A Watery Reading of the Land

Ever since I landed in Canada, more than half a century ago, I have been looking for the book to send home to let my siblings (and now my nieces and nephews) know what kind of country I live in. Frustrated by my own failure to convey an idea of the new country adequately (a failure reflected in their puzzled responses), I looked for a narrative that would touch on all the things I wanted to tell them about, the landscape, the politics, the peoples and their ways of life—an introduction to the country, told in a personal voice. I couldn’t find such a book, and concluded that what I was looking for did not exist. It does now.

Allan Casey’s Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada explores what he calls Canada’s “lake-greatness” in a series of journeys that join together into one quest, into “the soul of Canada.” The journeys, ten of them, are to lakes or to regions of lakes, across Canada, journeys taken because there is nothing so quintessentially Canadian...