Tag: Canada

A Love Letter to Louise Penny

A selection of Louise Penny novels at the Morrin Center library in Quebec City


I didn’t plan to fall in love, but then, who does?

While listening to Anne Bogel’s excellent podcast What Should I Read Next?, I first heard of Louise Penny’s crime/mystery series. As luck would have it, its first installment, Still Life, was already on my bookshelf (so maybe I actually had heard of it before?). I started in right away and found myself transported to an imaginary but vividly rendered town in Québec and was greeted by all its quirky, warm, hilarious, and human inhabitants. I walked with them as their community was fractured by a dreadful crime, shared their pain and surprise. And met the wise and thoughtful man who would enrich my life forever. I was down for the count. I willingly gave my heart, not only to that honorable inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, but also to his creator.

Louise Penny, an author whose skill and artistry I now admire more than those of any living writer, has done more than mold and shape fully human personalities and craft compelling stories around them, although these probably would have been enough for me to burn through the 16-book (and counting) series. She has created a normal place that is magical, a combined heaven and nirvana without the saints and angels. In fact, her characters are purposely flawed, and each has struggles with their inner demons, their relationships, their careers, their art. And she placed them all in Three Pines, a town that is unreal and yet familiar.

Without a doubt, one thing that makes Ms. Penny’s books so delicious for me is that they are set in Canada, admittedly a place I’ve always had a strange but unapologetic affinity for. If you’ve read any of my other blog posts, especially Oh, Canada, you know how much I adore the Great White North. I love the unspoiled outdoors, particularly the magic of snow – how everything feels clean and fresh afterward, and the unique stillness and quiet it brings. (Three Pines gets a lot of snow, and what’s perhaps even more attractive to me is that its inhabitants, like me, do not seem to be fans of the sticky, oppressive heat of summer. In at least one book, the summer is unusually and unbearably hot, and nearly every one of the characters complains about it. These are truly my people.) I also love that there are few really big cities, and not so many small ones either. I do love a place that feels wild and wide and yet cozy and welcoming at the same time.

The Morrin Center and Literary & Historical Society of Québec


One of my happiest trips — not just because it was the last one I made before the whole world shut down in 2020 — was to the province of Québec, in winter, when everything was frozen and fabulous. While in Québec City, I got to go to the Morrin Center, which houses the Literary & Historical Society of Québec, a location featured prominently in The Beautiful Mystery.


Now, I don’t recommend reading these lusciously and subtly interwoven books out of order because you’d be missing quite a lot of what I believe is the point – the slow, rich character development and interconnection between plots, the buildup of friendship and the agonizing, awful burn of relationships deteriorating. Like most series, the books get better and better and better as you become familiar with the emotional landscape, trust me. (I have a rule about book series that you can’t decide to continue or drop them until book 3, and it’s not let me down with this or any other series I’ve read.) But if you just want to dip a toe into a quirky little mystery set in snowy, deceptively quiet Québec, complete with historical backstories and rife with the exploration of healing and redemption, you could certainly do worse than The Beautiful Mystery.

I’m not going to summarize plots or give you any spoilers here. I might be an okay writer, but I would just utterly fail to convey the experience you will experience if you just read the dang books. So please do that. I promise you’ll be transported.

Where will you go? Sometimes you’ll go to Montreal or Québec, but mostly, you’ll journey to Three Pines, where most of the books are set and to where all of its characters have a deep connection. It’s a quaint village (modeled on the one Ms. Penny herself inhabits) that is purposely out of reach of the rest of the more populated world, roughly an hour south-ish of Montreal and near the US border. A running joke in the books is that it’s terribly hard to find and outsiders frequently wonder why you want to find it anyway. There is practically no cell service and even the wifi is, well, mostly dial-up. It’s small, and tucked away, and community means everything to those who live there, so much so that they’ll welcome others to that community without question. And it’s a good thing too, because another running theme is that those who need to find Three Pines, will.

I suppose Three Pines is the character I’ve most fallen in love with. Absolutely everything about the location, the village cafe and bookstore, the food, the people, and the traditions appeals to me. And maybe I’m crazy, but its spirit speaks to me. It’s become symbolic to me, a “place” where I can think deeper and reflect on redemption and forgiveness and the goodness of humans. I recently bought a t-shirt that just has three pine trees on it. It makes me happy every time I see it and even happier when I wear it — kind of an inside joke with myself, a reminder to smile and be optimistic. Because of Ms. Penny’s lovely creation, when I see three pine trees together, I go to a place in my imagination that lifts my mood and soothes my soul.

Some might argue that Three Pines itself isn’t real, and they’d be right, but limited in their view. The village does not exist, physically. But I think of it as existing in ways that are far more important and powerful. Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.

Louise Penny

So thank you, Louise Penny, for giving me so many hours of reading bliss, and for continuing to do it. For being curious about human nature and pretty smart about it observing it and mirroring it through your characters in all its messy and beautiful ways, too. And, of course, for bringing to life Gamache — and Ruth, the duck, Gabi, Olivier, Clara, Myrna, Reine-Marie, Jean-Guy, Annie, and those delightful dog-like pets. While my love will likely remain unrequited, I am rewarded nonetheless by the pleasure and peace I receive in living often in Three Pines.

Oh, Canada!

July 1 is Canada Day. It’s like Canada’s Independence Day, for those of you who don’t have your finger on the pulse of Canadian holidays. I do because, y’all, I love Canada.

