Seven Oaks Magazine.

Alison Pick, an award winning young Canadian poet, has produced a first novel with characters that are compellingly ordinary, and a setting that is deeply rooted in this country’s diverse landscape.

The Sweet Edge explores the two solitudes -- not English and French Canada, as the obnoxious Native-ignoring cliché goes – of young lovers Adam and Ellen separated one summer both emotionally and physically. Adam, a progressive, perhaps somewhat pretentious, and sophisticated grad student, takes a summer-long solo canoe trip in the barren North, while Ellen, his at least temporarily jilted partner, spends a humid season of self-discovery in Toronto, where she has landed a job at an art gallery.

From their two contrasting locations, we see our two protagonists working out their inner thoughts and memories, often reflecting on similar events in starkly opposing terms. The story of the young couple comes together in this retrospective fashion, while we are kept in suspense as to the result of their reunion, and with respect to the content of a gift Adam has left Ellen.

Pick’s main characters are realistic representations of a generation that in many ways has taken longer than most to find itself. Adam and Ellen are both out to find their identity as adults, and emerge from the phenomenon that has been described as prolonged adolescence. For the male protagonist, it is the angst of a middle class idealist coming to grips with the limits of his own horizons, and ultimately his own mortality. For Ellen, in contrast, it is her difficult past and lingering sense of inferiority and lack of purpose. The cast of characters Ellen encounters in her urban journey is a little too predictable, sort of a potpourri of the middle class urbanity of the 21st century. So, for instance, one of the friends she makes, who is a lesbian, attends yoga class and talks about Tibetan Buddhism.

Adam, meanwhile, encounters precious few souls on his long journey, and Pick deserves praise for keeping his self-reflections interesting. The rookie novelist also manages to seamlessly include descriptions of sex in all the awkward and randomness that fiction often glosses over or omits.

The Sweet Edge takes its title from a line in Thoreau’s Walden Pond, an appropriate reference for a first novel set, in part at least, in the solitude of Nature. The great writer of Civil Disobedience began his career while living in a simple one-room house by the Pond. Alison Pick’s debut makes for good reading, whether at leisure on a holiday or trip in the outdoors, or during the short breaks from busy city and working life.