We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,598,087.38 | Books Available: 784,727 | Members Online: 241

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Consumption

Consumption
Author: Kevin Patterson

From Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize winner Kevin Patterson, an epic first novel of north and south, infused with stark beauty, startlingly realized characters and fierce truths. — Born on the tundra in the early 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic hunting life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is evacuated to a south... more »ern sanitarium for the treatment of tuberculosis. For six years she has no way to contact her parents. She grows healthy, learns Cree and English, becomes accustomed to books and radio, sunbathing and store-bought food. When she is finally sent home, she steps off the plane into a world that has changed radically. Even her father, Emo, a legendary hunter, has come in off the land to hunker in on Rankin Inlet at the edge of Hudson Bay. And Victoria herself has become a stranger to her family and her birth culture.

Vividly evoking the modern contradictions of the north – walrus meat and convenience foods, dog teams and diamond mines, midnight sun and 24-hour satellite TV – Patterson takes us into the heart of Victoria’s internal exile, as she marries and raises a family. Many love her, but none can heal her. Not her son, who disdains the settled life she has bought for him and who struggles to be like his grandfather. Not her daughters, who embrace the pop culture of the south. Not her husband, Robertson, who slowly becomes estranged as he pursues the economic opportunities the north offers white men. Not her Inuit lover, who can offer her only glimpses of her lost childhood. And most especially not the local doctor, Balthazar, who has come to Rankin Inlet from New York City to escape scrutiny and seems fated to harm instead of heal.

When violence strikes Victoria’s world, followed quickly by horrifying medical tragedy, Kevin Patterson shows how the tenuous bonds of friendship, love and family fly apart. And then at last, with great feeling, he evokes the unexpectedly tender ways in which the survivors struggle to their feet and carry on.

It was morning, again, and she was awake and so were the kids, but they had all stayed in bed and listened to the walls shaking. Nine, or something like that, and still perfectly black. She had been dreaming that she had been having sex with Robertson and she was glad she had woken up. Even the unreal and fading picture of it had left her feeling alarmed – though that eased as the picture of the two of them, entwined, had faded. In another conscious moment she was able to blink the topic away and out of her thoughts. As it had been.

She could hear her girls, Marie and Justine, whispering to one another in their bedroom. She couldn’t tell what they were saying. She heard the word “potato.” Pauloosie, her son, her oldest child, was silent. She listened carefully and thought she could hear him turning in his bed. And then the wind wound up and just howled.

As a girl she had not been this restless, waiting out storms with her parents on the land in a little iglu, drinking sweet tea and lying on caribou skins. It had been more dangerous then but less frightening. Storms make an iglu feel more substantial somehow.

–From Consumption

From the Hardcover edition.

ISBN-13: 9780679314387
ISBN-10: 0679314385
Publication Date: 7/31/2007
Pages: 400
Rating:

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.

3.3 stars, based on 2 ratings

Publisher: Vintage Canada
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Read All 1 Book Reviews of "Consumption"

Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews

Lesley F. (knitter) reviewed Consumption on 7/1/2012 + 64 more book reviews

Can I give s book 6 stars? I loved this book. Yes, the heroine, a Canadian Eskimo, contracts TB as a child, but the book is about how her entire life is affected by being sent away for 6 years to a sanitarium at the age of 10. It is also about how the Eskimos are changed by the white man's culture, how the Eskimo once lived on the land, and there is also some very interesting medical information. Beautiful writing. Fascinating story. And some geography lessons as well if you care to look up the places mentioned on maps.

Share/Like this Review?

Read All Book Reviews of "Consumption"

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> General >> Contemporary
Literature & Fiction >> General >> Literary

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Consumption

Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews

Loading...