Blood Moon Over Rat Lake
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2023
Pages: 136
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2023
Pages: 134
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In the rough and ready environment of a northern mining town, Moishe, a young boy in love with horses and himself saddled with that strange, foreign sounding name, one that provokes mistreatment by bullies, navigates the increasingly painful steps of growing up. He struggles to make sense of his physical development, his precocious curiosity about girls and women and how to deal with a mother who though loving is difficult to live with. He finds comforting solace in the woods and lakes and a growing fascination with fishing and hunting. He deals with his attention deficit disorder in school by a force of will, becoming a committed reader and an athlete. His father contributes to his confusion by refusing to lay out ironclad rules, rather choosing to challenge Moishe's stereotypes about killing animals, his attitudes toward indigenous people, toward members of the gay community and his deepening interest in religion. In adolescence, his older sister and her husband become his salvation.
Life becomes a series of moral tests. His failure to help other outsiders troubles him and he vows to do better. He forms a close relationship with Jamey, a charismatic, strong and kind young man who grew up on an ‘Indian reservation’ and becomes a legendary bush pilot. Jamey himself faces a major moral decision in choosing between two women he loves, one from the reservation and another from the private school to which his family sends him in order to socialize him. Jamey’s aboriginal girlfriend eventually is drawn to an older possessive man. That leads to a violent outcome.
CHAPTER 1 A Cowboy Named Moishe and the Mystique of Women and Fish
CHAPTER 2 Early School Days
CHAPTER 3 Immersing in Religion
CHAPTER 4 Finding God and Then Jesus
CHAPTER 5 Judging Others and the Morality of the Kill
CHAPTER 6 Discovering True Loneliness
CHAPTER 7 The Arrival of the Hero
CHAPTER 8 Bravado and the Bear
CHAPTER 9 Viking Ascending
CHAPTER 10 The Girl Left Behind
CHAPTER 11 Negotiating Adolescence: Hubris
CHAPTER 12 Emerging Halcyon Days
CHAPTER 13 An Unlikely Friendship
CHAPTER 14 Of Men, Mentors and Muskellunge
CHAPTER 15 Return of the Viking
CHAPTER 16 Apotheosis
CHAPTER 17 Love, Loss and Hate: You Always Hurt the One You Love–Mills Brothers
CHAPTER 18 Denouement
Ehor Boyanowsky helped found the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, co-founded the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, served as president of the SFU Faculty Association, and twice as president of The Confederation of Faculty Associations of BC, as well as The Steelhead Society of BC, positions reflecting his major commitment to universities as founts of knowledge, to civil rights in Canada and to wild river and wild fish conservation. He now lives in the Thompson River Valley with his wife, Cristina Martini, his English setters and two cats at Nighthawk Ranch now a wildlife preserve.
Time has not changed but the innocence of time has changed. Ehor Boyanowsky's coming of age novel captures a life of lost innocence. It explores a compelling real life story of an immigrant family's experience that endures challenges that continue to this day. Highly recommended.
Brian A. Grosman K.C. BA, LLB, LLM,
Author of ten books including the best seller Fire Power
This book is a must read for anyone with a love of Northern Ontario. It's beautifully written, characters and landscape so well drawn - all out grand coming of age story. Moishe will surely become a beloved literary character, since that's what he is - a character!
Alma Lee CM
Founder of the Vancouver Writers Festival
A memorable depiction of adolescence and young manhood that springs from the strength of Boyanowsky's prose and his penetrating vision of human nature.
J.A. Wainwright
Author of Guernica Prize-winning novel This Cleaving and This Burning
It has been a while since I offered any advice, wisdom or counsel, but the time has come…
My modus operendi is as a producer rather than a consumer. Thus, I’d rather write a book than read one. Of course, this has made me a highly productive but largely ignorant human being. The one exception to my penchant for production is my time fishing and hunting. And while its assumed rationale is to gather as well as search, I increasingly revel in the pursuit rather than the capture. This has been the case with fishing for a long time, but in my hunting I always looked forward to the gathering part as well. This posture took a significant turn when I arrowed my milestone elk in September. Thus, when I returned to Alberta to hunt in November I armed myself with a new iPone 15 Pro Max, so I could do a better job photographing the prey that I had little motivation to shoot. However, unlike most vegetarians I know, I was in no way orthodox in maintaining a recoilless hunt. As we have sufficient elk for the winter, I would only have shot a very unusual beast, such as one whose character I had never previously encountered.
