Reviews for Ravensong

The average rating for Ravensong based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-24 00:00:00 Ryan Mcentevy Ravensong, Lee Maracle's 1993 novel, is as powerful and meaningful today as it was when it was first published some twenty years ago. It is a beautifully written, at times challenging, story that weaves the past with the present into a moving portrait of a family, a community and a land that has faced and still faces many challenges from within and from outside. Situated in the Northwest of Vancouver Island, Maracle evokes a land where the Raven sings and communicates with Cedar, where the cedar responds with gently swinging its branches and sometimes weeps. It was a fertile land between the ocean and the river, providing for the people with all they needed. Yet, memories of disturbing past events cast long shadows over the people and the natural environment. Myths and stories from ancient times come alive again and again, such as that of the double-headed sea serpent that caused havoc with the minds of the people or the foreigners who arrived with ships... A young girl, deeply lost in thought sitting under the cedar, carries vivid images of those tragic events that contributed to more catastrophes later, traumas that the community has not yet recovered from. Set in the mid nineteen fifties, the novel is built around an extended multi-generational Coast-Salish family and their community. Their village may seem self-contained and even remote from the bustling urban life, yet "white town" is just across the river and a bridge connects the two communities. Stacey, the young girl's older sister, is the only one among her siblings and cousins who attends school in the town. At seventeen she has dreams of continuing her studies at university to become a teacher in her village. She is exposed to a world that doesn't make much sense to her. For example, during an outbreak of the Hong Kong flu, her village cannot get access to vital medicines and no doctor comes to visit them. The barriers, both physical and mental are huge. Suspicion reigns on both sides of the river. The bridge is mostly a one-way street. What will it take to change? Lee Maracle's way of telling her story absorbed me totally. Her writing changes from the wonderfully poetic evocation of the natural world to a language that is precise, direct and at times provocative when depicting the daily life of the people and their community. Ravensong is filled with well-developed characters, they come alive in their interactions whether in sorrow or in laughter, in love or in pain. In fact, the author herself kept her fondness for her protagonists over the decades and continued their stories in her most recent novel, Celia's Song. In fact, I read the two novels back to back, and while the combined reading enhanced and deepened my understanding, the two novels stand on their own very well. Just to give you a sense of the poetic writing in Ravensong, here is the opening paragraph: "From the depths of the sound Raven sang a deep wind song, melancholy green. Above, the water layered itself in stacks of still green, dark to light. The sound of Raven spiralled out from its small beginning in larger and larger concentric circles, gaining volume as it passes each successive layer of green. The song echoed the rolling motion of earth's centre, filtering itself through the last layer to reach outward to earth's shoreline above the deep. Wind changed direction, blowing the song toward cedar. Cedar picked up the tune, repeated the refrain, each lacey branch bending to echo ravensong. Cloud, seduced by the rustling of cedar, moved sensually to shore. ..."

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-26 00:00:00 Matthew Uhl Salish- Métis author Lee Maracle's 1993 novel Ravensong doesn't centre around queerness or lesbian sexuality in the way that you might expect in a book reviewed here. It's a beautiful and powerful novel about settler and Indigenous relations regardless, but its main character Stacey, a young Salish woman living on a reserve in the 1950s, isn't explicitly or implicity queer (although she is potentially queer, I would say, given Maracle's take on sexuality). There is, however, a lesbian couple who feature as secondary characters in Ravensong, and I think their inclusion is really significant, for a few reasons. Mostly, I find the way that the novel deals with queer sexuality in relation to its politics of decolonization fascinating. In fact, I think honing in on how the novel deals with queerness is a great way to understand what it's trying to do in terms of decolonizing. The absence in Ravensong of an explicit assertion of queerness, the fact that it doesn't "come out," as it were, as a queer text, is no failure at all but rather indicates an entirely different method of interrogating issues of queer sexuality... See the rest of my review on my website: