Origin of Haloes

by Kristen Den Hartog

Stretching across two decades and unfolding in Olympic-year intervals, Origin of Haloes tells the story of two families – the LeBlancs and the Halliwells – connected by an illicit affair and a lie... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1596921455
• ISBN13: 9781596921450
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

"Life was easier when it stayed small"

Author Kristen den Hartog, brings emotional richness and deeply resonant sense of the Ontario landscape, to her latest novel, The Origin of Haloes. The setting is Deep River, a planned community on the Ottawa River, where fragmented family ties and unfulfilled dreams forever link two very different families together. Kay Clancy grows up obsessed with gymnastics and hopes that someday she will be able to compete in the Olympics. Talented and feisty, Kay solicits the help of trusted Coach Russell Halliwell, but unfortunately Mr. Halliwell - husband to Marie, and father to young, overweight Eddie - has more on his mind. Discovering that she is pregnant, Kay is forced to put her Olympic career on hold, and soon falls into the waiting arms of Joe LeBlanc. It is the early sixties, a time of tumultuous change for Canada, and for a world that is in the thick of the cold war. But Kay appears oblivious to the events going on around her; she is just happy to raise her three children: Estelle, Louis, and Margar. Kay's ideal life is short-lived when Joe inexplicably disappears and Kay, suddenly feeling abandoned is hurtled into a whirlwind of loss. Joe's unexplained absence would eventually come to define him, and define the rest of them too, though Margar, the littlest one, never knew him at all. But it is left up to Margar to unravel the mystery of Joe's disappearance, but everything Margar discovers is out of context, "like a tapestry unwoven," and even if the picture could be woven together again, there would be strand missing. Kay, for her part, desperately misses Joe. Is he dead, his body lying at the bottom of the Ottawa River, or is he living somewhere else, in Montreal perhaps? She never stops thinking of him, and outwardly she's a get-on-with-it sort of woman, but inwardly she wishes that Joe were here right now. Guilt and shame fill her whole body. Once Kay had been someone who didn't linger in the past, but now she "cart wheels backward instead of forwards, uncomfortable with her new reflective nature." Flexible in the extreme, she sees life in a fluid, forward motion, and she has the ability to whirl through any unpleasant event by not slowing enough to examine it closely. But Joe's actions complicate the cycle of consequence, which spin around and round "like interlocking torture wheels driven by cogs and gears." And what of Marie Halliwell, who has kept her husband's indiscretion a secret for so many years? Russell had charmed and wooed her and had a hold on her still. But Russell was not and never would be a dignified man. Marie had changed anyway - "from cracked bone china, she had manufactured a durable, plastic heart." She wonders of Russell and her could be the way they had been before, and she wonders whether they love each other at all. One thing is for sure; Marie treasured Joe LeBlanc's friendship. He gave no sign that he recognized or returned the affection, and it has been this that had really attracted her to him

A tale of danger, of secrets kept and revealed, of lies and consequeces..."

