Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Littlechild’s work vibrantly political

George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within
By George Littlechild
Heritage House, 176 pages, $59.95

Review by Candace Fertile

Just in time for Christmas giving (or maybe even for keeping and sharing), George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within is a stunning art book with commentary by the artist on each of the more than 150 pieces contained within the covers. Littlechild’s brief explanations of his art focus on his personal history as a Plains Cree man who discovered at the age of 17 that his father was white.

Littlechild laments the loss of parents and the chance to grow up in the Cree culture. His mother, Rachel Littlechild, was forced into a residential school; her son George was part of the “Sixties Scoop” when many aboriginal children were fostered or adopted by white families. Littlechild is grateful that he had loving foster parents who encouraged both his exploration of his cultural background and his artistic talent. But the discovery of his true biological parentage sent him on a search for his family. Fortunately he has found an extensive and welcoming community of relations who have helped him gain insight to his parents and himself.

Littlechild selected the work in this book, and it gives an overview of his career and his personal life. They are inextricably intertwined. And while giggling isn’t a huge part of aboriginal history in Canada after the arrival of Europeans, Littlechild prefers to deal with the wonder of life rather than the tragedies of his people. He certainly does not avoid the brutal treatment his people faced, but he tends to celebrate the courage, perseverance, and beauty of his people while educating readers in a gentle direct way about the past.

Littlechild’s artwork is political in that regard. And many of the pieces, whether paintings or mixed-media works incorporating family photographs, are portraits. Perhaps the most emphatic aspect of Littlechild’s work is its vibrancy. Images spring off the page in a fabulous concoction of colour. Reds, pinks, and purples predominate. The images, which often have black in them, are placed on a black background to punch up their effect.

The pictures can appear deceptively simple, but time spent looking at them and then reading the brief commentary opens up the richness that is Littlechild’s synthesis of imagination and reality. Horses are a key feature, as are stars. The more recent artworks incorporate elements of west coast aboriginal art (Littlechild has lived on the west coast since 1990 and currently lives in Comox).

The reproductions cannot possibly capture the vibrancy of the originals, but Littlechild himself points to the importance of access to art when he says in the commentary to Even Mrs. Horsechild Gets the Blues that he was fascinated by his foster brother’s art books and was particularly entranced by Egyptian imagery, a transformative imagery which he uses in his works. Mrs. Horsechild has a human body and a horse’s head.

It’s obvious I’m a fan of Littlechild’s work, and I have been since seeing his work in the 1980s at Asum Mena (the Alberta Native art show) in Edmonton. I feel a personal affinity for Littlechild’s work as Cree blood flows from my maternal ancestors. And his vivid colours affirm life, even when depicting sadness and misunderstanding as in Red Horse in a Sea of White Horses.

The message of Littlechild’s work is optimistic. He believes that through education people can move away from racism and other form of prejudice such as denigrating women or homosexuals. He believes that art is important. As he says in his introduction, “In my work, I am committed to righting the wrongs that First Nations peoples have endured by creating art that focusses on cultural, social, and political injustices. As an artist, an educator, and a cultural worker, my goal is a better world.” This book demonstrates Littlechild’s determination. It’s a visual feast — a treat both for newcomers and those already aware of his concerns.

Candace Fertile still has a Littlechild poster from one of the Asum Mena shows years ago.

Savage confronts prairie’s sad forgetting

A Geography of Blood:
Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape
By Candace Savage
Greystone/David Suzuki Foundation, 214 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

It’s both gratifying and unnerving to read a book that simultaneously challenges and affirms one’s own struggle with Western Canadian history. Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood is such a book. And I’m not the only one to think so: two days after I finished reading it, and was ruminating on this review, Savage won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize. Ironically, the winner is yet another of those titles created by Greystone Books, an imprint of the backruptcy-ridden Douglas and McIntyre. (Sad proof that publishing good, relevant books is not enough in today’s beset publishing world?)

Savage obviously put her entire heart, soul and intellect into A Geography of Blood: it’s a personal, thoughtful and sternly researched piece of writing in which the author confronts the literally buried history surrounding the small (population 600) Saskatchewan town of Eastend, where she and her partner have bought a get-away property. In this confrontation, she calls into question the entire triumphalist “settler history” of Canada. An august member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Rachel Carson Institute honour roll, Savage is the author of over two dozen books on the natural world and its denizens. This book should give her the national and international reputation she so richly deserves.

