I only finished it for a book club. I really wanted to like this book but despite its interesting premise, and beautiful writing, I found the narrative confusing and disengaging.

This is a novel of resistance—of multiple resistances. 

Characters weave in and out of the stories told by Lendsinda, Simeon, the old woman, and men who were once enslaved. I lost track of these characters’ threads now and then, and the tangle of places and connections took me out of the story a few times. Some stories were also more active than others, so my interest rose and ebbed throughout.

It’s also an important engagement with Canada’s history of enslavement and white supremacy, which is so often overlooked in favour of the universal “free country”. Thomas shows Canada through Black and Indigenous men and women’s eyes, shows realities of harassment, kidnapping, criminalization, and assault of racialized people in Canada; and if not that, of looking the other way, disregarding acts of violence, theft, and exploitation that have been enacted on Black and Indigenous people throughout the history of this land. The stories are singular, unusual and, as Lendsinda herself says, unlikely. They are representative, a metaphorical reality. This novel is spun from answers to a series of “what if” questions that make up a life, a community, a culture, a history.

Fundamentally, In the Upper Country speaks of resilience and survival, honouring the thousands of real, skilled, enslaved, racialized, connected people who have lived in the United States and Canada.