From the Publisher
A lonely 70-year-old woman takes in an abandoned girl in this
heart-wrenching tale of love and loss set in the black communities
of southwestern Ontario.
Rush Home Road, a dramatic début novel by an adept
storyteller, was compared to John Steinbeck and Alice Munro and is
poised to become beloved by readers around the world. While
exploring the rich history of the Underground Railroad, whereby
fugitive slaves from the United States found freedom in Canada, it
also speaks broadly of motherhood, understanding, the importance of
goodness and the power of love.
Rusholme, Ontario, is an all-black town born of the Underground
Railroad. Its inhabitants farm land cleared by their ancestors who
escaped slavery, and are grateful for modest comforts and richness
of life; but for the taint of the bootleggers, it is a strong and
peaceful community. At fifteen, Addy Shadd has learned to bake a
pie crust better than her mother's, and is happy to pick vegetables
in the fields in summer so she can show off her strong, smooth
calves to Chester Monk, the young man she hopes to marry one day.
At the annual Strawberry Supper, her dreams go horribly awry. A
series of terrible misunderstandings lead to the tragic death of
her brother, and blame falls on Addy. Shunned by her family, exiled
from the community, she leaves home to find a new life. One refrain
fills her head: Rush Home. But she is no longer welcome in
Rusholme. Her courageous journey takes her to less-sheltered
places, first to Detroit, then Chatham, where she finds a home for
a while - until tragedy strikes again. Addy has learned to accept
the tribulations life deals her as merely "what is."
Many years later, in 1978, we meet Addy at 70, living in a trailer
park near Lake Erie. She grows flowers and keeps a tidy house, her
only company the voice of her little brother Leam, which has stayed
with her through the years. Her quiet existence is ruptured
suddenly when a neighbour offers to pay Addy to look after her
young daughter for the summer. Before Addy can act on her second
thoughts, the girl's mother has disappeared, and odd, mixed-race
Sharla Cody is Addy's responsibility.
It is not the first time Addy has had a five-year-old to care for,
and although long-neglected Sharla has much to learn about how to
behave, her warm, grateful presence brings back a deluge of
memories for Addy, who carries an unwarranted burden of guilt. As
we watch a relationship unfold between the aging Addy and the
little girl she chooses to care for, we are transported through
flashbacks into the harsh life of a strong woman who endured more
disasters than triumphs, suffered through racism and prejudice, but
still has faith in the redemptive power of love.
With its depictions of human nature at its most despicable and most
admirable, Rush Home Road is heartbreaking but
optimistic, passionate but funny, intimate and readable, with
skillfully drawn characters and compelling plot twists. Although
Knopf Canada was the first publisher to buy the manuscript, a U.S.
publisher quickly paid a large advance for the remaining rights to
this first novel by a Canadian author, and within two months of
acquiring the manuscript had sold it in eleven countries. Shortly
after the book's publication, film rights were bought by Whoopi
Goldberg, who plans to play the lead role.
From the Jacket
"I can see Oprah, with a little makeup, playing Addy Shadd in a
5-hankie movie."
-W.P. Kinsella, Books In Canada
"Impressive…. A fascinating story that probably will be unfamiliar
to most readers…. This one may leave you weeping into your beach
blanket."
-Boston Globe
"A poignant novel about the power of love and forgiveness."
-Booklist
"Rush Home Road is a neat novel…packaged and
presented with all the ends tucked in, not a thread unravelling
from the smooth pages…compelling reading."
-Tara Klager, New Brunswick Reader
"Lansens writes her tale with assurance, skillfully drawing
rounded characters about whom the reader quickly comes to
care….It's one of those books that ends too soon."
-Red Deer Advocate
"Lansens is a willing storyteller.... As a writer, she desires
a particular kind of reader, one who wants above all to be
transported--who might sit at her knee, the hearth."
-Noah Richler, National Post
"[A] poignant debut….Addy's life - her marriage, her children, her
journey to Detroit and back to Canada - is the rich core of a novel
also laden with history….This is artfully done."
-Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002
"To read Lansens's Rush Home Road is to
read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women
coupled with Margaret Laurence's The Stone
Angel, but as if both novels had been penned by
Toni Morrison... In Rush Home Road ... an Ontario
almost never imagined, a secret, rural black Ontario, a landscape
of tobacco, corn and strawberries and a history of struggle and
beauty, is given magnificent, complex reality.... Lansens is a
brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted comprehension of
human flaws and humane possibilities."
