Sense of place in Richard Ford's Canada

The second half (part 2) of Richard Ford's "Canada" takes place in the eponymous country - part 1 ends with the parents, Bev and Neeva, imprisoned on charges of bank robbery and the twin children (15-year-olds) essentially abandoned. The sister takes off with her teenage boyfriend, presumably to live in Utah or SF and maybe get married, what a dismal prospect for an intelligent young woman, leaving the son, Dell - the narrator of this novel - alone. He makes it pretty clear that he was never to see his parents (or his sister apparently) again, so the novel is embarking into a very different phase. We're concerned that the state of Montana may pick Dell up and send him to a state orphanage, where he, a frail and intellectual kid, will not thrive at all. Then his mother's acquaintance - it would be a stretch to call her a friend - picks Dell up and drives him north, without telling him much about their destination, which turns out to be he brother's piece of land in the midst of Saskatchewan - she leaves Dell there, in hopes that he'll be better off with her brother than he would have in an orphanage. It's a very scary journey for the kid, into a foreign country and a completely alien life. The ranch-hand type who's detailed to take care of Dell is a very threatening guy, possibly an abuser; the brother, who runs a hotel, seems uninvolved and crude, though intelligent (a Harvard grad, improbably). The kid is left in a crappy bunkhouse and is told he'll be doing chores around the place, so it's unclear whether he'll ever be able to resume his education - all in all, a terrible predicament, and one would think there might have been a way to get him some kind of better care, perhaps with his estranged grandparents. Reminds me a little of the harrowing memoir by Richard Rhodes about the cruelties he faced as an orphan. Ford remains terrific an maintaining narrative tension throughout and at creating a sense of place - earlier in the novel very well captures the sense of a western mining town, and he perfectly conveys the oddness of the border crossing and the adjustment to a new but only slightly different country. It's a quality that my sister and I call "bugginess," which is hard to convey or explain: the sense that everything is the same except for some slight differences that make everything thereby all the more disconcerting, differences such as different currency (though still called a dollar), different style of housing (in Canada, houses built to look like one another but each on a distinctly separated tract), slightly weird place names (the border crossing called the Port of Willow Creek) - few other writers touch on this, though William Gibson did so in describing England from the POV of an American, and I think Updike touched on it also regarding border crossings and highway signage.