten with a girl who lives on a street near a couple of fellows he knows. He makes a point of spending as much time hanging out around them as he can, hoping to be noticed. He doesn't have Jamie's confidence.

Sasha is quiet, shy, and modest, while her father is anything but. He’s the foreman of the lumbermill that is the lifeblood of their town on the Canadian island of Bear Lake. The relationships between Tom and the other boys revolves around bikes, games, and food. This is not a sophisticated bunch of kids, but Tom does have a future in mind. He’s the son of a very proud teacher, and he has obviously inherited her regard for a good education. He's got plenty of confidence academically.

But he’s still a kid ruled by a budding infatuation with this quiet girl. It’s rather sweet to watch him try to catch her eye without seeming to try, and of course her terrifying father is rather a deterrent. Still, teenage love will find a way, and his two sidekicks are pretty much left in the dust until they’re needed for companionship.

“In certain moments, in the middle of some long discourse, he would glance at her accusingly, then smile, first at her, then, finally, at himself. Her modesty seemed to provide a sense of irony that he naturally lacked.”

They are never seen together near her house, so Sasha has to walk home alone, and around every corner lurks Jamie Dence, driving along slowly to call out to and flirt with her, wearing his “oversized sunglasses”. Yes – the epitome of cool, he thinks, trying to hide the fact he’s out of work.

“He had been let go by the mill the month before, the first, having been hired out of high school three years earlier when the logging industry was still healthy.”

Any town that is built around a single industry and becomes a company town is at the mercy of the fortunes of one company, so conversations around kitchen tables and in the bars keep coming around to the rumours of people being laid off.

Meanwhile, the high school kids are growing up, forming liaisons, enjoying the changing seasons, and thinking about their futures, unlike Jamie, who seems stuck in time, growing older but not up.

“He often drank at the pool hall during the days, cutting a foolish figure at his age, and the kids grew more and more wary of him.”

A couple of serious events occur which affect everyone’s plans. It’s a relatively simple story with characters typical of their age and place, I imagine, and I think this could easily appeal as a Young Adult novel. I'm very fond of simple stories that suggest some extra depth, but I didn't feel that here, for whatever reason. Many readers love it, so I'll leave my comments at that.

Thanks to NetGalley and Fairlight Books for the preview copy from which I've quoted.

While this book is a bit darker and depressing than I expected, I find this book a really comforting one to read. Prendiville's eloquent description of town's atmosphere made me feel as if I was actually there while reading this novella; a moody and struggling (or should I say dying?) logging town which everyone knows everyone play as a backdrop of the complicated coming of age tale of Tom and Sasha, two young residents of Bear Lake.

This novella, while pleasing since it covers a story from quite a long time span, I wish it was longer so we as readers can delve deeper inside the characters.

More from Fairlight Moderns – but this time a totally different take on life in an odd pocket of society.

Atlantic Winds is set in Bear Lake, Canada during the 1970’s. It’s a claustrophobic town with just one main employer and a close-knit community who have their own sense of right and wrong. I imagined a family diner, lots of young families with stay-at-home Mums and plenty of men in plaid. Traditional, poor-but-making-ends-meet, safe.

Or not.

Right from the start you get the impression that there are some families who are just a little… off. This creeping sense of unease permeates the text like the mist that I imagined rolled off the lake every morning. The writing is wonderfully atmospheric and added to the overall themes of justice, guilt and duty.

Written primarily about the teenagers in the town, the novella explores the roles of men vs women in a town with limited options and little scope for upwards mobility. I found the characters to be a little one-dimensional (the “hero”, the “victim” and the “villain”) but I could have lived with that… had the hero not been involved in one of the most dubiously consensual sex scenes I’ve ever read:

“And so she’d followed him there… until the moment it happened and she’d seized up and tried to show him, by a tremulous, calming smile, that it didn’t hurt.”

Then:

“‘I’m fine’ she told him, and hugged him to make him feel better.”

I could write for several pages here about how sex is something that women – even young women losing their virginity – can and should be actively, happily engaged in and that THIS IS NOT OK. I mean – seized up? How much more obvious can it be that this girl doesn’t want to have sex? Plus that line about making him feel better (because he clearly feels guilty) REALLY made me angry. However, I understand that a) this is the 1970’s and b) the novella explores the extent to which the female character (Sasha) is denied her own agency through the expectations put upon her to be a good, dutiful daughter – and perhaps the author is trying to show how this affects her life in a myriad of ways.