Older Canlit readers will recall that Eastend is the site of Wallace Stegner’s iconic book Wolf Willow, which I’ve always thought was a proven precursor to today’s creative nonfiction just by its very subtitle: A History, A Story and A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.

Once she gets over the delights of the quaint seclusion, the prairie light and the terrain where “the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan,” Savage, like any honest researcher, becomes obsessed with what and who preceded European settlement. And that, of course, was once-immense herds of buffalo and First People’s long inhabitation of the land around the Cypress Hills.

Savage does not have to dig very deeply before she discovers the full import of the past: Big Bear, Little Pine, Lucky Man and the ensuing 1883 confrontation with the heartless deceit of “the Great Mother” Queen Victoria and her minions. While personally searching out the “lost” history buried within the Cypress Hills terrain, Savage interviews a contemporary woman, Jean Francis Oakes, also known as Piyeso ka-petowitak (Thunder Coming Sounds Good). While trying to internalize Oakes’s hunger-camp stories, Savage writes one of the most compelling sentences in the book: “There are limits to my capacity for shame and sadness.”

And this is the essential message of A Geography of Blood: that the shameful stories of how the prairies were wrested from the “savages” and “settled,” must be told. And retold — until Canada’s collective capacity for both shame and sadness is replaced by a new, inclusive narrative in which First Nations people at last enjoy equal rights and opportunities as citizens.

Lynne Van Luven grew up on a farm near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, which is surrounded by five reservations, further legacies of the hunger camps

Author explores walls that divide us

Walls
Travels Along the Barricades
By Marcello Di Cintio
Published by Goose Lane
287 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Andy Ogle

When one thinks of walls these days, one’s mind travels immediately to Israel’s ongoing attempt to wall out the Palestinians on the West Bank. Or one might recall the Berlin Wall and marvel that it has already been 23 years since it came down.

Marcello Di Cintio does go to the West Bank and he does discuss the Berlin Wall, but he begins his travel with barriers that most North American readers have likely never heard of — in the Western Sahara, at two Spanish enclaves in Morroco, and the barrier still being extended that separates India from Bangladesh. He even finds a homegrown example — l’Acadie fence that separates the well-off anglo enclave of the town of Mount Royal and the largely immigrant, lower-class community of Parc-Extension in Montreal. I confess they were all news to me.

That novelty in itself is one time-honoured feature of good travel writing — taking readers to exotic foreign places or unknown corners of one’s own country. But Di Cintio’s goal is much more ambitions than that. He wants to understand what these walls mean for the people who live against them, those for whom they were built to include or exclude.

“I wondered what it meant to live a barricaded life,” he writes. “I wanted to discover what sort of societies created the walls. More than this, I wanted to know what societies the walls themselves created.”

So, in February 2008, “because it seemed as good a place to start as any,” he flew into the Sahara Desert. Three years later, he finished his quest in Montreal, having more than succeeded in meeting his goals.

Among the lessons he learns is that walls often don’t entirely succeed in their primary purpose of keeping out those who want in — most notably the U.S. Mexican border fence and the barriers at Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves that are essentially the southernmost reaches of the European Union.

What the walls do succeed at — and here Israel’s wall, the Indo-Bangladshi fence, the barriers dividing Catholic from Protestant neighbourhoods in Belfast and the wall that separates Greek and Turkish Cypriots serve as key examples —is to reinforce in concrete and barbed wire the sense of us and them. “With unambiguous authority,” Di Cintio says of his stay on Cyprus, “the Wall declares, You are either Turkish or Greek.” Even on this tiny island, anything Cypriots might share is rendered irrelevant.

The walls also throw up an uncomfortable truth for Di Cintio. As an outsider, it’s easy for him to flit back and forth across the barricades. But they also, as he puts it, scoff at neutrality. To play the role of objective journalist, to talk with those on both sides and refuse to take sides is, he decides, to occupy a sort of no-man’s land, his own private “Dead Zone.”

Yet, at the heart of Di Cintio’s book lies the practice of journalism, of finding people on both sides of the barriers, be they the nomadic Saharawi, African and Punjabi refugees in Ceuti or the gun-toting but surprisingly anti-fence redneck in Arizona, willing and often eager to share their experiences and lives. Walls (long-listed for the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction) succeeds largely on that basis. Di Cintio’s willingness to go beyond mere reportage, to ponder his role in the story, lifts it to an even higher level.

