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Another day, another belief system challenged!

Welcome to Freedom to Read week, you hooligan-supporters of the postmodern idea of multiculturalism. Five Rivers Publishing is celebrating your right to read anything you want by delivering you impassioned letters stating why you shouldn’t read our books, and get the satisfaction of defying another person who tells you what to read or think!

Dear Five,

It has come to my attention that the book Hunter’s Daughter, by Nowick Gray, is an affront to our sacrosanct Canadian values; as such, it should be banned from further publication, lest it infect the steadfast beliefs of our young and future generations. Need I cite any further evidence than the book’s premise, that an RCMP officer going rogue and subverting the rule of law in the sovereign territory of the Queen, is somehow a sympathetic hero?

The book portrays all too well the abject poverty, backwardness, and, though it pains me to say it, anarchy of the uncivilized tribes of the region of Arctic Quebec. Established Christian religion, which for centuries has sought to improve the lot of those unfortunates, is given short shrift in this nod to postmodern ‘multiculturalism’—aside, that is, from the odious portrait of the decrepit and complicit Anglican priest, Father Tomlin. Instead we see glorified the self-serving antics of various self-styled ‘shamans’; and if the plot’s scandalous outcome is any indication, we readers are meant to, at best, regard their flouting of the region’s vested authority as somehow justified.

To complete the topsy-turvy sideshow celebrating a travesty of justice, the Hudson’s Bay Company—the third leg of that historical triad of Government, Church and Business which we should rightly credit with the salvation of the impoverished Eskimos (referred to in this revisionist tale with the trendy moniker, ‘Inuit’)—we see the Bay manager presented as a corpulent parody of a materialistic lord in his castle, mean-spirited and bent on destruction of the remnants of this obsolete aboriginal ‘culture.’

In short, the ill-conceived ‘novel’ known as Hunter’s Daughter is but a thinly disguised manifesto for the toppling of every pillar of our dear Western Civilization. In the name of blessed Queen Victoria, let all such tracts be burned and banned, forever!

—E. L. Wrathwight

Did E.L. Wrathwight make you cringe as much as he made us? If you want to write back to Mr. Wrathwight, our comment box is welcome to you. I have to be honest, though: if this had been real I would print it out to tear it to shreds, then stomp on it, then burn it, then put it in my cereal so its only way out would be to become shi—I mean, crap. But hey, that’s my approach.

If you want the calmer (and more rational) approach in defying Mr. Wrathwight by reading Hunter’s Daughter, pick up your copy in Amazon, Kobo, or Indigo, then tell us all about it.

Happy Freedom to Read!