Maybe.

Overall, I found this complex, evocative little novella to be a really compelling read, even though it did make me incredibly angry. It certainly raised a lot of issues but for me they weren’t fully resolved, perhaps due to the brevity of the text. I can’t say that I liked it, but it definitely made me think.

This novella from Fairlight Books is about a small mill town in 1970s Canada when the mill closes. It focuses on a handful of children but is not YA in tone. I read it during the netgalley reviewathon.

This novella turned out to be much darker than I expected. The novella is beautifully written and it was a pleasure to read every page. This is a simple tale of growing up in a small town where everybody knows each other and the town depends on the Mill for survival. The town is dying. The Mill is a contracting industry where there are fewer jobs outside of the Mill and the future does not look well for Bear Lake. I love books that are set in small town so completely fell in love with Bear Lake. The author does an amazing job of bringing the town and the resident to life. The main focus is the complicated relationship between Sasha and Town. However, we are introduced to a whole host of brilliantly written, human characters. The accident takes place about halfway through and isn’t really an accident. This dark turn seemed unexpected to me. The character of Jamie, one of the first men to be paid off at the Mill broke my heart a little. He’s seen as a nuisance by the locals because he drinks away his unemployment checks at the local bar and causes trouble. I felt great sympathy for him. He’s only recently graduated from high school so losing his job is a real blow. He didn’t deserve what happens to him. I love how rumours about what happened to Jamie circulate for years, typical of a small town. This was a real treat.

This story is set in 1970's Canada in a small logging town. The log industry is suffering during this time period and layoffs are happening. There is much unrest and strife in the town because of men being out of work. The story centers upon the teenage character of Tom Clairbourne. He's a model student, especially proficient at math, and is a great source of pride to his mother who is a teacher in town. However, Tom's current preoccupation is his attraction to the daughter of the foreman at the logging mill, Sasha Dovonovitch.

I enjoyed the tortured, careful, choreographed wooing of shy, innocent Sasha by Tom that finally culminated in a triumphant first kiss. This is about a small town and the timid, discreet courting of a young teenage girl, perhaps not really old enough to date. It consisted of walks in the neighbourhood, on Main Street, and visits to the cinema to see "Star Wars", which had just been released. A soda shop visit was a ruse to extend a first date, where ostensibly Tom was paired up with Sasha's bold friend Cindy... but the foursome all could see what was going on. Tom only had eyes for Sasha.

There is a nuisance in town named Jamie who was one of the first people laid off from the mill, being one of the youngest. He had only recently graduated from high school, but now he held court at a local bar, where much of his unemployment stipend was spent. He begins to stalk and flirt with the timid Sasha, an introvert who doesn't like to make waves and is reluctant to tell anyone. There have also been some destructive incidents in town involving the mill site, and Jamie's sullied reputation has many town natives looking at Jamie accusingly.

This is a short book of 144 pages that was a quick and mildly pleasant read. I'm not sure if I would want to keep reading it as a regular length book. There is a depressing shroud around the characters with little to none uplifting storyline to redeem it. As usual, I seem to be an outlier because there were many high rated reviews of this book, which had influenced me to read it.

Thank you to the publisher Fairlight Books who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

Atlantic Winds takes place in the early 1970s, and the location is Bear Island, one of the small cold islands off of Canada's Atlantic coastline. I intensely dislike living in the cold, but I love to read stories set in these insular icy-even-in-summer Canadian Islands. Like the old west, it is a land apart, one that doesn't follow the rigid framework of 'civilization' demanded of the heavily populated rest of the world. Independence of thought and action is not regarded as weird, just eccentric. Although even in the village of Bear Lake there is the odd eccentric who is too weird to be invited to your next BBQ. And unfortunately even the occasional bad seed.

In Atlantic Winds, we follow the lives and trials of several of the island youngsters. The characters are very well defined, you feel like you know them personally, and understand the problems inherent to life on a small island where the main industry is centered around the timber industry.

These are good kids. I enjoyed Tom, Cormic, and Denis, Sasha, and Cindy - these are kids like those I grew up with in the high plains desert town of Roswell in the 1960s. Eager to grow up, afraid to show their true feelings, anxious to get out into that big world out there where anything is possible.
Afraid that you will not know enough to make it, out there.

I am pleased to recommend to friends and family this historical, coming of age novel. William Prendiville is an author I will follow.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, WilliamPrendiville, and Fairlight Books. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.