Andy Ogle is a former reporter at the Edmonton Journal

Ten nonfiction books long-listed for $40,000 prize

Two books released by an imperiled B.C. publisher are among the 10 titles long-listed for Canada’s largest literary non-fiction prize.
A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape by Candace Savage and The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen by Stephen Bown are both published by Douglas and McIntyre, which recently announced it is going into bankruptcy protection. Both books are contending for the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The other eight contenders include:

• A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda by Robert Fowler (published by Harper Collins) HarperCollins Canada
• A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring by Nahlah Ayed (Doubleday); Penguin Group Canada
• here we are among the living: a memoir in emails by Samantha Bernstein (Tightrope) Tightrope Books
• Pinboy: A Memoir by George Bowering (Cormorant) Cormorant Books
• Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins (Knopf) Knopf Canada
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe (Harper Collins) HarperCollins Canada
• Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy by Andrew Preston (Knopf)
• Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane) Knopf Canada

The shortlist will be announced on December 4, and the award will be presented in Vancouver in early 2013. Last year, Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill, also published by D and M, won the award, which was first awarded in 2005.
D & M Publishers Inc.
Goose Lane Editions

How Should a Person be?

How Should A Person Be?
By Sheila Heti
Published by House of Anansi
306 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

The cover of this book describes it as a novel from life, and it is certainly that. The novel opens with the protagonist, Sheila, posing a time-worn question: How should a person be?

In How Should a Person Be, Heti fictionalizes actual events and conversations she and fellow artist friends experience over the course of one year, as she grapples with her identity. A combination of autobiography and fiction, the novel is written as freeform prose, weaving in transcribed conversations and actual emails throughout.

The “novel” begins with the protagonist deciding to divorce her husband after realizing they were together more out of convenience than love: “It was like we were afraid of hurting one another. We never fought or pushed, as if the world was hard enough.” After the divorce, Sheila forms a close friendship with a painter named Margaux, despite neither woman having ever sustained a female friendship.

As Sheila struggles to write a play commissioned by a feminist theatre, she looks to Margaux for inspiration, deciding to tape their conversations. Their discussions focus primarily on art and what it means to be an artist, because Margaux, “is made impatient with conversations about relationships or men.” The narrative follows the two women, as they spend their days working in their shared studio, and their nights drinking in hopes of finding inspiration at the bottom of the glass.

Sheila feels worthless in her inability to write and takes on a sadistic lover named Israel, despite knowing – in fact, largely because – he wants nothing from her but sex. She finally ends the relationship by purposefully degrading herself to the point that neither of them could ever feel sexual desire towards the other.

Desiring to create a work of beauty, despite her writer’s block, Sheila begins working as a shampoo girl at a hair salon, where she revels in the opportunity to work at a job where she feels competent. Sheila decides to use her Margaux recordings as source material, which leads to an argument between the friends. Unequipped to deal with the conflict, Sheila succumbs to her usual avoidance patterns by taking off to New York City, leaving the broken friendship behind. Sheila comes to realize, “Margaux was not like the stars in the sky. There was only one Margaux – not Margaux’s scattered everywhere through the darkness.” This realization leads to her return to Toronto, where she fights, and succeeds, at re-establishing their friendship.

Although the use of transcribed conversations added to the novel’s raw, confessional feeling, the lack of structure or clear narrative arc made it seem disjointed and scattered. There were often long segments that failed to move the action forward, including several pages spent describing a nightmare, and a ten-page transcription of a conversation between Sheila and the man at a copy store.
Nonetheless, this novel is unabashed and quirky, and although Sheila realizes the impossibility of determining how a person should be, she discovers – along with the reader – that the process of asking is more important than any answer. As for her own life, it dawns on her, “I made what I could with what I had.”

Jenny Aitken is a regular reviewer for the Coastal Spectator

Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide

Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide
By Harold Kalman and Robin Ward
Photographs by John Roaf
Douglas & McIntyre, 336 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide is a highly readable and informative guide to Vancouver’s buildings, both old and new. And while the city has not been known for its architecture, except perhaps the Vancouver Special, a two-story, basement-less house put up by the block in the seventies because of its low cost, Harold Kalman and Robin Ward manage to integrate Vancouver’s buildings with its history in an engaging way. And the authors do not shy away from difficult topics, such as racism and homelessness.

