Rebecca Campbell (4) (1975–)

This novel won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin award, which tells you a lot. As I read, I often compared this book to Le Guin's writing. Campbell covers a long span of time during which humans somehow adapt and start to mitigate the damage to the climate caused by our growth ethos. Campbell is hopeful and lays out a plausible way to deal with climate change, at least in British Columbia. I hope this book gets read more widely, it is not simply a projected future scenario, her characters have depth and her writing is beautiful.… (mere)

Stelliform Press has become a favorite press of mine, and this was another gorgeous, thoughtful book. Campbell's prose is so gentle and intricate, there's a fascinating interplay with the minimalism of her dialogue, the careful nuance of her progressions and structure, and the near-violent presentation of the future that we're so rashly building for ourselves (and have been building for ourselves for centuries). Although there were moments here where I desperately wanted to linger longer with particular characters and times--especially in the very first section of the book, before I realized what I'd walked into, and in the middle section of the book that it seems this book stemmed from (based on the Acknowledgements)--I soon understood what Campbell was doing and could only admire her for it.

This is a smart and in some magnificent ways subversive book, and I'm so glad to have stumbled across it and given it a chance. It's yet another proof that everything from Stelliform is worth paying attention to.… (mere)

A beautiful story of how how a song written in 1902 links people over time: the original songwriter, sick of the hacky love songs from which he makes his living and wanting to include something about the wonders of the universe; the singer who, as a young girl, is entranced by the mystery and makes it her signature song as a performer; a young girl having built a crystal radio set and picking up the ethereal strains over the airwaves, in amongst short-wave broadcasts from around the world; a crewmember on a generation starship leaving an Earth made uninhabitable by climate change, wishing she had a copy of the song her mother used to sing to and thinking of it flying ahead of them, along with all the other broadcasts, perhaps to be picked up by some distance intelligence.… (mere)

I was in a Canadian bookstore in Stratford, ON, and felt I should buy at least one Canadian book while there. So I went to the Canadian author section and chose by Rebecca Campbell.

In her first novel, set in British Columbia, Campbell interweaves the stories of Anthea, a contemporary graduate student working on the restoration of an old opera house, and Liam, a third-rate tenor performing on the Vaudeville circuits of the 1920s and 1930s. Both become peripherally involved with mystical cult figures trying to draw followers into their orbits, and the lives of each seem to dwindle away as the novel progresses and ends.

While there are fascinating glimpses of lives in Western Canada now and, even more so, nearly a hundred years ago, the novel seems to tell tales of dissolution and decay. I was involved in the reading of the novel, but I think Campbell did not entirely resolve the issues that confront many first-time novelists. Promise is there, but not completely fulfilled in this novel.… (mere)