by Carissa Halton
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$23.95/376 pp.
Revolution Songs is the debut novel of Carissa Halton, a communications consultant and keynote speaker on community development and government relations. Despite Revolution Songs being her first foray into fiction, she’s not an inexperienced writer. Halton previously published Little Yellow House (University of Alberta Press, 2018), a nonfiction account of moving to a rough, inner-city Edmonton neighbourhood. She has also published widely in magazines such as Today’s Parent and Azure and won a National Magazine Award for an article in Eighteen Bridges.
Halton brings direct language and talent as a researcher to her first attempt at fiction. Revolution Songs is a meticulously researched account of the turbulent years in the Crowsnest Pass from 1928 to 1932. Readers needn’t be put off by the two-page character list or the author’s note that sets out the book’s historical context. The novel is accessible and easy to follow despite its large cast. Halton delivers the story in short, catchy chapters, each with its own narrative arc, and readers will also learn the history by being immersed in the story. However, the endnote clarifying where Halton takes liberties and where she sticks to facts will be invaluable to history buffs. This transparency and rigorous research make Revolution Songs the perfect novel for anyone wanting an energetic, immersive tour of this region’s Depression-era history.
Halton is one of the few authors to hold a fictional mirror up to this specific region. In an old-fashioned, chronological storytelling style, she sketches the main events of the Pass with such acute attention that the place itself becomes a main character. She captures the smell of the mines, the shadow of Frank Slide, the dark days, the relentless wind, the omnipresent coal dust, the development of the local Communist party at the same time as the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the growing support for women’s emancipation, and the constant grief and fear of families who made their living by mining coal. A character complains the smell alone would make her divorce her husband if he forced her to live in one of these miserable towns.
From the large cast, Annie Jalmer emerges as the novel’s heart. Readers focus on her as she navigates the Pass’s political conflicts, such as that between communist and fascist forces, or the rising unrest of workers. This labour unrest eventually results in a strike that provides the novel’s main plot. Though writing in largely utilitarian language, Halton creates believable, compelling characters who pull readers into the drama and lend insight, especially into the challenges of women navigating the hard mining-town life and the province’s fraught Depression-era politics. The story of the Canadian KKK gaining a foothold in Alberta is an important and timely reminder that not only can it happen here, but it has happened here—as a direct outcome of similar political polarization.
Halton’s deep research has afforded her no shortage of drama. She portrays a company that gives its employees just enough shifts that they’ll stay and labour conditions in which boys die because the “boss class” refuses to prioritize human life over their own financial interest. Despite this inhospitable working environment, desperate workers come from all over the world to this “miserable mountain pass.” Halton powerfully notes that there are many languages in the Pass, but all fail to describe the grief.
Revolution Songs might not be the book for readers who like experimental literary fiction and poetic language, but lovers of historical fiction will be hard-pressed to find a novel more packed full of drama than this one.
Angie Abdou is a professor of creative writing at Athabasca University. Her most recent book is This One Wild Life (ECW).
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