Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Open Arms by Marina Endicott ISBN 13: 9781550548402. Freehand Books is pleased to be bringing back to print the widely acclaimed first novel by the author of the Giller-shortlisted Good to a Fault, Marina Endicott. Open Arms is a contemporary quest story set in Saskatoon and featuring a protagonist whose spirit is as strong as her heart is broken. Seventeen-year-old Bessie Smith Connolly, the daughter of a rock-singer mother and absentee poet father, must navigate grief and betrayal, making her way through her exploded family and out into the world. Open Arms was a finalist for the 2002 Amazon-Books in Canada First Novel Award and broadcast on CBC Radio's Between the Covers. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Marina Endicott’s second novel, Good to a Fault (Freehand Books, 2008), was declared a “Must Read” by The Globe and Mail and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Endicott lives in Edmonton and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. : My mother drives her van as if she’s sailing, leaning her weight against each turn to keep an even keel in this stiff breeze. Sometimes when I go with her through the dark streets I fall asleep on the bundles of newspapers in the back, and wake to see her shoulders and head arched black against the windshield, some song slipping out under her breath. On my grandmother’s piano there’s a photograph of my mother hiking far out over the waves, one hand on the tiller and the other on the spinnaker line. Her head is flung back and her eyes are closed, and the sun is everywhere on her. She liked a good wind off Mahone Bay, then. Now she sails the prairie streets in a black van, delivering bundles to the paper boys from midnight till six in the morning. For a long time I wasn’t with her. When I was five I got taken to live with my grandparents in Nova Scotia, and for seven years I didn’t even see my mother, until she started sharing a house with Katherine, my father’s second ex-wife, who was alone too and had a little baby, my half-sister Irene. My father, the poet Patrick Connolly, lives on an island in British Columbia now, with Doreen. When my mother moved in with Katherine and got the newspaper job, I guess she convinced my grandparents that she was stable enough to have me visit. After that I got to be with her in the summers, at least. Things got confused this year by my grandfather’s illness. My mother came out to Nova Scotia to help, and in June, after he died, I went tree-planting with her in Saskatchewan, so we could be quiet in the woods. The deal was that I would spend one more year in Mahone Bay, to keep my grandmother company and finish high school. But something happened once I got there, and I couldn’t stay after all. It was nearly September by the time I came back to Saskatoon for good. The night I arrived, my mother took me out in the van with her, for a treat. I was past going to sleep by then. The branches whipped the windshield in the back alleys as if someone was running ahead of us, some big hasty girl at Guide camp. I put her in yellow shorts and watched her white imaginary thighs until we swung onto a street in the maze or obstacle course of my mother’s route through town. Usually the bundles aren’t ready till 12:30, sometimes 1:00. We hang around the back of the newspaper building, behind the press, drinking coffee from a machine and talking to the other drivers. My mother knows them all, of course. One of them is in a band she sometimes used to sing for. This night the bundles were peeling off the conveyor belt as we drove up, and I went to open the van doors while she started grabbing the packs by their bindings. The band guy’s van was beside ours. He sang out to her, “Company tonight, Isabel?” And she said, “Not tonight, not tonight,” lightly, happily. Then she handed me a bundle and said, “Oh! Yes! Company tonight―you know Bessie―” Then the band guy, whose name is Lee, said, “Hey, Bessie, how you doing?” and clapped his doors shut and drove off. We finished loading the bundles and got back into the van, and I said something about the night being nice and called her Grandmother, pretending the mistake to even out the insults, so she’d feel better about forgetting me. Marina Endicott. In 1993 Marina Endicott was nominated for the JOURNEY PRIZE for her short story "With The Band," and in 2001 she published her first NOVEL, Open Arms , short-listed for the Amazon/Books In Canada First Novel award in 2002. The work traces the story of young Bessie Smith as she survives her upbringing with a poet father who abandons the family to pursue his romantic ideals, and a wild mother who scrapes a living with a third rate band. With her husband, a member of the RCMP, Endicott settled in MAYERTHORPE, Alberta. Following the 2005 killing of four RCMP officers there, she wrote the long poem Policeman's Wife, Some Letters , which was shortlisted for a CBC Literary Prize in 2006. In the poem Endicott reveals the cost of loving and waiting for a police officer over the expanses of the Canadian PRAIRIES: "More than my own death I am afraid of yours,/ to suffer that great absence. / I pray that death be kind, be late, be changed to breath." Marina Endicott believes she does her best writing "at home in Canada. anywhere in Canada really." Although commissioned to write plays ( see DRAMA), and having served as a dramaturge at the BANFF CENTRE for the Arts, Endicott suggests "I'm no kind of playwright." Yet her novels contain a theatrical sensibility, seen in her illumination of her characters' inner lives as she subtly explores the intersection of their dreams and realities. Her penetrating observations make us care for her characters, because we recognize the truth of our own, ordinary selves being played out. Endicott uses a light touch when expressing her characters' profound turning points, portraying the arrival of the unexpected with little warning, immediately demanding we give more of ourselves to one another. Endicott's next novel, Good to a Fault , was a finalist for the 2008 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE and won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, Canada and the Caribbean. Her domestic setting casts in relief the extraordinary act of her protagonist: taking into her home and her life a complex family of strangers. The Little Shadows , Endicott's third novel, was longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize and a finalist for a 2011 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD. Here, Endicott immerses us in the vaudeville stages of the Canadian prairies at the opening of the