A brief introduction guides readers into the book. The authors indicate their intention for their work: “Exploring Vancouver reveals the architecture and urbanism of the city, its history and the people and the society that made it.” And they have excelled at this task. The book is arranged into 14 chapters by location, and each building has a short explanation and a colour photograph. Each chapter includes a map and a suggested route to take advantage of the information within the pages. And the chapters are letter- and colour-coded to make navigating the book about as easy as possible.

I was surprised to learn that Vancouver is the only major North American city without a freeway through it. In 1967, the Strathcona Freeway plan was blocked, thus saving the neighbourhoods of Chinatown and Gastown, which the freeway would have cut through. The lack of a freeway contributes to an emphasis on livable housing density, “Vancouverism,” as the ideology is known and admired internationally. The authors are clearly in love with their subject and present Vancouver as a model for the world, with its eco-friendly attitude and residential downtown. What doesn’t come up much is the traffic problem, which is one of the worst in North America.

For people who want to know what they are looking at while on a walk, this book is splendid: it works well for the Vancouverite or the visitor or the armchair traveller. Strolling around is one of the most pleasant pastimes in a city that is relatively safe, clean, and ice-free. Reading about the city is fun as this book has a lively and crisp tone. Anyone familiar with Vancouver will find iconic buildings, such as the Europe Hotel at 43 Powell with its flatiron design and the Marine Building at 355 Burrard with its gorgeous Art Deco features, along with newer buildings such as One Wall Centre at 938 Nelson with its controversial two-tone glass compromise in its 48 towers and the Olympic Village at False Creek, described in a clear, no-nonsense fashion. I will definitely take this book with me whenever I go to Vancouver and will explore some of the sights with attention.

The authors have scoured the city for buildings to include, from the soaring towers of downtown and the West End to the old Woodward’s store to the mansions of Shaughnessy and numerous other private dwellings of all sizes. Bridges are included. Skytrain stations are also included. The scope extends as far as Richmond, New Westminster, and Burnaby. The breadth is remarkable. It’s no surprise that the book is endorsed by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

And to round out the informative value of the volume, the authors include a glossary, a list of books for further reading, and a detailed index. Put all that on a high quality paper with sewn in signatures, and the result is a beautiful, durable – and affordable – book. And that’s kind of ironic. As the authors note, Vancouver is an extremely “livable” city but only for those who can afford the high cost of housing.

Candace Fertile is a contributing editor of The Coastal Spectator and teaches English at Camosun College

Wise Food for Urbanite Thought

Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto
By Rhona McAdam.
Rocky Mountain Books, 168 pp., $16.95.

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

Rapidly increasing urbanization is a global phenomenon that increasingly challenges human society. In Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, Rhona McAdam takes a critical step toward a new “urban agriculture manifesto” by placing the urban human/environmental interaction at the center of new attempts to deal with the current urban food dilemma. McAdam argues that the current “culture” of imported food has resulted in the decimation of the once thriving, sustainable, and local farming industry. This has resulted in the “majority of us having no idea what the ecological consequences of our food choices are.” To remedy this, McAdam calls for a “new food ethic,” the proliferation of small, sustainable, local, urban food producing gardens, and a return to the “virtuous cycle” of producing the food we eat.

Between tending her small Victoria garden and exchanging garden tips with her neighbourhood gardening collective, McAdam travels, researches, and writes on growing urban habitation and the current global food crisis. McAdam recounts her personal journey of discovery of the “good food” and “slow food” movement and her subsequent training in ‘Sustainable Local Food’ from St. Lawrence College. She reports on current food-safety issues, describing the historical sources and the issues around food production. As well, McAdam spotlights such new directions in the field as urban allotment gardens, edible landscaping, kitchen gardens, urban fish farms, meatless Mondays, and vertical farming, while providing an insightful analysis of the negative environmental consequences of the mega-agro industry.

Throughout, she is both thoughtful and informative, as evidenced in her final chapter, The Future of Urban Agriculture, in which she urges us to look beyond the immediate and envision “the future of food secure cities – and food production in general.”

You don’t need to be a “Guerrilla Gardener” to enjoy reading Digging the City. The book is appealing for its personal narrative, informative analysis, and for its contribution to the growing literature on the sustainable food movement that seeks to change the way we eat.

