Be Sure to Close Your Eyes

The year is 1908, and Mary-Beth Sleaford is a five-year-old girl living in the countryside just north of Toronto. She etches an angel into a tower that her father, Professor John Sleaford, is building, one of many he will erect over the next eighteen years. Eventually Mary-Beth and her family move west to Saskatchewan, but one day, as an adult, she returns to the ruin of that first tower and discovers that her angel is almost as bright as the day she carved it with a piece of brick. Hood's heroine, the artist Mary-Beth Sleaford, is a true representative of her age. She embodies the English-Canadian character Ñreticent and caught between American exuberance and British reserve. The three men in her life are also facets of the greater Canadian psyche. Her father is an eccentric inventor imbued with the spirit of Americanism. Petter Arnesson, her first fiancŽ, is a Prairie jazz cornetist with overwhelming artistic ambition tempered with the necessary practicality of the immigrant. And finally Earl Codrington, the pragmatist who becomes her husband, is a small-town Ontario businessman with an optimistic eye on the future.