by Fran Kimmel
ECW PRESS
2025/$24.95/288 pp.
A book titled Cattail Lane might be expected to start slowly, meditatively. Birdsong and swaying rushes. Not so with this Cattail Lane, by Fran Kimmel, which bursts into action with the surprise arrival of an unknown teenage son into the stagnant life of an absentee deadbeat dad. We are in a small town, probably in central Alberta. Other than that, it takes a minute for the reader to get oriented, deftly paralleling the confusion and abruptness the character experiences.
Once we settle in with our main characters—Nick, the mystery dad, Billy, the son, and Evie, Billy’s grandmother, who orchestrated the whole thing but due to advancing dementia can no longer explain herself—we are able to proceed with what turns out to be a fairly familiar plot structure.
Evie has a secret: she knows Nick has a son (conceived during a teenaged one-night stand with her daughter), whom she raised after her daughter died and who she put in Nick’s unknowing hands once her dementia started to take over.
At Evie’s long-term care facility, Prairie View Manor, we meet Nick’s potential love interest, Sarah. At a dingy bar we also meet Candace, the love interest from Nick’s old and disappointing life. Through these two women we get to know his past and his future. While the author keeps us from Candace’s point of view, we do get a shifting point of view between Nick, Sarah and Billy. We get a glimpse at Evie’s perspective in one of Nick’s later recollections, but we are left wanting either a flashback or a small chapter from her point of view. This may be the author reminding us of what is lost with dementia, but it is also within the power of the novel to bring her back. I would have loved a moment with just Evie.
Ultimately Cattail Lane becomes a rather straight shot to a lesson about the importance and meaning of family and community, most movingly told through the story of Billy and Evie and their life before Nick. Eventually they come together to overcome the limitations of Evie’s disease and paint a mural at Prairie View Manor based on a photo Nick took.
While some subplots crowd out the more effective parts of the story, all in all this is a good summer read. Cattail Lane would be a perfect companion to an afternoon in a hammock, perhaps lakeside while listening to birdsong and swaying rushes. Kimmel shows an almost equal care between the characters and landscape and creates a warm and welcoming world for the reader—one that does stick pretty closely to unsurprising plot lines but pleasingly veers away from a clean ending, which adds depth to the characters. The story closes with a satisfying sense of beginning rather than ending.
Megan Clark is a writer and librarian from Lethbridge.
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