Susan Hawkins is completing her History in Art PhD and is a trained gardener

New novels launched with suitable enthusiasm

Bill Gaston and Marjorie Celona

A Reading Hosted by Penguin Canada and Munro’s Books

Wednesday, October 17/12, Bard and Banker

Attended by Garth Martens

Novelists Marjorie Celona and Bill Gaston were in high cheer at the launch for their respective books, Celona’s debut novel Y and Gaston’s latest achievement The World. Relegated to the heat-lamped Hobbit hole upstairs, one hundred bodies crammed intimately together on benches, wicker chairs and between shelves of books, with pints in steady supply and higher demand. If a packed house is a recipe for an anxious sweat, the claustrophobic constraint of the venue added an uncommon ebullience to the usual wafty social cocktail that precedes such events, with every effervescent embrace an affirmation of tribal reliance.

The readings were brilliant as expected, beginning first with Celona, an emerging astonishment who flew in from Banff that morning, followed by local treasure Bill “The White Bear” Gaston, typically self-effacing in unshaven assemblé. Whether from the unrelenting heat lamp or the friction of flawlessly tempered prose, even the bodies lollygagging on the patio were unbuttoning their varied cardigans, dismantling their paisley silks, each set of thick-rimmed glasses sliding from the bridge of the nose, the product-rifled coifs losing their curated weave. Verily, the autocracies of style disunited in sweat.

Following the readings, of course the rabble queued, blank pages folded open, eager for a bit of chat or the commodified stamp of an author autograph, no one saying what everyone was thinking: if you back the right horse you can supplement your retirement fund on Ebay, or at least pay the rent this winter. The hooch was bankrolled by Penguin Canada, so I ordered another pint, its sedimental froth
churning like butter on the tongue. A good piss up, as my uncle might say. And two books that deserve it.

As the night staggered to an end, Gaston offered me a plate of fries, half-eaten. “Don’t take it if it’s gross,” he said, pointing to his mouth. “You can have half of the burger too, if you want it.” I took the fries. As Bill shambled to the bathroom, I picked at the plate with a gamesome friend, wondering when Bill’s partner Dede Crane might turn, mid-conversation, to find an alien person eating from her
husband’s plate. When we exceeded the budget for the liquor, the assemblage began to rotate and disperse. The moon looked like getting out of there. I kicked it to the street with a pair of books, a full belly, and a great night put to rest.

Garth Martens has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Victoria. He is a former member of the poetry editorial board at The Malahat Review. His first book of poems, Motive of Machines, will appear in spring of 2014 with House of Anansi Press.

Bechdel’s mother narrative too static

Are You my Mother?: A Comic Drama

By Alison Bechdel

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

297 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Fans of Alison Bechdel will be interested in her second family-based graphic novel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. The graphic skills that made Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic immensely satisfying and readable are on display in Bechdel’s latest offering. I was thrilled when Bechdel made the leap from comic strip to graphic novel with Fun, which I read voraciously and loved. So perhaps my expectations of Are You My Mother? were impossibly high. While Bechdel’s drawing retains its appeal in her third book, the narrative is less lively than that of Fun. Nor is the work as a whole as compelling as Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, the 2010 Canadian graphic novel that also tells the tale of a dyke and her mother.

While Fun was the story of Bechdel growing up in a funeral home and focused on her relationship with her closeted father, Mother? addresses the author’s more conflicted relationship with her female parent. The narrative line of Fun takes Bechdel through childhood and to university while Mother? explores primarily either the infant Bechdel or her adult self in therapeutic or romantic relationships. The most common settings of Mother? thus lack the graphic energy or interest that her more mobile childhood afforded. Far too many frames present Bechdel sitting with her therapist, a static situation that is not particularly graphic-novel friendly. Bechdel also recounts several dreams reminding me that, often, dreams are most fascinating to the dreamer (and possibly her therapist).

Ironically, I find Mother? leans too heavily in the direction of the academic essay. Although I have studied Jacques Lacan, it demands too much of the graphic memoir for Bechdel to present the theories of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Alice Miller, and Lacan in such detail. Although I am in shocked awe at her boldness in titling a chapter, “Transitional Objects” and somewhat amused to see Lacan’s Écrits given graphic treatment, I found the many panels of text (complete with highlighting) excessive – and too static to enliven graphic narrative.

Nor does Bechdel quote psychoanalysts only. Virginia Woolf, one of my favourite authors, serves as her literary touchstone. Mother? includes textual panels from Moments of Being and To The Lighthouse. The Woolf references in Mother? parallel Bechdel’s use of James Joyce in Fun. It’s interesting, and slyly appropriate, that Bechdel uses the iconic father and mother of high modernism to anchor her relations to her own father and mother. Readers may also note a nod to gender in the colorful rose (or is it pink?), which gives many frames in Mother? the effect of retinted old photographs, and contrast with the verdigris of Fun.

