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A young novelist cleverly reimagines the draft dodger era January–February 2014
Spoiler alert: Robert McGill’s beautifully crafted second novel is a shape shifter. One minute it is a universal coming-of-age story full of astute character observations and sly social comment; the next, a mystery novel teeter-tottering between rural Ontario and war-torn Laos. Defying easy categorization, Once We Had a Country somehow manages to turn the struggles of a commune of well-intentioned but woefully inexperienced American draft dodgers into a novel that defines what it means to be Canadian in the most Canadian way possible—by observing…