This isn’t a long book and it’s probably meant for teens mainly but it is an engaging story. I remember when it was chosen for On the Same Page which was a book that all of Manitoba was encouraged to read in 2010-2011. Amazingly that was 10 years ago. Oh well better late than never.
Juliana is a teenage girl who grew up in Northwest Ontario but her parents separated and she and her mother went to live in Winnipeg. Juliana’s father stayed on at the lodge on Lake of the Woods that his family had owned and operated for 3 generations. He had run into tough financial times and couldn’t afford to visit Juliana in Winnipeg very much. She missed him a lot. When summer came she finally got the chance to spend a week with him at the lodge. However her Dad was busy almost all the time with work and money concerns. Then a fishing contest started at the lodge with big prizes for anyone who caught big fish. Juliana was determined that she and her Dad would enter the contest and catch a prize winning fish. Juliana would get to spend time with her Dad and the prize money would bail her Dad out of the financial difficulty he was in. Juliana had seen a monster fish under their boat house; at first she and her Dad thought it was a sturgeon but when her Dad finally saw it he realized it was a muskie. The Ojibway of the area called these enormous muskies “medicine fish”. There are very few of them left in Lake of the Woods. It would be a prize worth taking but Juliana knows she can’t kill the muskie if she catches it. She intends to catch and release it but first she has to catch this wily creature.
This book certainly isn’t preachy but it does have lots of good lessons about the preservation of our natural heritage and how to live a good life. Jake Macdonald died earlier this year but has left a legacy of great writing. ( )