UNDER THIS UNBROKEN SKY
Shandi Mitchell
Harper
Fiction
ISBN: 9780061774027
Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter Shandi Mitchell has taken her keen visual eye and turned it toward the novel with this story of survival in a harsh new landscape. Teodor Mykolayenko, his wife Maria, their five children, his sister Anna and her young family have all migrated from the Ukraine to the Canadian prairies in the hopes of a fresh start on land they can call their own. Shortly after their arrival, Teodor is arrested (falsely and unfairly) for stealing grain that was really his own and sentenced to two years in prison. Maria has to cope with the care of her family as well as her sister-in-law’s brood. Anna’s ne’er-do-well husband, Stefan, is no help at all and frequently leaves for weeks and months at a time when farm life proves too tough.
Upon his return from prison, Teodor is anxious to get his family back on their feet. Because of his prison record, he is not allowed to buy land, so Anna puts the land deed in her name, with the understanding that he will pay her back the $10 homesteading fee and do all the work. It’s back-breaking work, but to him it’s restorative: “As Teodor tends the earth, he heals himself. In the field, he forgets about the past, forgets about the prison walls, and focuses only on the job at hand.” He cultivates the land and makes it inhabitable and even profitable to his family as the crops he lovingly and painstakingly plants start to prosper. The families endure months and months of exhausting work, rough, rocky ground, dust storms and brush fires that threaten not only their land but also their very lives.
Though not easy, they weather these storms and even begin to see a little return on their investment. The crops are starting to come in, and they have enough food to last them through the harsh winters. In keeping with his character (or lack thereof), now that the families are in good stead, Stefan decides to return. He hasn’t been home since the night months ago when he stopped in long enough to impregnate Anna. But he has heard that Teodor is making a go of the farm and wants his share. He knows that the land is in his wife’s name and lords this over Teodor, who feels for Anna but is adamant that things be equitable.
Teodor has done all the work, with the agreement that the land would be his. He has his own expanding family to worry about, as Maria is expecting another child. Although Anna suffers at the hands of her violent husband, she sides with him against her brother for fear of being completely abandoned. Her loneliness and sorrow surround her like a mist. She takes to wandering the prairies at night, communing with the howling coyotes that prowl after dark. Can these two families survive country life and each other?
With aspects of the Little House books and novels like PLAINSONG and THE GRAPES OF WRATH, UNDER THIS UNBROKEN SKY is as compelling as it is heart-wrenching. The severe desolation of life on the Canadian prairie is so richly described by Shandi Mitchell’s lyrical writing. Life was indeed hard back then, but there’s a beauty in its bleakness. As the author so eloquently states, when pondering the themes of her first novel, “…the story was about life, in all its beauty and savagery. It was about the moral lines that divide and join us. What is remembered and what is forgotten. And the fine line between those who break and those who don’t.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller
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