This is a quiet, meandering book about life in small town Alberta, told from the narrator Julia's perspective. Julia moves to fictional small town Medway (a stand-in for Mayerthorpe, Alberta) with her partner Hardy who has just joined the RCMP. They made a deal that Hardy would work for 5 years, while Julia would write, and then they would swap. Julia through the majority of the book is miserable, and I don't even know if she and Hardy truly like each other. Hardy's working hours means they hardly interact, and when they do he isn't allowed to tell her anything about his job. She's out of place, and forced to take various part time jobs to help pay the bills, deviating from their agreement that she would be here just to write.

I finished this book because it was for a book club, otherwise I think I would have DNF'd it. The prose is just slightly off, the cadence and grammar of sentences just slightly wrong, forcing me to re-read in a new tone to understand it. I think (hope?) it's done on purpose (?) to throw us readers off edge, the same way Julia feels a stranger in this small town. An example: "Sometimes when drunk Hardy hears extra well, some preternatural awareness." vs what would make it easier to read: "Sometimes when drunk, Hardy hears extra well, some preternatural awareness."

Towards the end of the book, Julia remarks to herself: "Journalism is not the job of the editor of a rural newspaper, I decided. [...] My real job was to chronicle that mess, its triviality and occasional beauty. To get the names right, to give people something they could put in a drawer for the slide show when their kids get married. To honour the true nature of the place, and not try to impose opinions or advice that only an outsider would offer." And this is a great summary of the book - Julia lists happenings, gives us the names of everyone, even those who never reappear in the novel again, how they all relate to each other; she gives us the small town gossip in bland, weird prose. We read between the lines of her observations and come away thinking she hates Medway, she hates Hardy, she hates her life yet she keeps having children with him. She even says to herself that she thinks about leaving constantly but she can't, she's doing good work letting Hardy vent out at her, helping him take stress off from the job, she can't leave because what about the kid(s). 

At the end of Part Two, after she, Hardy and kids finally leave, Julia reflects on life in Medway, how much she loved the people and the small town, and how lovely her new friends are, which feels really artificial because we've just spent the last 95% of the book not really hearing this side of her at all. 

I think we were supposed to feel sympathy for her, for Hardy and the force but I could not bring myself to care.