“In Seach of April Raintree” by Beatrice Culleton

In Search of April Raintree is not an easy book to read. It is written well and one can read it quickly. But it is one of the rawest, most tragedy-laden, saddest, most violent books I’ve recently read. Ms. Culleton shrinks from nothing—from pages of the humiliations and abuses suffered in a wretched foster home to a long, graphically descriptive scene of her heroine being raped.

When reading In Search of April Raintree, one moves back and forth constantly between seeking comfort by saying, “no, it couldn’t be this bad, this is only a story,” and then realizing that it is, in all likelihood, a very true to life, autobiographical story. If not the specific events, then at least the feelings, the emotions of a child growing up uncertain, lonely, afraid, searching always for a way out, a brighter future when everything will be okay, daydreaming of a time when, armoured by money, she will no longer be the victim, the one kicked around, the pawn, the plaything. For the biography at the end of the book says that author Beatrice Culleton, born in St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg on August 27, 1949 was, like the subject of her book, taken as a ward of the Children’s Aid Society of Winnipeg while still a young child; grew up in foster homes away from her real family; had two sisters die by their own hand, etc., etc. The only salve to the whole story is the notation that Beatrice Culleton, unlike her fictional April Raintree, had experiences in foster homes that were “generally positive”. After all this, the ritual disclaimer “the characters in this story are fictional and any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental”, seems quaintly pro forma.

The story goes through 20 years of the lives of two sisters, April and Cheryl Raintree, Metis by birth, who are swallowed into the Children’s Aid/foster home circuit and lose all touch with their natural parents. April, the narrator, ‘looks white’ and believes the only way out of her miserable existence is to become as excessively, over-compensatingly ‘white’ as possible. She partially succeeds; for a brief time she is wealthily and comfortably married to a businessman and lives with him and his mother in their Toronto mansion. She is also horribly alienated.

Her sister, meanwhile—dark complexioned and the ‘more Indian’ of the two—spends her life reading and composing essays about Louis Riel, trying to affirm her identity and planning to become a social worker in order to “help her people”.

In the end, it is April who survives, after Cheryl, in a search for their parents, finds their father on skid row and is so disillusioned that she becomes, in sequence, an alcoholic, a prostitute, and, ultimately, a suicide. Of course, Cheryl’s death is what ultimately turns April around to face her identity and step out of her fantasy world.

Beatrice Culleton’s novel achieves very well what it sets out to achieve. It is, in a way, a Thomas Hardy sort of book, chronicling lives so bleak and full of sadness with only the most bittersweet tidbits of hope that the readers, the society, can’t help but respond in sympathy and anger and seek to change it all.

Other things, though, that you hope for don’t turn up. The events of characters’ lives are recounted with little analysis and not much speculation as to the motivations of individuals and the momentum of the times. There’s a sinking feeling after it’s all over that it was all so terribly predictable; you’ve been moved but also manipulated. All characters, for instance, except the two sisters, are really caricatures—the good foster parents, the villainous foster parents, the wealthy, snobbish, Toronto society women, the busy bureaucratic social workers, the two-timing university professor, the (ultimately) understanding boyfriend.

It’s at this point where one must be charitable and encouraging for it is Ms. Culleton’s first novel. And an admirable one. A story that needs to be told no matter how difficult it is to hear/read. And, as important, a story Beatrice Culleton obviously needed to tell. The story I really want to read, though, starts where this one ends; April Raintree in the world of 1983 with all of this history behind her. We know what’s formed her, now we want to know what she’s going to do about it, how she’s going to get on with her life. I hope, somehow, that Beatrice Culleton will get back to the typewriter and give us that story too. ■

Larry Krotz is a Winnipeg writer who contributes regularly to the Globe and Mail.