BooksCanadian

The Spoon Stealer

A novel by Lesley Crewe.

Lesley Crewe

CBC Books Posted: Dec 22, 2021 11:08 AM EST | Last Updated: January 17, 2022

Born into a basket of clean sheets ruining a perfectly good load of laundry Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her.

And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don't know what to make of her.

Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer.

When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong.

But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful perhaps several spoonfuls of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy.

The Spoon Stealeris a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women's friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart. (FromVagrant Press)

The Spoon Stealer is on the Canada Reads 2022longlist.

Lesley Crewe is a Nova Scotia columnist, screenwriter andauthor of several novels, includingBeholden,Mary, Mary,Amazing Grace,Chloe Sparrow,Kin, The Spoon StealerandRelative Happiness, which has been adapted into a feature film.Crewe won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction forThe Spoon Stealer, a historical novel about a charming and loud old woman looking back on her life through a memoir she wrote.

From the book

Apparently, a summer morning in 1894 was the perfect time for hanging out a line of wash. The kind of day when the sun shone so bright in the clear blue sky, that white cotton sheets dazzled before your eyes, making you almost blind. The wind snapped pillow cases and clean towels back and forth like waving flags, and the smell of the grass and hay made you think that life was definitely worth living.

At least, that's what I was thinking when my mother gave an almighty screech and reached down between her apron and long skirt to attempt to catch me before I fell from between her legs into a basket full of freshly laundered linen. She didn't grab me in time, and I don't think she ever forgave me for bloodying those beautiful white sheets. But the scent of sundrenched fresh cotton in that meadow of wildflowers, mixed with the salty sea air and the aroma of fir trees, is still the most heavenly fragrance on earth. I feel it belongs only to me.

Which is nonsense, of course, but then that's how I've always seen the world. It's mine alone. And that attitude tried my mother's patience on an almost daily basis. She had no idea what to do with me.

Add some good to your morning and evening.