-George Elliot Clarke, The Globe and Mail
"Small-town Ontario is evoked like never before in the
epic…Rush Home Road….a compulsive page-turner that
keeps on chugging while shedding light on a part of Canadian
history that's not chronicled nearly enough."
-Susan G. Cole, NOW magazine (Toronto).
"Lansens proves her potential….Lansens presents us with a time and
place as steeped in history as the American south; rich material
indeed…..Rush Home Road has a sweetness
and a charm about it."
-Toronto Star
"The characters remain sympathetic even when patience and kindsness
fails them. The book contains reversals of fortune, vivid
characters and a rich vein of Canadian history rarely mined in
contemporary fiction. In Rush Home Road, Lori
Lansens creates a teeming, forgotten world linked to our own by one
woman's life, laid down across the twentieth century like a fragile
railroad track."
-Annabel Lyon, Vancouver Sun
"Rush Home Road offers an interesting
storyline rich with satisfying plot twists that skilfully confute
the reader's expectations. But the novel's true power comes from
Lansens' authorial voice -- a combinaton of grit and sensuality
that exposes the full humanity of characters laid bare against an
inconstant sociological landscape. The language flows effortlessly
and naturally, dialogue rendered true and authentic through
Lansens' deft handling of vernacular. The author's deep compassion
for her characters evokes writers like John Steinbeck… "
-Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)
"The magic of Lori Lansens' writing lies in the way it knows
its characters, and the way the characters know each
other….Rush Home Road is a major triumph
made up of many small, wonderful things. Dickens has written some
stuff like this; so have Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Haruki
Murakami and Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry and Roberston
Davies. But not on their first try."
-Hamilton Spectator
"immensely readable and informative about a root beginning in
our history that I have not seen plumbed in other Canadian novels -
the black experience at the end of the Underground Railroad,
principally in southwestern Ontario."
-Noah Richler, National Post
"Lansens' talent is evident in her ability to move beyond her
own experience to recreate the hardship, loves and losses of a
black woman in the last century. Her novel is a moving testament to
survival."
-Margaret Macpherson, Edmonton Journal
Advance Praise:
"Rush Home Road is brilliant in its microscopic
portrayal of the scent and stench, tears and screams, laughter and
joy of black Canadian life in a small southern Ontario town. It
draws with pulsating prose the picture of life in the developing
'Negro' societies formed by the proliferation of Canadian stations
along the Underground Railway."
-Austin Clarke, author of The Question and
The Origin of Waves
"This novel? It is the gospel of our history."
-George Elliott Clarke, author of Execution Poems
and Beatrice Chancy
"Rush Home Road, the story of a 70 year old
woman's journey through the nearly unbearable sorrows of her past,
in order to save an abandoned little girl, is a first novel of
exquisite power, honesty and conviction. Its portrait of how much
has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms
of race, love, hate and loss, is quite nearly without flaws."
-Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the
Ocean and A Theory of Relativity
"While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience abound
in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the
country's long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori
Lansens ... does so passionately with Rush Home
Road ... a compulsively readable book that leaves us
feeling we know more about a time and place - and about humankind -
than when we opened the cover."
-Quill & Quire advance review
About the Author
Lori Lansens is the author of two bestselling novels, Rush
Home Road and The Girls, which was a
Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2006 (and sold over
300,000 copies in the UK) and a finalist for the Orange Broadband
Prize for Fiction. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, Lori
Lansens now makes her home in California.
From the Hardcover edition.
Bookclub Guide
1. The American publisher described Rush Home
Road as reading "as if John Irving has written
The Color Purple." In his review, George
Elliott Clarke said the novel reminded him of Alice Munro's
Lives of Girls and Women, coupled with Margaret
Laurence's The Stone Angel, but as if both novels
had been penned by Toni Morrison. Can you comment on these
comparisons?
2. Jacquelyn Mitchard commented on the novel's portrait of "how
much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the
realms of race, love, hate and loss." How does Addy's early life
compare to Sharla's?
3. Is Addy's determined acceptance of "what is" - her endurance
that might be an inheritance from her enslaved ancestors - always a
blessing or sometimes a curse?
4. How much did the historical background of the novel
contribute to your interest in the narrative?
5. Addy teaches Sharla how to value herself by valuing other
people; she shows her simple ways of living and gives her a set of
morals. Can you compare this to any other fictional mother-child
relationships?
6. While the central characters of the novel are clearly Addy
and Sharla, the novel is filled with convincing male characters.
Which did you find most interesting?
Trade Paperback
January 21, 2003
Knopf Canada
English
0676974511
9780676974515