The Burin Girl

Kathy McWilliam
McWilloway Publishing (2025)
ISBN: 978-1069363718
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (12/2025)
5*- Women at Work
In her fine new novel, The Burin Girl, author Kathy McWilliam delivers a narrative that digs deep into the daily life of a working-class woman, Johanna O’Shea. Johanna comes to Newfoundland and the O’Shea household to wed widower Henry O’Shea, who has been left with children and does not have the time to tend to them. He really needs to be manning a fishing boat to earn his pay, so Johanna arrives, eventually marries him, runs the household, and looks after the children.

What The Burin Girl really does is explore how women use their ingenuity to create a sort of solidarity. The connection between mothers and daughters and other female friends is a vital part of life for women living in this era. They come to understand the world by educating themselves and sharing through the oral tradition. It has been women, throughout the centuries, who have
identified which foods are edible and which will kill you, when to plant certain vegetables, how to make clothing, and most importantly, how to use plants as medicine. There is a poignant moment after Johanna loses her second son, who dies at just two months old. She thinks of her mom and asks herself, “Her witch’s ways, I wonders, would they have saved him?”

….The working-class vernacular is spot-on, and again, the main theme is driven home: women need to work together, educate themselves, and forge a solidarity that makes it able for them to exist
in an especially tough climate (at a time when most homes probably had no electricity). The Burin Girl shows us, at nearly every juncture, that the patriarchy and its system offer little support for women like Johanna. Even the Reverend Father at church speaks in platitudes,
leaving Johanna feeling like she has nowhere to turn: “Reverend Father tells me nothin’ I can swallow down whole.”….

…..The truth here is not pretty. But The Burin Girl shows us how to survive when the odds are stacked against you, and by exploring the plight of working women in a turn-of-the-century Newfoundland fishing village, we see a world that is in some ways similar to that of Céline Sciamma’s brilliant film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Both are important works that highlight the reality of living in a patriarchal society, and somehow, finding in solidarity a means of making it
all work. The Burin Girl does exactly that.