Rage the Night by Donna Morrissey

One of the many authors whose books I am looking forward to re-reading in retirement is Donna Morrissey, having read each of her many novels as they were published over the past 25 years. Her most recent, Rage the Night, arrived in the store a few weeks before I headed to Newfoundland this fall. I resisted reading it until I arrived at the small fishing harbour we call home for a couple of months each year.

Rage the Night takes place in towns, and harbours I know, and in St. John’s, all in the early 1900s. The jacket information tells us that the novel involves the Newfoundland, a ship famous for its tragic history in carrying so many men to their deaths on the ice. The ice was near Elliston, a harbour not far from our home where we take all visiting friends to see the John C Crosbie Sealers Interpretation Centre and the waterfront memorial – having advised them to read Cassie Brown’s Death on the Ice before coming to Newfoundland. This tragedy on the ice is a grief still held by all who live here, as is the slaughter of so many of the Newfoundland Regiment in World War I – an event that took place at much the same time, and left no one in Newfoundland unaffected.

Donna Morrissey came to Parry Sound to present readings from some of her earlier novels, and I met her again in Newfoundland last summer at the Woody Point Writer’s Festival when she talked about her recently published memoir Pluck. She talked about life – the joys and griefs, had the audience both laughing and crying – there is no one who can tell a story as she can. She later told me that, as was her mother, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer – which she has shared in a blog on her website. And, that she is well now.

Rage the Night takes a young man, raised on the Northern Peninsula as an orphan, on a quest to discover his parentage. Travelling form St. Anthony to Deer Lake by dog sled, by train to the Avalon Peninsula and beyond, into a story that you will not want to put aside as his history is slowly revealed.

As Donna Morrisey writes on her website -

It matters not our differences, we all feed from the one basket of life with its fruit of kindness, grief, fear, and all other emotions evoked by this tremendous and terrible journey through life. Of the fruit in the basket, it is joy I covet most for it is fed by Love. And love is everything.