This was a beautifully written novella. I'd be interested in reading some of the author's longer works. I was also impressed with the publisher's series and am excited to read more of it.

This is a real gem of a book. A short one, certainly, but it lacks nothing in tension and atmosphere for it all its brevity. The core of the story is the relationship between two young people in a small logging community in Canada, Tom and Sasha, a relationship which is handled with delicacy and insight. In fact insight is the key word here. Each of the town’s characters, however briefly sketched, is described with insight and empathy and all of them come alive on the page. It’s a tragic little tale and a worthy addition to the wonderful Fairlight Moderns collection.

Set in the 1970s on Bear Lake, near Canada. Atlantic Winds, charts the slow decline of the logging and the blossoming relationship between a popular young man named Tom and the daughter of the mill's foreman, Sasha.

The novella does cover a rather large time frame and does well to evolve the relationship between Tom and Sasha as to where one would expect. Solid enough read, but it did feel slightly padded out and may have worked better as a short story.

With thanks to Netgalley and Fairlight for the ARC.

In the 1970s the small island of Bear Lake, near Canada revolved around the logging industry; during the prologue we meet Tom. Jump forward to part one and Tom is at school, well known for being good a maths and popular with girls; he catches a glimpse of Sasha, the extremely shy daughter of the mill foreman. He spends a summer trying to get Sasha to notice him, befriending her next door neighbour to give him a reason to be near her house. The novella follows the journey of their relationship and Tom's ambition to leave Bear Lake to study medicine alongside the journey of the town as the logging industry becomes less prominent. For a short book this covered quite a long time period so I didn't feel like you could really get to inside the characters.

I picked this up because I liked Sophie van Llewyn's Women's Prize-longlisted Bottled Goods and wanted to see what else this small publisher had to offer. Atlantic Winds is set in a small island community in Canada in the late 1970s; wildcat strikes at the local timber company are stirring up unrest, but the novel's main focus is a group of teenagers, Tom, Cormic and Sasha. Because of this, the first section feels achingly predictable, as Tom falls into initially unrequited love with Sasha, who barely speaks throughout the course of the novel. As this indicates, the gender roles here are stagnant, with Sasha a silent caretaker and victim and Tom cast as her defender. There are a number of violent events across the course of the story, but by the time I'd finished it, I'd already forgotten it.

Unlike Bottled Goods, Atlantic Winds feels more like a long short story than a novella. There's not necessarily anything wrong with this, but I came to realise across the course of the book that this is more because of the lack of depth in Prendiville's writing than the actual length, so this doesn't make a good short story, either. His prose might be kindly called sparse but to me felt simplistic - I'd hoped for something very atmospheric, but there's actually very little on the place where this is set. The only few paragraphs that have stuck with me is an early scene when a child dies after being buried in a snow fort - he's known throughout the town for his complicated multi-level forts with windows and dungeons, so he's literally smothered by his own creation. I'd thought this might end up having thematic resonance throughout the rest of the novella, but nothing doing. 2.5 stars.

"There's been an accident at Bear Lake". There's a tragic inevitability to this sentence which comes half-way through William Prendiville's beautiful little novella. The signs are there early on in how the story of Tom and Sasha is related, the tentative beginnings of their youthful love and the circumstances of their lives in Bear Lake simultaneously too strong and yet too fragile to withstand what is ahead. So when that sentence comes, it feels like you've been waiting on it with a horrible sense of foreboding and trepidation.

The fact that you are anxious about the fate of these characters is very much down to the quality of the writing, which is direct and unpretentious and not as grim as that warning might have made it sound. It's a style that is in tune with the age group of the young people involved, Tom only 14 when he first sees Sasha, and sees something in her that he doesn't see in anyone else, and something that others haven't yet seen in Sasha. It's that indefinable quality of attraction, the impact it has on young people and how it leads to love that Prendiville captures so well.

It's the tone then as well as the relative youth of Tom and Sasha that leads you to have some concerns about how they will endure the difficulties that lie ahead. There's a melancholic wistful tone there from the outset, a sense of looking back, of nostalgia and memory, of youth and possibilities. And where there are possibilities there are also paths not followed, potential not realised, lives cut short. But it's love that is the dominant characteristic here, one that carries all those others implicitly within it.