Anyway, my frugal consumption has resulted in accumulating unfulfilled promises to do consumptive things such as reading. My first self-imposed obligation was to read some of Tim Goddard’s five recent novels. Tim was at Univ of Calgary and worked on my team in Kosovo. His daughter, Nicola, was the first Canadian woman soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Tim went on to become Dean at UPEI and has now retired to take up growing wine grapes like I do, and writing novels like I don’t. Anyway, the first novel, Traces, was thankfully short as it is not very good. I choked it down before the early bow hunt and then tackled the second, much superior novel, Tracks, on the flights to and from Calgary for my recent hunt in the Rocky Foothills. So, this is the reason the main purpose of this communication has not yet come your way.
Since Monday, I have been in Caraquet where I sat down and did a binge read of Blood Moon over Rat Lake. Earlier readings were to peer critically into structure, phrasing, intended meaning, and possible re-engineering to improve the product and bring fame and fortune to my dear friend. Reading the ms for pleasure was not in the cards.
Now that time has passed, so this week reading for pleasure topped my rationale. Postponing the read has also taken advantage of my lifelong weakness in memory enabling the read to consume material that became fresh and novel since I last saw it. And like some other things in life, one cannot really appreciate the totality until one sees at least a galley proof. The book is a wonderful read; I thoroughly enjoyed it!
It is a superb piece of work, thoroughly grounded in the era in which we both grew up, flawlessly written and built on foundations of wide knowledge coming from your professional background, your keen observation of people, places and events, and your indulgent consumption of countless books. Like any good read, it captures the reader and doesn’t let go. I like the wonderful quotes heading each chapter, another testament to a life of widespread reading. I also appreciate the art, which is lovely, group of seven inspired and super appropriate – where did you get it? Surely the artist deserves a credit.
The cover works, though I am still not totally convinced that this is the best title (more on this later). As you know, the font size is miserly as is the white space.
I really appreciate the clear narrative style – keep the poetry for another book! But I love that you chose the best word in your vast vocabulary for every occasion. This represents deep thought and concern to describe everything deeply with frugality of prose.
The length of chapters is another strength. As a marketer, you drag the reader in so that they can always do one more before taking a break.
Of course, whether or not you realize it, this is actually two books. One could be entitled Growing up in Rat Lake: Lessons for Life. The first eight chapters plus some later material stand separately and collectively as solid nuggets to be mined and spent. They well might form the start of a book all about Moshe with another eight chapters on his later life. Then we might learn the outcomes related to his wailing mother and mysterious father. We might find out if he remained connected to Rat Lake or moved elsewhere. We would most importantly learn of his victories and losses in love. And if and how his passion for fishing continued to sustain him. In the current rendition, Moshe is very young when it all ends. He has learned many lessons (some more than once) but that’s all the learning and living that the reader knows about. This sub-book is dense and superbly crafted. This is the Catcher in the Rye book, though it remains unfinished.
The second book, Life and Love in Rat Lake: Immigrants and Aboriginals in a Canadian Mining Town, is more novel-like. (My facetious title indicates the differences between book one and book two). It introduces new characters and features a story line with not many twists and a definitive ending. As is the case with many novels, this book requires more explanation and narrative to keep the plot on track and not lose the reader. This is essentially a novelette and is not as profound as is the first sub book. In a way, you didn’t need to be there to write this story, nor did you need a lifetime of accumulated knowledge of people and psychology to produce it. Not that its in any way bad, but its just another novelette on a crowded library shelf. Thinking back to Wilbur Coffin, it might be stronger if it moved from the fiction shelf to the non-fiction.
So those are my thoughts. It don’t know if they contain any wisdom or counsel, but even when I read for pleasure the producer in me wants to say something that is hopefully helpful.