FIRST WORLD WAR. Three sisters, Aurora, Bella and Clover, with their widowed mother Flora, devise a harmony act, singing sentimental songs to rowdy, unsentimental audiences while meeting a cast of characters on and off stage, breaking their hearts and learning hard lessons. As a writer, Endicott believes she is an interior detective, asking, "what is it like to wait behind the curtain, to watch another fail, to feel success for the first time, to lose everything and carry on?" For Endicott, "novels are the best way to think of the world, to know the world." Marina Endicott continues to write in Edmonton, Alberta. Open Arms. Bessie Smith Connolly has lived with her Nova Scotia grandparents since she was small. But at seventeen?grieving the death of her steadfast grandfather, smarting from a split with the boy she loves?she escapes to Saskatoon to be with her mother, Isabel. Bittersweet, clear-eyed, . Read more. paperback 9781551119328. This item was successfully added to your cart. Overview. Bessie Smith Connolly has lived with her Nova Scotia grandparents since she was small. But at seventeen?grieving the death of her steadfast grandfather, smarting from a split with the boy she loves?she escapes to Saskatoon to be with her mother, Isabel. Bittersweet, clear-eyed, and deeply affecting, this marvellous debut novel charts Bessie's course as she makes her way through her exploded family and out into the world. Marina Endicott. Marina Endicott was born in British Columbia and worked as an actor and director before going to London, England, where she began to write fiction. Her novel Open Arms was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and her second won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Canada and Caribbean region. Awards. Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award 2001, Short-listed. Reviews. " Open Arms is the story of a young woman's quest. Her search is for a mother, her hope is for a final, hard-won comprehension, a reprieve from the ache of being human. But, as in the finest of quest stories, comprehension does not come at some big, dramatic end, it comes all along the complicated way. Marina Endicott's vision is evidence that the journey itself, although lonely and uncharted, can be filled with both clues and consolation. " ? Bonnie Burnard. " Open Arms is the story of a young woman's quest. Her search is for a mother, her hope is for a final, hard-won comprehension, a reprieve from the ache of being human. But, as in the finest of quest stories, comprehension does not come at some big, dramatic end, it comes all along the complicated way. Marina Endicott's vision is evidence that the journey itself, although lonely and uncharted, can be filled with both clues and consolation. " - Bonnie Burnard. Open Arms. We accept payment by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. 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This short guide from our Book Collecting Guide might help. Hang on… we're fetching the requested page. Can you guess which first edition cover the image above comes from? What was Dr. Seuss’s first published book? Take a stab at guessing and be entered to win a $50 Biblio gift certificate! Read the rules here. This website uses cookies. We use cookies to remember your preferences such as preferred shipping country and currency, to save items placed in your shopping cart, to track website visits referred from our advertising partners, and to analyze our website traffic. Privacy Details. ENDICOTT, Marina 1958- PERSONAL: Born 1958, in Golden, British Columbia, Canada; married; children: two. ADDRESSES: Home— Alberta, Canada. Agent— Douglas & Moore Publishing Group, Suite 201, 2323 Quebec St., Vancouver, BC V57 4S7, Canada. CAREER: Novelist. WRITINGS: Open Arms, Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2001. WORK IN PROGRESS: A second novel. SIDELIGHTS: Canadian writer Marina Endicott's debut novel, Open Arms, is a story about the relationships between several generations of women in an artistic but troubled family. Bessie Smith Connolly, who narrates the story, was raised in Nova Scotia by her grandparents after her poet father Patrick abandoned her and her rock-singer mother Isabel, who subsequently lost custody of Bessie after being arrested on a drug charge. At seventeen, following a breakup with her boyfriend Daniel and the death of her beloved grandfather, Bessie goes to Saskatchewan to be with her mother. Isabel is now supporting herself by delivering newspapers and is living with Patrick's second wife, Katherine, and Irene, Bessie's half sister. Bessie and Irene then visit their father, who is staying on an island off the coast of British Columbia with his third wife, Doreen, who is pregnant with twins. About to become a mother herself, Bessie goes in search of Isabel, who has gone missing with her latest lover. She is accompanied by her grandmother, Elizabeth, an aristocratic woman who searches small-town motels and bars with her as they cross the badlands of Alberta. The trip ultimately provides Bessie with insight about her family and herself. Trevor Klassen interviewed the novelist for ffwd online and asked Endicott about her inspiration for the book. Emphasizing that she did not draw on her own family background, Endicott explained that while working with a group of writers and artists, she noticed that "they wanted a glamorous life and to have children. They expected their children to do all the adapting—and I was indignant for the children's sake." She went on to add, "I started the book from anger . . . but over the last two years of writing I became less self-righteous. People are mostly trying to do the best they can." Klassen wrote of the novel that "in the end, women tell the story of womanhood, which, asserts Endicott, isn't the airy-fairy crap of the worst of spirituality, but practical emotional and tangible guides to maturing and living well." "Endicott is an excellent storyteller, and this is a substantial, sweet-natured novel, full of hope and promise," commented W. P. Kinsella of Open Arms in Books in Canada. . "Endicott shows a sure and skillful hand throughout the book," noted Nathan Whitlock in Quill & Quire, "weaving the lessons that Bessie must absorb into the story with nary a loose stitch." Resource Links contributor Elaine Jones called Open Arms a "wonderful first novel." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: periodicals. Books in Canada, August, 2001, W. P. Kinsella, review of Open Arms, p. 26; May, 2002. Quill & Quire, February, 2001, Nathan Whitlock, review of Open Arms. Resource Links, October, 2001, Elaine Jones, review of Open Arms, p. 55.