Book Review: Shadows on the Rock

As James Woodress, Willa Cather\u27s foremost biographer, remarks, An historical novel laid in Quebec in the seventeenth century seems an unlikely product from the pen of Willa Cather. Unlikely and unwelcome, some readers might add. Indeed, Shadows on the Rock (1931) is perhaps the most forbidding of Cather\u27s works. Plotless, slowly paced, and indifferent to the conventions of standard historical fiction, the novel focuses on a single year in the lives of two fictional characters-Euclide Auclair, an apothecary who has left his practice in Paris for the wilds of French Canada, and Cecile, his twelve-year-old daughter. Real-life figures, such as Count de Frontenac, the military governer of Quebec, and Bishop Fran~ois Xavier de Laval, appear as well, anchoring the action (what there is of it) in a delicately rendered historical milieu