Gary Anderson
In the rough and ready environment of a northern mining town, Moishe, a young boy in love with horses and himself saddled with that strange, foreign sounding name, one that provokes mistreatment by bullies, navigates the increasingly painful steps of growing up. He struggles to make sense of his physical development, his precocious curiosity about girls and women and how to deal with a mother who though loving is difficult to live with. He finds comforting solace in the woods and lakes and a growing fascination with fishing and hunting. He deals with his attention deficit disorder in school by a force of will, becoming a committed reader and an athlete. His father contributes to his confusion by refusing to lay out ironclad rules, rather choosing to challenge Moishe's stereotypes about killing animals, his attitudes toward indigenous people, toward members of the gay community and his deepening interest in religion. In adolescence, his older sister and her husband become his salvation.
Life becomes a series of moral tests. His failure to help other outsiders troubles him and he vows to do better. He forms a close relationship with Jamey, a charismatic, strong and kind young man who grew up on an ‘Indian reservation’ and becomes a legendary bush pilot. Jamey himself faces a major moral decision in choosing between two women he loves, one from the reservation and another from the private school to which his family sends him in order to socialize him. Jamey’s aboriginal girlfriend eventually is drawn to an older possessive man. That leads to a violent outcome.
CHAPTER 1 A Cowboy Named Moishe and the Mystique of Women and Fish
CHAPTER 2 Early School Days
CHAPTER 3 Immersing in Religion
CHAPTER 4 Finding God and Then Jesus
CHAPTER 5 Judging Others and the Morality of the Kill
CHAPTER 6 Discovering True Loneliness
CHAPTER 7 The Arrival of the Hero
CHAPTER 8 Bravado and the Bear
CHAPTER 9 Viking Ascending
CHAPTER 10 The Girl Left Behind
CHAPTER 11 Negotiating Adolescence: Hubris
CHAPTER 12 Emerging Halcyon Days
CHAPTER 13 An Unlikely Friendship
CHAPTER 14 Of Men, Mentors and Muskellunge
CHAPTER 15 Return of the Viking
CHAPTER 16 Apotheosis
CHAPTER 17 Love, Loss and Hate: You Always Hurt the One You Love–Mills Brothers
CHAPTER 18 Denouement
Ehor Boyanowsky helped found the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, co-founded the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, served as president of the SFU Faculty Association, and twice as president of The Confederation of Faculty Associations of BC, as well as The Steelhead Society of BC, positions reflecting his major commitment to universities as founts of knowledge, to civil rights in Canada and to wild river and wild fish conservation. He now lives in the Thompson River Valley with his wife, Cristina Martini, his English setters and two cats at Nighthawk Ranch now a wildlife preserve.
Time has not changed but the innocence of time has changed. Ehor Boyanowsky's coming of age novel captures a life of lost innocence. It explores a compelling real life story of an immigrant family's experience that endures challenges that continue to this day. Highly recommended.
Brian A. Grosman K.C. BA, LLB, LLM,
Author of ten books including the best seller Fire Power
This book is a must read for anyone with a love of Northern Ontario. It's beautifully written, characters and landscape so well drawn - all out grand coming of age story. Moishe will surely become a beloved literary character, since that's what he is - a character!
Alma Lee CM
Founder of the Vancouver Writers Festival
A memorable depiction of adolescence and young manhood that springs from the strength of Boyanowsky's prose and his penetrating vision of human nature.
J.A. Wainwright
Author of Guernica Prize-winning novel This Cleaving and This Burning
It has been a while since I offered any advice, wisdom or counsel, but the time has come…
My modus operendi is as a producer rather than a consumer. Thus, I’d rather write a book than read one. Of course, this has made me a highly productive but largely ignorant human being. The one exception to my penchant for production is my time fishing and hunting. And while its assumed rationale is to gather as well as search, I increasingly revel in the pursuit rather than the capture. This has been the case with fishing for a long time, but in my hunting I always looked forward to the gathering part as well. This posture took a significant turn when I arrowed my milestone elk in September. Thus, when I returned to Alberta to hunt in November I armed myself with a new iPone 15 Pro Max, so I could do a better job photographing the prey that I had little motivation to shoot. However, unlike most vegetarians I know, I was in no way orthodox in maintaining a recoilless hunt. As we have sufficient elk for the winter, I would only have shot a very unusual beast, such as one whose character I had never previously encountered.