What also exerts an influence on the tone of the book is the location and the period of economic decline. Bear Lake is a small community and it has its problems; problems that are probably intensified by it being remote and cut off from the mainland. The obstacles that lie in the way of Tom and Sasha being together are not just the usual ones of love rivalry and parental objection, but factors that relate to the logging community on Bear Lake, to the flow of work, to redundancies that place hardships on people, leading to families moving on and moving away.

There are any number of obstacles that Tom and Sasha's relationship has to endure, and the expected accident that occurs is certainly a factor in where it goes, but the exact reasons are less easily defined. William Prendiville nonetheless captures all the beauty of life and love in this lovely little novella, and it's those indefinable mysteries, possibilities and potential outcomes that don't materialise that ensures that the story will linger in the mind for a long time afterwards.

The third novella I have read in the excellent Fairlight Moderns series and just as good as I have come to expect from their publications. With thanks to them for the opportunity to read an ARC via NetGalley.

It is set in a small logging town in Canada in the 1970s where an isolated community is struggling in an increasingly unviable industry. People are losing their jobs and the atmosphere is fraught with unrest. Central to the story is the tentative love between Tom, ambitious to become a doctor and leave the area, and Sasha, daughter of the mill foreman who is hampered by a complicated home environment that doesn’t afford her the same freedom of choice. I found these two characters and their relationship particularly touching but we are given a whole cast of interesting personalities to appreciate, from the village gossip to the angry young man laid off work and blighted by alcohol. We see how a small community often decides for itself the truth behind events and apportions blame as it sees fit, regardless of lack of evidence, leading to further tragedy.

The story’s greatest strengths for me were the unpredictability of events - things just didn’t ever go the way I thought they were headed - and the author’s sure and delicate touch. In fewer than 150 pages, William Prendiville captures atmosphere and characters with subtlety and insight. With writing of this calibre on display, I wasn’t surprised to learn he is originally from Ireland. A real treat of a read, I’d love to see it expanded into a full length novel - there are plenty of minor characters whose stories would make fascinating reading (I am thinking here of the Dovonovitch parents). In any case, I’ll be following with interest to see what he writes next.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2854431707?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Set in rural 1970s Canada this is a beautifully written novella and felt very true to my own upbringing in an economically challenged small town.

It reminded me often of Eugenides' Virgin Suicides, but oddly I felt like I knew the unidentified narrators of that novel better than the named boys we follow in this one. I also would have really liked to have better explored Sasha's experience after Tom left for college, and for me the book is missing out for not telling that story. But, perhaps the emotional distance is intentional? We only get that story in snippets, third-hand as a reflection on the way that small towns gossip, blame, and then forget all so easily and seasonally?

I requested and received a copy of this title via NetGalley; nobody at Fairlight demanded a positive review in exchange. Obvs.

Atlantic Winds is a lovely novella that also serves as a portrait of a relationship and a community in the 1980s. Prendiville writes with precise, elegant prose that clearly tells the story of these young people in a moving and engrossing way. I found myself enraptured by the beauty of the writing. It's a very short read but also a very enjoyable one.

Thank you NetGalley and Fairlight Books for the ARC of Atlantic Winds!

Classic writing for grown-up readers.
Proper literature in a mini book which says so little aside from its enduring characters; and leaves so much with the reader in the reading.
Nothing is settled or too clear in this fine novella; just a simple tale of growing up in a town that is dying around them. Living in an area of logging; young lives are blighted by a contracting industry, fewer jobs for parents and little future in their hometown.
A familiar story of many communities across our post-industrial world. Here in Bear Lake surrounded by trees it is that timber and the logging mills that provide economic stability and rumours and a spreading contraction means fewer jobs, less prospects and unemployed young men turning to drugs and alcohol. This is re-enforced by fine writing where the physical geography mirrors the economic constraints.
Poignant and lyrical in it’s interactions and dialogue, this is writing at its best as it never wastes words in political tirade or social comment. It provides a story of real people, their choices, their impotence to adjust and their entrapment in circumstances and island life that few have the capacity to change.
Told mainly through the lives of Tom, his childhood crush Sasha and their extended friends and family.
I was moved by the general consensus to accept death and decay, within the people ‘s lives and the community’s soul. I found myself drawn to these young people, their frustrations, friendships and fragile aspirations. I loved the sense of a small community mindset, all seeing, all knowing and yet with little judicial intervention.
Beautifully told, never predictable and with many unexpected turns, that breaks our moral stance and emotional investment.
Moved my heart and mind and introduced an author whose name will now stand out as my kind of writer.