Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper is a book about place and the people who inhabit it. In Big Running, Newfoundland, where the community relies on the fishing industry, the fish have disappeared and the people begin to abandon their homes in search of work.

When they needed to remember where they were from, they could sing to see, to remember. They’d sing along, all together, sing and sing until morning.

Aidan and Martha Connor don’t want to move off the island so they job share on Canada’s mainland while also juggling home and children, Finn aged 10 and Cora aged 14, on the island.  Cora spends her time decorating the abandoned houses in the town by turning them into different countries – Italy, England, Mexico. When Cora goes missing, Finn becomes desperate to attract the fish back to Big Running in the hope it will reunite his family.

And sometimes the water was blue, more blue than sky, and sometimes it was dark and green and thick, and sometimes it was hardly any colour, changing and moving and pushing and pulling like breath.

Our Homesick Songs is a story of what happens to small communities when their primary natural resources disappear and is both heartbreaking and hopeful, in part due to the dual timelines. Finn in the present (1992-93) and his parents union twenty years earlier when fish were plentiful. 

All songs are homesick songs, Finn. Even the happy ones? Especially the happy ones.

Hooper elicits a compelling sense of place and atmosphere in this poetic story about family, love, being brave and keeping the faith. The reader can almost hear the plaintive mermaid song across the water.