SOURCE: "Fine-Rooted Blossomer," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 4, Spring, 1976, pp. 76-7.

In the following excerpt, Early criticizes Ferron's The Juneberry Tree for containing too many details, but states that "it has beauties enough."

"I am called Tinamer de Portanqueu. I am not the daughter of nomads or gypsies." So begins Jacques Ferron's brief novel of childhood and childhood's end. First published in French in 1970, it now appears in the "French Writers of Canada" series undertaken by Harvest House to make more Quebec fiction available in English translation. The Juneberry Tree is not self-consciously a story of Quebec: there are no priests, revolutionaries, swarming mulots or families of emaciated urchins, though there is a burning cathedral, attesting perhaps to the vitality of cultural archetypes. The novel is a curious hybrid of fable, dream and monograph.

While Tinamer is no Ishmael, she does survive terrors and voids which threaten...