A Review of the Book "The Wake" by Linden MacIntyre

Title: The Wake

Author: Linden MacIntyre

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Year: 2019

336 pages

From the Back: On November 18, 1929, a tsunami struck Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula. Giant waves, up to three storeys high, hit the coast at a hundred kilometers per hour, flooding dozens of communities and washing entire houses out to sea. The most destructive earthquake-related event in Newfoundland's history, the disaster killed 28 people and left hundreds more homeless or destitute. It took days for the outside world to find out about the death and damage caused by the tsunami, which forever changed the lives of many in habitants of the fishing outports along the Burin Peninsula.

Personal Thoughts: This book was not what I was expecting at all. Perhaps I didn't read the cover properly, but I thought The Wake was going to be about the 1929 tsunami. That storm took up perhaps a dozen pages of the entire book. The rest of the pages were filled with the decades of aftermath that followed. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; it just wasn't what I was expecting. The title was misleading because although none of the subsequent events would likely have happened without the tsunami, the narrative was almost solely about the mining that happened in Newfoundland. So perhaps a better title would have been The Mines.

    Because I was disappointed in how the book was turning out, I found it difficult to read. Not that the writing was bad, but it felt slow and repetitive as it jumped from one person's story to the next. It probably could have been half the length and still gotten the point across. Again, that could have been because of my unmet expectations.

    In the end, it was an interesting piece of history to have learned, especially as it appears to be a very little known piece of our Canadian history. It is always sad to learn about how poorly we can treat our fellow humans.