If you haven’t learned anything else about me, you should at least know that wanderlust and booklust are incredibly intertwined for me. I know I’m not unique among the reading world, but if I am planning to go somewhere new, I want to read every possible thing I can find that is set there or written by people from there. Lately, though, I seem to have reversed this. After reading books with a strong sense of place, I quickly develop mini-obsessions with the real-life settings and have no rest in my hindquarters until I get there (see my Longmire post for another example of this affliction).

One such place I’ve become absolutely obsessed with visiting is Canada, and it has been a dream bookish destination for me for the last year or two. This is largely thanks to Louise Penny and her excellent Inspector Gamache series. I’ll reveal my love for Ms. Penny and her work in another post soon (she deserves her very own post). For now, suffice it to say these books, among the many other things they do for me, paint such a lovely and vivid picture of a pretend place inspired by a real place that my feet are itching to cross the border.

The Great White North first entered my consciousness as a young girl when my mother (who swears she doesn’t recall this conversation) answered my question of “Where do you think I’ll end up in life?” with, among other more vague statements, “I can see you married to a bearded Canadian, living deep in the woods in a cozy house with your two bilingual sons.” For a kid with a deep and romantic imagination, this was all it took for me to start fantasizing. (And to her credit, my mom got the “bearded man” and “two sons” parts right, although, ironically, it is only my daughter who speaks French.) Canada, to this day, still remains a romantic destination for  someone like me who:

  • loves being outside but hates being hot
  • adores walking in forests, or within sight of mountains, especially in the snow, but lives in a mostly treeless and relatively flat Southern suburb where even a chill in the air is relatively rare
  • is passionate about hockey
  • longs to have nature adventures without having to fight traffic or crowds
  • is thrilled by the idea of putting maple syrup or brie (or at least cheese curds) on everything

While Quebec (the province in which Ms. Penny’s fictional Three Pines is set) is on the agenda, for me it needs to wait until the weather is frosty enough outside to necessitate cozy, roaring fires inside. As a compromise of sorts, and because I possess nearly zero patience when I get excited about something, especially travel, I recently visited Calgary and some national parks in Alberta (Banff) and British Columbia (Kootenay and Yoho). It was a breathtaking trip I’ll never forget.

Calgary was an absolute gem. I’m so glad we booked a full day of city strolling because it was a remarkably hip and walkable town. I got to visit my first Tim Hortons, stroll past the Saddledome (hockey) and through the grounds of the Calgary Stampede (rodeo), brave the glass floor at the Calgary Tower (it was a process), learned about Canadian history at the superb Glenbow Museum, had an amazing affogato at a local cafe -and had a moment of both bookish serendipity and full geek-out worship when I stumbled upon the newly opened Calgary Central Library.

Not only was the building itself an architectural wonder, but it took less than five minutes inside for me to realize this was truly a community hub for readers and students and children, of books and learning and curiosity. I mean, you gotta love a place that has a word bison (a sculpture of a bison made out of letters) and a ceiling like this:

I highly, highly recommend the Canadian Rockies at any (accessible) time of year, but going in the late spring was magical. The snow melt was filling lakes and rivers with a gorgeous frosty aquamarine, and the temperature was perfect. Days were warm enough not to need a heavy coat, but cool enough that I was always comfortable. (Did I mention I hate being hot?) I could not get over the site of the beautiful mountains, and thankfully they were everywhere!

Daytime during this trip was full of driving and hiking and gaping in awe at the snow-capped peaks, crystalline lakes, and verdant forests, so reading time was reserved for evenings in the hotel. I tried to read only Canadian authors with relevant Canadian settings on this trip, and I’m happy to say I found a couple of good ones. I had The Outlander by Gil Adamson on my Kindle, and although it took me awhile to get into it, I finished it shortly after I got home, relishing this wonderfully rich, raw, and kinda strange historical novel set in the Canadian Rockies. I also read In the Shadow of the Glacier by Vicki Delany, the first book of a police-procedural mystery series based in interior British Columbia. I love stories set in small towns, and Delany’s Trafalgar (based on the real town of Nelson, BC) has me enchanted, so I’m sure I’ll revisit the rest of the series.

We saw a couple of mule deer and a black bear (from a distance), but the wildlife I was most obsessed with in Canada were the birds. I’m a bird lover anyway, and it was fascinating to me to meet feathered friends I haven’t seen “down south.” But when I saw a raven up close for the first time ever, I was in love. So even though the author is not Canadian, I had to listen to the audiobook Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich. It’s a very science-y book, so I am still dipping into it every now and then, but I’ve learned an incredible amount about these clever, clever birds. This is one of the things I love about being a book nerd: No matter where you are or what sparks your interest, there’s a book for that. 

Visiting the Canadian Rockies was the best kind of pleasant and life-affirming surprise. When I planned the trip, it was sort of on a whim, a way to indulge in my Canada love and sate my curiosity until I could make it to the province of Quebec in winter. I didn’t do a ton of planning, figuring I’d let Canada show me what it would. I expected an adventure, certainly, and, wow, was it ever.  I had no idea how hard I’d fall for the hip, vast, western, grand, simple, pure loveliness of it all, and I’m still overwhelmed by it. In fact, I’m running out of words to describe its awesomeness.

Oh, Canada, you truly are “glorious and free.” I left a piece of my heart in the Canadian West, so I’ll be back. (And this time, I’ll pick up some new adjectives from the word bison.)