Coast

A Novel

Coast is a novel about four young adults on the threshold of their twenties and the day and a half they spend paddling Toronto’s shorelines after escaping a disastrous family reunion. The four paddlers are Alex, who comes from Canada’s West Coast, his twin sister Claire, who comes from Montreal, and Kate and Sam, two cousins they didn’t know they had until recently, and whom they meet only a couple hours before their urban canoe trip begins. It's a black comedy, a liquor-fuelled drama, and a tribute to the art of scribbling prose in notebooks. The trip lands the four on a beach where they join a bonfire surrounded by paddlers from a dragonboat festival. Sam immediately takes an interest in Rory, who has travelled from Ireland with half a dragonboat team to race with the team’s other Canuck half. Kate befriends Heather, captain of the Sunset Masters, a high school dragonboat team that Heather and her three best friends are racing with for the last time (the four have recently graduated). Alex — a fisherman, bohemian writer and lover of bonfires — hits it off with Spry from the Sunset Masters — a street artist who is being pushed to go to art school, but would prefer to forfeit the opportunity to hike and drive through the urban landscape where she lives and tend to her soul in the way she believes her soul wants her to. Alex has made a similar choice to the one Spry is tempted by. Through his success in creative writing, and the extra-credit essays and short-stories assigned to him by supportive teachers, he graduated a year early, with the expectation that he would enrol in a prestigious writing program, but he immediately forfeited the opportunity to move out West, work as a deckhand on fishing boats, and write dialogues in notebooks with no intention of publishing or finishing any pieces. The two make an easy connection, or would if it weren’t for Alex’s twin sister. Claire — a charmer, powerful manipulator with a ferocious temper, and despiser of anything bohemian (except pot, which she smokes habitually) — involves herself in her twin-brother’s fast-developing romance with Spry, most heavy-handedly when she learns that Spry’s very close friend Martyn, also paddling for the Sunset Masters, is in love with her. Although Claire at first dislikes Kate and Sam (not to mention Hamilton and, thus, the whole Hamilton side of the family), and although she is enraged that she is even on the trip (she was asleep in the docked canoes when Alex convinced his two cousins to escape the disastrous family reunion), she eventually forms a shaky peace with Kate and Sam, who themselves have a precarious relationship. Kate is a dirt bike and sled loving girl with a pit bull personality. Sam, who is not just Kate’s cousin, but also her best friend, is a canoe tripper, classical guitar player, and a sweet, soft-spoken person. Kate’s pit bull personality instigates many debates and bickering between her and Sam, and their friendship is put to the test in this story. The question that overshadows the whole book, however, is whether, by the end of the trip, Alex and Claire will reconcile the distance that their equally cynical and isolating personalities have created between them, and embrace their family, even Kate and Sam — their very different inland counterparts.

No public reviews yet. Be the first.