A trusted athletics coach seduces an innocent minor in his charge, resulting in a pregnancy, the birth of a daughter, a marriage built on a lie, and secrets which eventually taint the lives of many people in Ottawa Valley's Deep River community, especially members of the LeBlanc and Halliwell families. These deceptions, the very act which made them necessary, will cause death, disappearance and despair beyond measure. Sixteen year-old Kay Clancy is an "aspiring, teenaged gymnast of uncommon talent" getting ready to compete for a spot on the Canadian team headed for the 1960 Rome Olympics. However, her dreams are dashed when she becomes pregnant by her coach, a man more than twice her age with a lovely wife and child of his own. Shortly after her disquieting discovery, Kay falls in love. She literally flips off the school's trampoline right into Joseph Patrice Emmanuel Francois Gabriel LeBlanc's "Herculean arms." Kay believes it is love at first sight for both of them, but Joe had seen her before, so he loved her earlier. When Kay confesses her pregnancy, but not the identity of the father, Joe disappears. He returns, however, months later, in time to claim Kay for his wife and baby Estelle as his first born. What follows are happy years for the LeBlancs. Baby Louis arrives on the scene not long after Estelle. And Margaret, (called Margar), is about to be born when tragedy strikes and Joe disappears again. He is last seen portaging his canoe toward the nearby river. Years later, when all have given up hope of finding him or his remains, (except for Louis, Margar and his LeBlanc uncles), Joe's disintegrating canoe paddle is found, along with a canoe 'thwart,' underneath the dock in front of the Halliwell home, where the coach lives with his emotionally fragile wife, Marie, and their son, Eddie. Margar LeBlanc, the only one of Joe's three children never to see him, longs to do so. The mischievous and very curious girl is frequently drawn to the Halliwell home, by the river. What she will eventually find there will alter her forever. This beautifully written and complex story is framed by the quadrennial Summer Olympiads, from Rome in 1960 to Moscow in 1980, and oddly enough, it is also interspersed with sitings of the Trudeau family, debonair Premier Pierre, his wife Margaret and their three sons. I grew up in this time period and was a fan of Canada's first family, as well as the Summer Games, so it makes sense to me. It also gives me a vivid sense of the period and setting. Kristen Den Hartog's characters, especially the children, really leap off the page. She captures them in telling moments of joy, sorrow and fear with remarkable eloquence. Ms. Den Hartog describes with tremendous poignancy a child's longing for a lost parent, a hero figure - "Margar never knew her dad, but because she was always looking for him, she was the one who bumped into him most often, after he disappeared." And a child's irrational fears: "Born into a time of p

The aching landscape of loss

A planned community on the Ottawa River, it is in Deep River in the 1960's that Olympic-bound gymnast Kay Clancy finds herself pregnant at sixteen and out of the competition. Trained by a coach who almost made the Olympic team himself, Kay literally flips into the waiting arms of Joe LeBlanc, who catches not only her compact body, but her heart as well. Pregnancy interferes with Kay's athletic career, but later, as the wife of Joe LeBlanc, she could not be happier, the mother of three, Estelle, Louis and Margaret. The only cloud on the horizon is Joe's penchant for disappearing. He leaves the first time before Estelle's birth, but returns in time to claim mother and child. Joes's second abandonment is more disconcerting, while Kay is carrying yet-to-be-born baby Margaret, whose name Louis shortens to Margar. While the LeBlanc clan thrives, Joe still at the center of their domestic harmony, another family across town struggles to keep their fragile bonds intact. Coach Russell Halliwell, inspiration of Olympic hopefuls and bon vivant of a small town, is married to Marie, whom he romanced and wed in Rome. Their only child is the rotund, bespectacled Eddie, a bitter disappointment to his athletic father, but the comfort of the often-melancholy Marie. Eddie isolates himself, turning to art for expression, but on the edge of an ungovernable anger that draws him into a dark and savage place. The story evolves in Olympic-year intervals, as the children grow up without the presence of their father. Margar will never know Joe and spends the rest of her life searching for him in pictures and crowds, while Louis remembers shrieking with glee in his father's arms. After Joe leaves, Louis stops growing until Kay buys a trampoline for the back yard that both terrifies and excites the little boy: "He was so afraid, but so compelled to jump, that fear clung to the soles of his feet and desire grabbed the tips of his fingers. Together, they stretched him." Kay is the keeper of family secrets, complicit in the events that drive Joe from his home, but unable to change what she has wrought; she is "the brave-faced mistress of whitewash", never revealing her fears or suspicions about her missing husband. Kay doggedly waitresses in her parent's cafe, providing for her children with the unbidden kindness of Joe's uncles, Alphonse and Toussaint LeBlanc, master craftsmen with wise and generous natures. It is through these two families, the LeBlanc's and the Halliwell's, that we appreciate the author's skillful rendering of pathos, disappointment and personal redemption. As in her previous novels, den Hartog takes the small intimacies of ordinary lives and fills them with the daily dramas that form the centerpiece of her writing. The characters assume human dimensions, Kay's desperate belief that happiness can be built upon a lie, Marie Halliwell's gradual loss of rigid emotional control to stave off unhappiness, Eddie Halliwell's observant quietude, overhearing what h