As this first novel opens, 70-year-old Addy Shadd is living a peaceful trailer-park existence in the company of down-and-outers like Collette, who leaves her daughter with Addy and then disappears. Five-year-old Sharla is neither lovely nor lovable, and Addy's habit of solitude is hard to break, but as the two outcasts learn to care for each other, they begin healing from the abuse that they have suffered. Memories of Addy's childhood days in Rusholme, a Canadian border town settled by runaway slaves in the 1800s, come rushing back and carry the reader away. Addy recalls intimate details a small brother who died, past lovers, children now gone, and the many people who betrayed her while historical events like the Underground Railroad, the Pullman porter movement, and Prohibition frame her account and reflect some of the hardships suffered by African Americans, even in Canada. Though Addy has led a hard life, her beautiful, gentle spirit, her wise and loving way with Sharla, and an ultimate message of hope redeem the book from melancholy. A beautiful debut; recommended for all public libraries. Jennifer Baker, Seattle P.L. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
A plot-driven first from Canadian Lansens strains to affirm love and redemption as an ailing slave-descendant becomes guardian of a mixed-race child. The story explores the lives of those Canadian blacks whose ancestors fled north during the American Revolution or by way of the Underground Railroad. Addy Shadd, who grew up in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves, must now survive not only racism but additional story-demanded tragedies and sorrows in a tale that makes her victim less of character than of plot. The story moves between past and present as Addy relates how the white woman Collette Depuis asks her care for her five-year-old daughter Sharla for the summer. Addy lives in a mobile home in the black section of a trailer park, and when the grubby and unkempt Sharla arrives with neither baggage nor the money Collette promised, Addy sees that the girl is of mixed race, though Sharla has no idea who her father is. Collette vanishes, and, touched by Sharla's plight, the 80-year-old Addy sets out to raise her as memories of her own childhood and past come back to her. She recalls her first love, the death of her only brother, and her rape, when she was 15, by her father's bootlegging associate. When her pregnancy began showing and she was locked out of the house, she fled to Detroit, where a black family took her in. She describes now how the baby died at birth; how she moved to nearby Chatham and married Mose, a porter; bore a daughter who died with Mose in a railway accident; and the lonely years that followed. With Addy's health now failing rapidly, she and Sharla both find redemption and closure when they finally make it back to Rusholme (as in Rush Home Road). Brimming overwith good intentions, but a relentlessly churning plot makes for an unconvincing ride.
"I can see Oprah, with a little makeup, playing Addy Shadd in a 5-hankie movie."
—W.P. Kinsella, Books In Canada
"Impressive…. A fascinating story that probably will be unfamiliar to most readers…. This one may leave you weeping into your beach blanket."
—Boston Globe
"A poignant novel about the power of love and forgiveness."
—Booklist
"Rush Home Road is a neat novel…packaged and presented with all the ends tucked in, not a thread unravelling from the smooth pages…compelling reading."
—Tara Klager, New Brunswick Reader
"Lansens writes her tale with assurance, skillfully drawing rounded characters about whom the reader quickly comes to care….It’s one of those books that ends too soon."
—Red Deer Advocate
"Lansens is a willing storyteller.... As a writer, she desires a particular kind of reader, one who wants above all to be transported—who might sit at her knee, the hearth."
—Noah Richler, National Post
"[A] poignant debut….Addy’s life — her marriage, her children, her journey to Detroit and back to Canada — is the rich core of a novel also laden with history….This is artfully done."
—Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002
"To read Lansens's Rush Home Road is to read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women coupled with Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, but as if both novels had been penned by Toni Morrison... In Rush Home Road ... an Ontario almost never imagined, a secret, rural black Ontario, a landscape of tobacco, corn and strawberries and a history of struggle and beauty, is given magnificent, complex reality.... Lansens is a brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted comprehension of human flaws and humane possibilities."
—George Elliot Clarke, The Globe and Mail
"Small-town Ontario is evoked like never before in the epic…Rush Home Road….a compulsive page-turner that keeps on chugging while shedding light on a part of Canadian history that’s not chronicled nearly enough."
—Susan G. Cole, NOW magazine (Toronto).
"Lansens proves her potential….Lansens presents us with a time and place as steeped in history as the American south; rich material indeed…..Rush Home Road has a sweetness and a charm about it."
—Toronto Star
"The characters remain sympathetic even when patience and kindsness fails them. The book contains reversals of fortune, vivid characters and a rich vein of Canadian history rarely mined in contemporary fiction. In Rush Home Road, Lori Lansens creates a teeming, forgotten world linked to our own by one woman’s life, laid down across the twentieth century like a fragile railroad track."
—Annabel Lyon, Vancouver Sun
"Rush Home Road offers an interesting storyline rich with satisfying plot twists that skilfully confute the reader’s expectations. But the novel’s true power comes from Lansens’ authorial voice — a combinaton of grit and sensuality that exposes the full humanity of characters laid bare against an inconstant sociological landscape. The language flows effortlessly and naturally, dialogue rendered true and authentic through Lansens’ deft handling of vernacular. The author’s deep compassion for her characters evokes writers like John Steinbeck… "
—Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)
"The magic of Lori Lansens’ writing lies in the way it knows its characters, and the way the characters know each other….Rush Home Road is a major triumph made up of many small, wonderful things. Dickens has written some stuff like this; so have Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami and Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry and Roberston Davies. But not on their first try."
—Hamilton Spectator
"immensely readable and informative about a root beginning in our history that I have not seen plumbed in other Canadian novels — the black experience at the end of the Underground Railroad, principally in southwestern Ontario."
—Noah Richler, National Post
"Lansens’ talent is evident in her ability to move beyond her own experience to recreate the hardship, loves and losses of a black woman in the last century. Her novel is a moving testament to survival."
—Margaret Macpherson, Edmonton Journal
Advance Praise:
"Rush Home Road is brilliant in its microscopic portrayal of the scent and stench, tears and screams, laughter and joy of black Canadian life in a small southern Ontario town. It draws with pulsating prose the picture of life in the developing ‘Negro’ societies formed by the proliferation of Canadian stations along the Underground Railway."
—Austin Clarke, author of The Question and The Origin of Waves
"This novel? It is the gospel of our history."
—George Elliott Clarke, author of Execution Poems and Beatrice Chancy
"Rush Home Road, the story of a 70 year old woman's journey through the nearly unbearable sorrows of her past, in order to save an abandoned little girl, is a first novel of exquisite power, honesty and conviction. Its portrait of how much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms of race, love, hate and loss, is quite nearly without flaws."
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and A Theory of Relativity
"While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience abound in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the country's long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori Lansens ... does so passionately with Rush Home Road ... a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we know more about a time and place — and about humankind — than when we opened the cover."
—Quill & Quire advance review
