Taking place in rural Saskatchewan during the tenures of renowned federal leaders (Wilfrid Laurier and Mackenzie King, namely), Tara Gereaux’s immersive and altogether captivating novel actually begins with a chilling epigraph from another household name in Canada: John A. Macdonald. Treaty 4/Regina resident Gereaux (Saltus) relates Macdonald’s comment to a colleague about a lieutenant governor’s impending negotiations with Louis Riel and his Métis cohort: “I anticipate that [he] will have a good deal of trouble, and it will require considerable management to keep these wild people quiet.”
As epigraphs go, Gereaux’s identifies commonplace racism circa 1869. The novel’s subsequent pair of historical settings, about four and eight decades later, suggest cultural change that could be measured in teaspoons.
The novel opens in 1946 with an intimate domestic scene, a woman’s once-monthly Saturday night ritual during the platinum era of Veronica Lake and Betty Grable. Seated on a toilet lid, Florence applies peroxide to dye her hair “a perfect shade of blond.” A respected senior secretary at one of Torduvalle’s business successes, the fifty-one-year old is financially solvent, respected, and capable. And (even better, in her view), Florence “blends in with everyone else.” She’s worked hard to attain these goals, to acquire “a life without restraints.”
Florence has an eye for beautiful household goods too. And with that Gereaux introduces what might suggest a tragic flaw: “Her precious purchases are insulation against the poverty she never wants to know again.”
Perhaps like literary forebears Jay Gatsby and Mildred Pierce, Florence has radically transformed her social standing and now denies a past defined by lack of opportunity and hardship? If so, at what cost that transformation? Turns out, Gereaux’s answer is a complex one.
Starting with “Spring 1908 The Nest, Saskatchewan,” Gereaux portrays Florence’s youth in alternating chapters, where her family lives subsists on “land the government claimed it owned.” There, they’re referred to as “half-breeds.”
In those heartbreaking sections, Florence quickly learns about—and faces—racism in nearby Quincey Lake. She hears “we don’t serve your kind here” and intuits that her skin colour—“as light as dried pair grass in the fall”—is advantageous in ways that her brother’s darker hue is not.
Facing a staggering familial loss and a building rage, Florence thinks, imagines, and plans. And with an accidental discovery—with a change of clothing and hairstyle she can pass as white—Florence realizes she can tread unnoticed, and be “invisible in an entirely new way.” She catches a train and arrives in Regina with a new, self-fashioned identity: “There are two separate parts of her now, two different ways to be in the world, but she feels whole, more complete, like she never was before.”
Upon the arrival of an itinerant Métis labourer in Torduvalle in 1946, however, Florence’s “life without restraints” is upended. From there, Gereaux’s pace accelerates to match the momentum of Florence’s seeming fall from a hard-won status quo—blending in, comfort, security. As a fictional account of the workings of systemic racism, Wild People Quiet speaks with firm conviction, despite the elegance, delicacy, and subtlety of Gereaux’s prose.
The novel’s second epigraph dates from 2003, where visual artist Christi Belcourt acknowledges beadwork for providing her with a sense of history, and as a way for Métis culture to say “We have survived.” Belcourt’s statement is hopeful and stands in counterpoint to Macdonald’s words from 150 years earlier.
For Florence, beadwork serves a purpose too. And if Gereaux rushes through Florence’s personal evolution in the novel’s concluding quarter and introduces a hopefulness that’s largely unsupported by her overall characterization of Torduvalle’s bigoted white citizenry, they’re understandable choices. For this delightful, proud, and accomplished protagonist, readers will wish for a happy ending too.
Tara Gereaux is the author of Saltus, which was shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Novel Award and three Saskatchewan Book Awards; and Size of a Fist, a teen novella, which was also shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Tara holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and has worked as a writer and story editor for film and television. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan and lives in Regina on Treaty 4 territory and the homeland of the Métis.
Publisher: Scribner Canada (March 3, 2026)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 304 pages
ISBN: 9781668060568
Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.
