A Town Called Solace + Fougasse

A mystery set in small town northern Ontario, and a rustic French bread

Hello hello, and welcome to Good Book/Good Bread!

Since my last issue life has been delightful and truly chaotic. I’m nearly moved out of my cabin in Squamish, as my partner and I are moving to Revelstoke in mid-October. And this past Monday I began a new job (at a really cool climate tech company, check them out here). All the change is exciting, but I’m also feeling a bit weird and upside down. Perhaps that’s why I found myself drawn to such a weird book and a weird bread for this issue. I hope you enjoy the review of the strange and wonderful book below and the leaf-shaped bread I matched it with!

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Part 1: Good Book

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson (2021)

Setting the Tone

No light, no light by Florence + The Machine, here.

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In a nutshell 

A Town Called Solace is a work of fiction centred around the vanishing of sixteen-year-old Rose in a small northern Ontario town in 1972. Her adoring seven-year-old sister Clara is consumed with worry after her sister vanishes. She insists on keeping vigil at the window seat in her family’s living room in case Rose returns. Compounding Clara’s worry is that her elderly neighbour Mrs. Orchard went into the hospital many weeks ago for a minor operation and still hasn’t returned. Clara dutifully continues to feed Mrs. Orchard’s cat Moses, as she promised.

One day at her window seat, Clara sees a man in his thirties moving boxes into Mrs. Orchard’s house. She’s incensed; he doesn’t belong there. Slowly Clara warms up to the man, Liam Kane, as he begins to get to know Clara and her family. A Town Called Solace is told through the rotating points of views of Liam, Mrs. Orchard and Clara. Throughout the novel, suspense builds as we learn what connects Mrs. Orchard and Liam, as well as how Rose came to go missing, and how grief and longing binds these seemingly very different characters together.

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Three Things I Liked About A Town Called Solace

1. It blew my mind that someone thought of this plot

I brought this book on a week-long canoe trip. It can be a risky endeavour choosing a single book to bring into the backcountry. What if I don’t like it? What if it’s awful and I don’t want to read it and I have to lie in the tent at night before bed with gasp, my thoughts? Thankfully, I loved this book and tore through it on the trip. By tore through it I mean I read maybe a chapter a night before falling asleep with my headlamp on and the book open beside me. But you get it.

This book was so good, in large part because the setting is very normal. It follows regular people, the kind you might recognize from your own neighbourhood. Yet the prose is so detailed and beautiful that I was completely captivated by the story. The book is part mystery, part thriller, part dark comedy, and the way Mary Lawson ties all of the characters together is so smart. Multiple times while I was reading it I found myself wondering, how on earth did she think of that?

2. It brings the reader into isolated experiences

Mary Lawson is incredibly skilled at illuminating very specific, lonely experiences. I found some of these scenes to be very visceral. One that stood out to me was Mrs. Orchard describing the woman whose bed is next to hers in the hospital, Martha. Martha is very sick but also struggling with dementia. Mrs. Orchard listens as Martha’s doctors briskly describe the risky procedure they want her to undergo. She doesn’t understand what they’re explaining to her but feels too powerless to question the doctors’ authority. She has no family, no visitors and no one to advocate for her. I felt very uneasy when reading this chapter, and it was powerful in transporting me momentarily into that kind of isolation.

3. It builds understanding and compassion for characters doing questionable things

This book is especially effective at crafting such sympathetic and fully formed characters that you want to support them even when their behaviour seems objectively wrong. In some of the chapters told from Mrs. Orchard’s perspective, the story steps back in time to when she was in her twenties. Mr. and Mrs. Orchard tried to have children for years, but were unsuccessful. Having children was so important to Mrs. Orchard, and we experience her heartbreak alongside her. When Mrs. Orchard begins growing very attached to one of her frazzled neighbour’s young sons, it’s weird and certainly overstepping boundaries. Yet I found myself at the same time having some compassion for her behaviour, in a way I never would have if the character development hadn’t been so rich.

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Part 2: Good Bread—Fougasse

Why this bread for this book? 

Given the strange and intertwined plot of A Town Called Solace, I thought fougasse would be a perfect fit. Fougasse is a rustic French flatbread that has some similarities to focaccia. This isn’t the kind of bread you slice for your PB&J; it’s great for sharing with a table of friends where everyone can break off a piece. It’s typically shaped to look like a freeform leaf by rolling out the dough and cutting in multiple slits.

Recipe

I watched this great video on YouTube about making fougasse, and the recipe is in the video description. For a pretty complex looking bread, it’s actually not that difficult to make. The most intimidating part was cutting the slits in the dough, but I think as long as you don’t cut all the way through the dough border, it’s quite forgiving. I baked my fougasse on a pizza stone, and placed a pan with ice cubes on the rack below to create some steam for an extra crispy crust.

Looking forward…

New book I’m looking forward to reading: Solito by Javier Zamora, here

Bread I’m looking forward to baking: Challah rolls, here

New album I’m looking forward to listening to while doing both of the above: Asphalt Meadows by Death Cab for Cutie, here

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