REVIEW (MILD SPOILERS): Summer Musings on Rosalind Knight’s That Summer at the Mettawas
Today we’ve got a review of another local Canadian author from Essex County, Ontario: Rosalind Knight. Rosalind Knight is a retired high school English teacher, who enjoys spending her time with family and writing. Based on the author’s last name, I know what you’re probably thinking, but we’re not related. However, she was an important influence and mentor in my development as a reader and writer of literature as a teen.
Knight’s debut novel, That Summer at the Mettawas (Cranberry Tree Press, 2014), is a mixture of memory and fiction based on musings over the local culture of Kingsville. The book expertly weaves elements together from local history and family stories. This leads to my first point of interest in the book: I found Knight’s employment of diverse points of view (POVs) both interesting and refreshing. The book fluctuates between three distinct POVs and literary settings: 1900, 1963, and 2000. In general, the book follows an inverted chiasmic structure centered around its chronology, working back from 2000 to 1963, to 1900, and then back to 1963 before returning to 2000. The flow and logic of this structure is remarkable in terms of how it is portrayed as the narrator’s attempt at working back through time through memory.
The structure matches much of the thematic positioning of the work, particularly with reference to the workings of memory and regret (in this case, the regret of not learning more from one’s elderly family members while they were still alive). The catalyst for much of this musing on memory and regret is brought on by the clearing out of a family cottage in 2000. The narrator, her two sisters, and their husbands are working on clearing out the belongings of family members from the family cottage, as they prepare to put it on the market. The discovery of photographs and newspaper clippings stimulate the narrator’s memories about her great aunt, Betsy, leading the narrative to jump back into the sixties when the narrator was a young girl.
In the sixties, Betsy was already an older woman, suffering from dementia, and we discover that she had gifted the narrator’s parents the family cottage. Now in Betsy’s advanced age, the family continues to invite Betsy to the cottage for two weeks each summer. Given the narrator’s younger stature at the time, she realizes that she did not take the time to learn much about Betsy’s past, who she was, nor about her early years in Canada. This leads her to attempt to reconstruct the past based on the aforementioned discovered photos and newspaper clippings (in 2000), and now also her childhood memories (from the 1960s).
These musings bring us to the third layer of the narrative in 1900, in which Betsy is a young woman, having newly arrived in Canada as she awaits the arrival of her fiancé to join her in her new life. In the meantime, Betsy decides to set out for herself and establish a life in Canada, taking up a summer job at the Mettawas Hotel. The Mettawas Hotel was a historical resort, located in Kingsville from 1889-1902. From this point in the narrative, we learn about Betsy’s eventful first summer in the region, her fortitude, and struggles in adapting to her new cultural purview. Several eventful episodes take place in her life and are reconstructed by the narrator, who works her way back through the scant evidence available to reconstruct Betsy’s eventful summer, but I won’t spoil those particular narrative plot points here.
What I particularly enjoyed about the book was how well it stood as a localized period piece for the Essex County region. Through the narrative, readers learn about the hospitality industry, boating culture and railway system of the era (which has changed tremendously over the years). Reading the book, one gets the sense that the entire work is a historical recounting or memoir rather than historical fiction, though the author carefully notes following the narrative itself where much of the work deviates into fiction and where the author gained her inspiration. Notably, most of the material about Betsy is, in fact, fictionalized, but it is so well written that it gives the sense of direct access to the period.
Another notable element are the author’s vivid descriptions, particularly of 1900. While That Summer at the Mettawas is firmly situated as a work of historical fiction, I found much of the imagery from the 1900s highly reminiscent of the descriptions of clothes, culture and society from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019). While readers could take this shared imagery as incidental, it is interesting to note that Margaret Atwood also spent much of life within Essex County, particularly on Lake Eerie (on Pelee Island), where much of Knight’s book is literarily situated. To me, the use of this reminiscent literary description is an exciting and notable flourish as it shows a cultural and historical ethos shared by both authors in this region. In short, I found the narrative framework intellectually stimulating and clever, allowing an opportunity to imagine how the region has changed over the span of a hundred years, as well as a helpful admonition to preserve the memory of the past. If you’re a fan of historical fiction, I highly recommend this book. You can find Rosalind Knight’s book at the River Bookshop in Amherstburg and at Carnegie Arts and Tourism Centre in Kingsville.
Stay well!