Return to, escape from Newfoundland
The Art of Getting Lost and Found
by Glenna Turnbull
St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2026
$24.95 / 9781778530814
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
*
If you never get lost, how can you ever be found? In Glenna Turnbull’s debut novel, The Art of Getting Lost and Found, we meet two women separated by more than a century but united by a desire to escape the painful present in quest of a better future.
We first meet Maggie in her psychiatrist’s office. She’s lost her kids in a messy divorce, and has now lost her mother too. She has borderline personality disorder and some scars on her face that she can’t seem to stop touching, and when she tells her psychiatrist about her plan to visit her mother’s former Newfoundland home to scatter her ashes, the doctor has her doubts.
She’d be even more nervous if she knew that Maggie intends to leave her medication behind.
It’s a journey of discovery, both outer and inner, and as Maggie heads to Newfoundland, we learn her back story. Her controlling husband. Her furious drunken father, whose ashes she also intends to scatter. The children that, in one poignant scene, she follows on Instagram because she sees them so rarely in real life.
On her journey, Maggie picks up mementos. Sea glass and rocks that she intends to use in a stained-glass window she’ll make when she gets home. As the medication leaves her system, her emotions become less predictable, and her parents’ beautiful homeland becomes increasingly enchanting, from the rugged ocean scenery to a stone “rippled like the nose of a Shar-Pei” that ends up in her collection.
Her passion for her art is in some sense a distillation of her psychological condition: “…a piece of glass could be both fragile and strong; the way it could change its mood so quickly with every different light.”
But glass, of course, can be dangerous too. Recounting an accident in her glass studio, Maggie says, “as soon as the blood began to stream out of my hand, all the pain I was feeling inside disappeared. It was as if it had been released out into the world, pouring like spilled wine from a knocked-over glass.”
She keeps touching those scars on her face that make her self-conscious, and we start to believe that maybe there are no accidents.
Maggie’s journey is a solitary one, but her regular life back in Kelowna (where Turnbull resides) isn’t so different. Besides her friend Romany—a sassy source of emotional support who advises her to bring condoms on her trip, despite Maggie’s worry that her “vagina’s gone dry and shrivelled up”—all she has is a dog and her stained glass. But as she makes a pilgrimage to the places her mother knew, she encounters a cast of friendly Newfoundland b’ys who make her feel closer to the mother she’s lost.
Maggie doesn’t have it easy, but the novel’s other protagonist, Susan “Shorty” Short, is living a horror story. Told over the same week in August as Maggie’s story, only in 1887 instead of 2017, Shorty’s half of the novel has its most harrowing scenes.
Married to Lorne, a violent drunk without a single redeeming quality, Shorty’s sole priority is getting her and her children away, before he kills them all. Surrounded by unfriendly neighbours—“Old Marta’s tongue flaps faster than sheets on the laundry line”—Shorty’s few moments of pleasure are spent either with her children or reading the books she borrows from the local schoolteacher. But Lorne doesn’t want either her or his kids to read.
“He switches quicker than a room goes dark after blowing the lantern out,” she says of Lorne, and anyone who knows the first thing about abusive relationships will blink in recognition at her observation that “I honestly never know with Lorne how he’s going to react to anything. Ever.”
It is notable that Shorty doesn’t exactly sound like she’s from 1887. In fact, she sounds a lot like Maggie. But that deliberate anachronism, along with their curly red hair and a past haunted by abusive men, isn’t the only thing that links the two women.
The novel alternates between the two women, both stories told in the present tense and in the first person, Shorty’s run-ins with Lorne getting increasingly threatening while Maggie oscillates between the joy of discovery and the dark memories of her own past. At times, the chapters deliberately echo one another like a reflection on a still pond. “I can do it. I know I can,” ends one of Maggie’s chapters, right before Shorty’s next chapter begins, “we can do it. I know we can.”
As a modern woman, Maggie Breen certainly has more agency than Shorty. But freedom comes with the responsibility of being a moral actor. Maggie isn’t to blame for her mental illness, or her past trauma, but in some cases, it’s her own bad decisions that have gotten her to the lonely place she’s in now. She’s well aware of that fact, and Turnbull does not let her off the hook, even while extending her plenty of compassion.
The narration in Maggie’s chapters is deeply internal, her journey as much inward as it is outward. For Shorty, though, Newfoundland is a rugged, elemental, unfriendly place, and the nature imagery reflects her emotional state as she becomes increasingly desperate to escape.
When violence comes, it’s written plainly and starkly, made all the more shocking by its avoidance of melodrama. It manages to be both inevitable and horrifying at the same time, and it’s impossible not to start rooting for Shorty as she does everything in her limited power to protect her children from the monster they live with.
The way the stories reflect and enhance one another makes the dual narrative technique more than just a gimmick. There is a real dialogue between past and present that justifies telling the two stories together like this. Still, it’s hard not to wonder if these stories would be strong enough to stand on their own.
Turnbull is working here with a combination of Newfoundland legend and what clearly seems to be her own past, and what power the novel has comes from a sense of quiet endurance, not sudden revelation. The way that the stories end up intersecting is clear almost from the outset, and that robs the narrative of some of its tension. But The Art of Getting Lost and Found, while short on surprises, is a novel with real promise, and it will be interesting to see how Turnbull’s career develops from here.
*
Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan has reviewed recent books by Richard Wagamese, Marilyn Bowering, Marina Sonkina, Dennis E. Bolen, Don McLellan, Vijay Khurana, and Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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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