Mary Ann Alice is hovering on the brink of adolescence – she is the smartest girl in her class and she wants to be the First Girl Poet on the Gatineau River.  She is our storyteller, and her own coming of age story coincides with the coming of the end of the world. Her world, anyway.

Mary Ann Alice’s family farm is upstream of the village of Low, Quebec, an area settled by Irish Catholic immigrants in the mid 1800s. Low is a quiet agricultural community in the early 1920s but it’s about to explode into the biggest construction site in the world. Government and Serious Money want to exploit the tumultuous flow of the Paugan Falls for hydro-electric power, and that is going to happen no matter what anybody thinks about it.

Mary Ann Alice is the human bridge from the time before the harnessing of the Falls to the massive dam of the late 1920s that we still see today. She watches her personal world collapse and morph into modernity with all the loss and pain and consequences. She loved the old river, and she knows it’s down there somewhere, but the challenge is to make peace with the new one.

From one point of view, the story depicts a slow-moving social disaster orchestrated by politicians and lawyers. There will be expropriation of property, massive construction of a power dam choking the river, flooding of farmland above the dam, loss of familiar landscape, potential breakdowns in social fabric, loss of life, loss of identity and loss of a way of life. From another point of view, it’s the future knocking with opportunity for many in a poverty stricken region. The story does not sentimentalize the plight of the inhabitants of Low, but rather takes an even-handed look at what a new world  brings and the resilience required to keep moving.