Sandra Cohen-Rose

Waskaganish Sandra Cohen-Rose

Waskaganish DescriptionWaskaganish presents a classic Canadian epic of lost and found love, brutality, and murder, from the Polish pogroms, to southern England, to regions of Quebec affected by the 1980s political unrest: Waskaganish, Montréal, and the Eastern Townships. We experience the unraveling of the connection between an exquisite blue diamond necklace and the missing 16.25 caret Eagle Diamond - one of the biggest diamonds ever recovered in the continental United States, stolen in 1964 from New York's Museum of Natural History - and what lies beneath the cratonic rocks of Waskaganish, a small Cree community at the junction of the Rupert River and James Bay, and the lives of the Montrealers it touched. One man with deep-rooted connections to Waskaganish was wealthy, ruthless entrepreneur Robert Steinman. He and a young, geologist, Avrum Wood, the great-grandson of Polish-Jewish immigrant Charles Wood, who found the Eagle Diamond in 1876 on his rented farm in Eagle, Wisconsin, had a dream that changed forever the lives of those it touched, including the epic's protagonist, striking, amber-eyed food and nutrition expert Hannah Epstein Star, internist Jonathan Star, Cree physician Rebecca Stone, and, ultimately, actor/director Kurt Garnet. We can identify and empathize with the protagonist as she struggles to maintain her moral compass and optimism in a society rife with pseudo-science, racism, insatiable greed, deceit, love, lust and loss, and brutality. The journey through the boreal forests of Waskaganish and the genteel urban quilt of the unique Montreal neighbourhoods are described intimately as the lives of the leading characters emerge and the novel's complex plot unfolds.