Alberta Views

Toward the end of Corinna Chong’s sophomore novel, Bad Land, six-year-old Jez asks her aunt Regina how the badlands, the region of southern Alberta dominated by towering sandstone hoodoos and sculptural rock face, got its name. Regina’s tentative answer: European explorers — no, Indigenous people — first called it that, and can you blame them? “Imagine,” Regina remarks, “how cruel this land would have seemed to someone who had never known anything like it before.” Jez considers this while looking out of a car window at the arid hills, eventually adding that those people must have changed their minds: “They saw it wasn’t really bad.” The words speak just as much to the landscape as to Jez and her aunt.

Bad Land foregrounds questions of inheritance and redemption, using its setting of Drumheller, Alberta, known for its otherworldly terrain and fossil beds, to explore family ties, destiny, and agency. Set during a sweltering summer in 2016, the book...