May 9, 2022

Cambium Blue, by Maureen Brownlee

Oh my gosh, I loved Maureen Brownlee’s Cambium Blue from its first pages, with characters so vivid, sympathetic and familiar that I felt like I was watching a small town TV drama and the story’s spell was never broken. The story moving between the perspectives of Stevie, single mom turned newspaper reporter; her eccentric neighbour Nash, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War; and Maggie, the community newspaper publisher trying to decide whether or not to carry on with her flagging business after the death of her husband. It’s 1995 and changes are already afoot in the rural British Columbia town of Beauty Creek, ever since the sawmill closed down, which has locals are struggling, plus a beetle infestation is threatening the area’s most valued resource and local politicians are determined to add polish and red tape to the way things things have always been done.

A smooth-talking businessman is promising fortune in the form of a luxury resort, but not everybody is convinced he has town’s best interests in mind. Similarly controversial is a crackdown on Nash’s yard full of things he’s scavenged from the town dump, which has Stevie coming to his defence once they’ve developed a prickly connection when she dares to interview him about his history for the paper, but Stevie’s never been an advocate for anybody before, a teen mom who never finished high school, though Maggie sees something in her and has given her a chance to prove herself, the kind of chance Maggie herself might have appreciated once upon a time before her promise had been overwhelmed by that of her husband.

Cambium Blue is a novel about community, and change, its necessity sometimes and other times one must rail against it. It’s also a beautiful ode to community newspapers, situated at a moment just before the advent of the internet made the business seem impossible—though some of defied the odds. (Brownlee’s biography mentions her ten years spent as “variously publisher, editor, reporter, photographer, graphic designer and janitor for a weekly community newspaper.”) There’s a certain amount of small town dynamics that make the story especially compelling, but there’s nothing tawdry about this, Brownlee permitting each of her characters such a fierce dignity and inspiring sense of self that makes the story so alive. Such characterization, along with beautiful prose, resulting in novel that really sings, and reading it was moving, and such a pleasure.