Her use of quotation, which lacks the full integration of a really good academic essay, suggests Bechdel has not achieved quite enough distance on her therapy to integrate it fully into the literary graphic novel. The question in her title acknowledges that the story is about Bechdel’s search for a mother rather than about her mother and its present tense implies that that search is on-going, not yet resolved. Mother? might be read as Bechdel’s own Drama of the Gifted Child (the Miller book she quotes) – her sincerity and her gifts are indisputable. Certainly, readers who share similar issues may well forgive the dynamic limitations of Mother? and not only enjoy, but benefit from Bechdel’s psychoanalytic research and insights. For me, there isn’t enough graphic comic in this Comic Drama.

Chris Fox recently completed her PhD in English – which has not diminished her sense of humour

Celona updates foundling narrative

By Marjorie Celona
Published by Hamish Hamilton Canada, $30

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Marjorie Celona has updated the foundling novel for the 21st-century. Set on Vancouver Island, the back story of the abandonment, essentially that of the birth parents, is as developed as foundling Shannon’s story. Celona alternates events in the two stories with great skill to create a compelling, suspenseful narrative that finally unites both strands, and in doing so offers characters – and readers – penetrating insights into what constitutes “family.”

Celona’s novel gives a postmodern meta-nod to Tom Jones and like its foundling, Tom, Shannon has a lusty appetite for food: “I don’t want to eat at all if I can’t eat like a wild animal.” However, there the resemblance ends. Unlike Tom, Shannon’s appetite disappears at significant times, and is more likely to extend to illicit substances than to sexual adventures. Readers follow the contemporary foundling (and her sometimes unreliable narrative) as she is moved from one “at-risk” placement to another, finally arriving to relative safety with Miranda and her daughter Lydia-Rose. Here, Celona effectively captures the naïve, strangely confident demeanor that accompanies the troubled, but determined, 16-year-old Shannon’s first steps into independence.

Because there is suspense in this story, I hesitate to give too much away; however, it is no surprise that a child who’s been abandoned wonders how and why she was left and seeks the identity of her biological parents. Shannon’s drive to “find the why” of it all takes her to the Y(MCA), and to the hard-knock downtowns of Victoria and Vancouver. Her earlier traumas make her vulnerable to others, but though Shannon still hurts herself, she has, miraculously, developed a strong sense of self-preservation that impels her to flee the greatest dangers.

Shannon is also lucky. Her luck is that she attends to key pieces of advice given to her by her strongest mother, Miranda, a kindly social worker, and a street musician. This faculty (and the Times Colonist story of her birth) leads Shannon back to Victoria’s YMCA and to Vaughn, the man who witnesses Shannon’s mother leaving her four-pound preemie newborn at the Y’s doors at sunrise. Vaughn is Y’s guardian angel, a weight trainer at the Y. He is a seer, and one who believes he can affect how the future unfolds. Vaughn helps Shannon with her quest by giving her nourishment, mobility, wisdom, and companionship.

Celona’s writing, more gritty than lyrical, makes this compelling tale believable, keeps us reading long after bedtime because we care about Shannon and we want to know what happens. In part, it’s Celona’s use of concrete detail that draws us in. For Victorians, it’s also satisfying to read about “our town” written by a local writer. Celona was a graduate of UVic’s star-studded Creative Writing Program before gaining an MFA from Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Y’s characters drive in and out of Victoria along Douglas Street, as have we all, passing the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, the Mayfair Mall, and Thompson’s Foam Shop. She also captures the liveliness, friendliness, and desperation of the Dallas Road and downtown park night life as Victoria’s homeless and addicted meet and share drugs. Celona’s vision is empathetic and compassionate; she enables readers to understand the innocence with which horror can arrive and destroy lives.

But she doesn’t leave us there. Shannon’s life begins again – signalled by a clever repeat of the novel’s opening paragraphs – and this time she is more solidly and consciously a part of the family that has been hammered out in the forge of her coming of age quest.
I had to “Add” Celona to my spellcheck as I wrote this; I recommend we add her to the Canadian literary canon as well. Y is a worthy Giller nominee.

Victoria resident Chris Fox just completed a PhD in English, with a focus on Canadian literature. She has been published in The Malahat Review, Ariel, Atlantis and Studies in Canadian Literature