The Waiting Hours

I keep swearing I’ll get more sleep.  There’s been a terrible cold / flu / nightmare going around the office and I was off the week before last.  I was awake hacking for several days before I finally found the right combination of pillows, pain relief and Calm sleep stories to help me get more than 45 minutes of sleep at a time.  And then, all of a sudden, I had a couple of incredible sleeps and thought I was back on track but work, life, hormones and good books threw me off track again. Last night, my problem was exhaustion and a lack (alas) of alone time. I had been exhausted since noon but stayed up until almost 2:00 puttering and reading. Needless to say, today was a long haul. I’m going to try to re-set tonight with a small dose of melatonin.

One of the books I read through the night recently was Shandi Mitchell’s The Waiting Hours.  I met Shandi at Lunenburg Lit last Fall and we had a good chat.  My work overlaps with some of the work of the characters in the book and I hadn’t read it when I met her.  I knew it would be an intense experience for me and I was hesitant.  I knew, too, that part of me would watch the story as I read it instead of being fully immersed in it. Anyway. Talking to Shandi in September, I learned that she had really done her homework, including lots of observation in the field(s), and that she felt passion for the work of the real people behind the stories.  I trusted her.  Still, the book sat next to the bed for almost four months before I opened it last week.

Each of the overlapping, intersecting stories of the characters in The Waiting Hours is very well told. They stand on their own and fit into the larger arc in ways that make sense to me.  It may seem impossible for the stories to connect and for these characters to bump into each other as often as they do...but I promise you it’s true to life. The Waiting Hours is an excellent book but one I recommend with caution. If you work in emergency services of any kind or live with people who do, it may be a hard read. That said, Shandi Mitchell honours the work of the people who answer and dispatch emergency calls, the people and animals who put themselves in harm’s way to help others and so many others who respond and help along the way.  She puts a lot of care into the stories of the families and friends, too, and helps the reader see so much more.