THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE SURVIVAL KIT: flannel pyjamas, fleecy slippers, a woollen blanket, a cat and a crackling fire to ward off cold weather from up north and cold characters from down south. It’s a cold not unlike “a living thing that chases … and wants to suck the life” from us.

Will Bird (son of Xavier Bird from Three Day Road) is in a coma, shrivelling up in a Moose Factory hospital bed. As if trying to decide whether he should stay alive, Will narrates the events leading up to his coma to his nieces Annie and Suzanne. But Suzanne has gone missing, so Annie sits by her vegetative uncle alone. Because the nurse tells Annie that talking to comatose patients can help them, Annie—reluctantly at first—tells her uncle of her search for Suzanne in Toronto, Montreal, and New York. A search sometimes curtailed by drugs, the fast-paced lifestyle of modeling and superficial friends who claim to have known Suzanne.

Like Three Day Road, Boyden’s highly acclaimed first novel, Through Black Spruce believes in the healing power of storytelling. The characters tell stories to unburden and heal themselves as well as their listeners. The only character who doesn’t need any healing, a city Indian named Gordon, is mute; he plays the role of Annie’s stoic protector as she tried to find her sister and herself.

Will and Annie’s voices are distinct, and draw readers in in different ways. Will’s cadence is slow and entrancing. He often sounds old and tired, but there is poetry and humour in his way of looking at things. For example, Will calls Dorothy, his school crush, and hangs up a few times, only to have Dorothy call him back. “Caller ID?” Will wonders. “What the hell is that? It’s technology conspiring against me.” Annie’s voice is younger, faster, more to the point. She often says “Ever!” as others would say “No way!” Complementing each other, their voices describe some of the troubles of Native people, both young and old: alcoholism, vagrancy, the desire to live with nature twinned with the need to get away from it. Gordon alone seems to truly relish the Moosonee bush, preferring the cold wind to a cold shoulder. Parts Irish, Scottish and Métis, Boyden, upon winning the prestigious Giller Prize this past November, promised to “always write about the First Nations of Canada” and “push the message that we need to heal.”

Despite the ending, which is a little too tidy, and a section when Will flees north to a deserted island in James Bay and readers want the narrator to get back to the point, the novel is suspenseful. The teeter-totter of narratives feels effective and balanced until Boyden returns to the reason Will is in a coma and Will’s side of the seesaw comes crashing down. This change of pace is jarring at first, but form meets subject matter and all is forgiven.

Mélanie Grondin is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in carte blanche, Soliloquies, Headlight and Room Magazine. Her short story Law of Attraction will appear in the upcoming issue of Nashwaak Review. She was dreading winter long before it even began.