A prayer of thanks
Wôpanâak / Seasons
by Carrie Anne Vanderhoop / illustrated by Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley
Vancouver: Tradewinds Books, 2025
$24.95 / 9781926890418
Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic
*
The natural world is front and centre in virtually every panel of Wôpanâak / Seasons. It’s not foreboding, or a dangerous wilderness, though. Majestic and vast, nature is part of everyday life.
In the picture book, sand, trees, snow, and shore are not remote or removed from any day’s activities. In fact, virtually every panel shows people. They’re happily part of it all.
In one panel, a child walks with her grandfather on a solitary road, listening to a chorus of frogs. Visually, the pair is dwarfed by a vibrant night sky, a tree with an immense trunk, and a forest rendered in inviting green hues. In another, two kids sit on a shore and watch as the immense sunset “paints the sky pink and gold.” In a third panel, a child watches as a red-tail hawk circles above at a dusk painted in striations of blue, violet, and pink. Another, set in winter, depicts kids play in fields of snow as an adult grills venison on an open fire.
With the exception of two panels—one depicts a spring social, the other a family’s Christmas feast of roast turkey and venison—the outside world is simply there to be enjoyed and appreciated. It’s wondrous, bounteous. Though ordinary—always accessible, never far from sight—it offers enchantment.
“I got saved by the beauty of the world,” the poet Mary Oliver said a few years before her death in 2019, and there’s something of that sentiment in the pages written by Carrie Anne Vanderhoop and illustrated by Vancouver resident Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley.
Yet, it’s not only beautiful, an unending playground, as in Wôpanâak / Seasons beauty might come second after another of nature’s properties: it’s generative. Lobsters and clams are cooked on hot rocks; delectable grapes and cranberries are harvested; yams, beans, and squash are planted and later eaten with gusto.
And as the young narrator passes through each season and delights in its adventures and foods, she recalls (in English interspersed with Wampanoag) moments and scenes that have brought her pleasure and joy. Before the panels for the next season begin, she lists what she’s thankful for. She asks her young audience about their own gratitude for each season.
Vanderhoop might have chosen one version of realism: an urban trip in traffic to the nearest Costco. Instead, however, her story—which is based on her own memories and recollections of stories she was told about the Wampanoag region of Aquinnah in Massachusetts (Vanderhoop now resides on Haida Gwaii)—conjures a formative past whose abundant pleasures began and ended with nature and her extended family’s activities within it.
In her “Author’s Note,” Vanderhoop mentions her own thankfulness for land and community. It installed an abiding “sense of identity, belonging and responsibility” in her. And while the youngsters looking at the pictures and reading (or listening to) the words of Vanderhoop’s book will probably not pay any attention to an author’s afterword, they’ll intuit the lyrical, prayer-like poetry of the book: the natural world is a wonderland of sights and experiences, it nourishes, sustains, and gratifies us, it is part of us and we are part of it, amen.
The “world offers itself to your imagination,” Oliver wrote, it “calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.” With lovely, striking images and a warm, exultant child’s voice that exclaims about nature, family, and family-in-nature, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop and Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley take readers to another imaginative world whose citizens appreciate their place in the family of things.
*
My Two-Faced Luck, the fifth novel by Salt Spring Islander Brett Josef Grubisic, published in 2021 with Now or Never Publishing, is reviewed here by Geoffrey Morrison. A previous novel, Oldness; or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O (2018), was reviewed by Dustin Cole. [Editorial note: A BCR editor, Brett has recently reviewed books by Trevor Atkins, Lee et al., Kung Jaadee and Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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