Anyway, my frugal consumption has resulted in accumulating unfulfilled promises to do consumptive things such as reading. My first self-imposed obligation was to read some of Tim Goddard’s five recent novels. Tim was at Univ of Calgary and worked on my team in Kosovo. His daughter, Nicola, was the first Canadian woman soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Tim went on to become Dean at UPEI and has now retired to take up growing wine grapes like I do, and writing novels like I don’t. Anyway, the first novel, Traces, was thankfully short as it is not very good. I choked it down before the early bow hunt and then tackled the second, much superior novel, Tracks, on the flights to and from Calgary for my recent hunt in the Rocky Foothills. So, this is the reason the main purpose of this communication has not yet come your way.
Since Monday, I have been in Caraquet where I sat down and did a binge read of Blood Moon over Rat Lake. Earlier readings were to peer critically into structure, phrasing, intended meaning, and possible re-engineering to improve the product and bring fame and fortune to my dear friend. Reading the ms for pleasure was not in the cards.
Now that time has passed, so this week reading for pleasure topped my rationale. Postponing the read has also taken advantage of my lifelong weakness in memory enabling the read to consume material that became fresh and novel since I last saw it. And like some other things in life, one cannot really appreciate the totality until one sees at least a galley proof. The book is a wonderful read; I thoroughly enjoyed it!
It is a superb piece of work, thoroughly grounded in the era in which we both grew up, flawlessly written and built on foundations of wide knowledge coming from your professional background, your keen observation of people, places and events, and your indulgent consumption of countless books. Like any good read, it captures the reader and doesn’t let go. I like the wonderful quotes heading each chapter, another testament to a life of widespread reading. I also appreciate the art, which is lovely, group of seven inspired and super appropriate – where did you get it? Surely the artist deserves a credit.
The cover works, though I am still not totally convinced that this is the best title (more on this later). As you know, the font size is miserly as is the white space.
I really appreciate the clear narrative style – keep the poetry for another book! But I love that you chose the best word in your vast vocabulary for every occasion. This represents deep thought and concern to describe everything deeply with frugality of prose.
The length of chapters is another strength. As a marketer, you drag the reader in so that they can always do one more before taking a break.
Of course, whether or not you realize it, this is actually two books. One could be entitled Growing up in Rat Lake: Lessons for Life. The first eight chapters plus some later material stand separately and collectively as solid nuggets to be mined and spent. They well might form the start of a book all about Moshe with another eight chapters on his later life. Then we might learn the outcomes related to his wailing mother and mysterious father. We might find out if he remained connected to Rat Lake or moved elsewhere. We would most importantly learn of his victories and losses in love. And if and how his passion for fishing continued to sustain him. In the current rendition, Moshe is very young when it all ends. He has learned many lessons (some more than once) but that’s all the learning and living that the reader knows about. This sub-book is dense and superbly crafted. This is the Catcher in the Rye book, though it remains unfinished.
The second book, Life and Love in Rat Lake: Immigrants and Aboriginals in a Canadian Mining Town, is more novel-like. (My facetious title indicates the differences between book one and book two). It introduces new characters and features a story line with not many twists and a definitive ending. As is the case with many novels, this book requires more explanation and narrative to keep the plot on track and not lose the reader. This is essentially a novelette and is not as profound as is the first sub book. In a way, you didn’t need to be there to write this story, nor did you need a lifetime of accumulated knowledge of people and psychology to produce it. Not that its in any way bad, but its just another novelette on a crowded library shelf. Thinking back to Wilbur Coffin, it might be stronger if it moved from the fiction shelf to the non-fiction.
So those are my thoughts. It don’t know if they contain any wisdom or counsel, but even when I read for pleasure the producer in me wants to say something that is hopefully helpful.
Gary Anderson