Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch

Two and half days of my last week were spent in the absolute bliss of reading Sheree Fitch's first novel Kiss the Joy as it Flies (shortlisted for the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour). I'd previously only read Fitch's wonderful children's book Kisses Kisses Baby-O!, but love it so much that when I discovered Fitch had written a novel for adult readers, I had to read it. Though I began reading with a degree of uncertainty: the story of Mercy Beth Fanjoy, who receives a troubling medical prognosis and decides to stage a clear-out of her messy life in the time she has left. This sort of formula could go either way, and very quickly in, I was pleased to find Fitch had gone in the right one, with sprightly prose and a narrative packing a punch. The novel is wonderfully original, although if pressed, I'd have to call it as Fannie Flagg meets Miriam Toews.

In Kiss the Joy as it Flies, it's not so much plot that accelerates as the language itself operating on sheer gumption, and the spirit of Mercy Fanjoy picking up speed as she comes into her own. Though things happen-- people die, hopes are dashed, love is born, battles are fought, illusions are shattered, triumphs are won, and lessons learned. The stuff of life with a wacky cast of characters who are constructed as types-- religious zealot mother, loyal friend, hippie daughter, enigmatic dead father, sex god-- but each of them excellently crafted with the most remarkable ability to surprise you.

Mercy Fanjoy is wholly embodied by Fitch's prose. The fact of the disease that lurks inside her, and her buxomness, and her sexuality, and when she expresses milk from her engorged breasts into the bathtub during a flashback in which she remembers her teenaged, single-mothered, basement-apartmented self. Two decades on, Mercy has come a long way-- she's reconciled with her difficult mother, earned a university degree, she pens her own column in the Odell Observer, has raised her daughter, bought her own house, teaches a creative writing course, and has maintained a lifelong relationship with her best friend Lulu. She still holds a grudge against horrible Teeny Gaudet (who has since gone onto fame as bestselling author of the "Burt the Burping Bear" series of children's books), but you can't win them all.

Over the week she seeks to put her life in order, Mercy finds herself becoming unhinged, and emerging from a rut she's been stuck in too long. In the end, just about everybody in her life surprises her, but she manages to shock them right back, tenfold. And while it's raw, we'll get our hearts warmed, and Fitch also pulls of a satire so slick, we can't help laughing, and I suppose that this is what she means by "the sheer mad joy of all of it."

On reading in 2009

It's been a funny old year for me, reading-wise and otherwise. I don't even know how many books I read in total, because my Books Read Since 2006 list was lost in the (Un)Great Hard Drive Kaputment in late June. I'd wager I've read about 100 books in total though, and I'm quite pleased with the fact that I've read 53 of them since my baby was born in May. Many of these books have frustrated me, however. Something has changed in the way I read-- either the books have gotten worse, or I've become more demanding/less patient. This has been ongoing since I first got pregnant, and all the books I read in the first trimester made me nauseous. Since then, I've had no time for a book that does poorly what it has set out to do.

I think there's a connection in that lately, most of my literary fiction (apart from big name authors) comes from small presses. Last year, I made an "indie list", that was sort of an off-the-beaten-track best ofs, but this year small press books make up half of the books I liked best. My impression is that the big publishing houses have been focusing less on literary fiction, in producing it and promoting it. And perhaps this been an opportunity for small presses to pick up their slack, or at least receive more focus on the wonderful books they've been publishing all along. It just seems remarkably clear to me for whom the bottom line is something other than profit.

I've also seen less incredibly polished popular fiction with a literary bent-- it's been derided, but last year I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, or The Flying Troutmans and American Wife which managed to be delicious and literary at the very same time. The pop/lit. divide has seemed wider lately, much to the detriment of popular fiction in general.

Anyway, where have I discovered the books I liked best this year? I was been coaxed to read many after newspaper reviews-- Caroline Adderson on Lisa Moore, and Lisa Moore on Lorrie Moore in particular, neither of which disappointed. And then there are bloggers: I read The Spare Room after DoveGreyReader's review, and I read The Incident Report because of Melanie's review (which was before its Giller longlisting). I read The Children's Book after Steph wrote about it at Crooked House. The Lydia Peelle book after Lauren Groff recommended it on her blog. I only read The English Stories because I wanted to buy something from Biblioasis at Eden Mills, and that goes to show you never know, because it was one of my favourite books all year. Apart from that, my point is that bloggers sell books, oh, yes they do!

Surprising: so many short story collections here. I root for the short story, but I adore novels, but maybe short stories have better suited my focus lately. Unsurprising: all my favourite books were written by women. This doesn't mean the men are rubbish, but I think I've only read two novels by men in the last six months, so better broaden my focus in the new year.

This list doesn't mention The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon (which is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal in foreign lands like America). Read my post on it: the book was absolute magic and blew me away, but alas, as it was not published this year, it doesn't fit the bill. You should read it anyway, though.

My other favourite discovery was Barbara Pym. I can't imagine what my life would have been had I not picked up Excellent Women at the Vic Book Sale and discovered how incredible her novels are. They're so funny, smart and modern. I just finished read my second, No Fond Return of Love, and I liked it even better than Excellent Women. But I'll be writing more about that later.

Pickle Me This Top Books of 2009

• The Believers by Zoe Heller. From my review: "In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible"
• Delicate, Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. From my review: "I will say, however, that this is a book worth judging by its cover, for the reader will not be disappointed. The cover's bird motif appearing throughout the collection, joining these stories otherwise so disparate by style, narration, location, characterization. But the birds are there, and so is water, bodies of big and small, and swimmers, and poolside loungers, and drownings and rain. So that to ponder all these stories together after the fact is to draw surprising connections, new conclusions. Here are nine stories that belong together, but not in ways that one might suspect."
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner. From my review: "This is a perfect novel. It's also quite short, but... there is substance, layers and layers of. At its root about friendship, which Garner refers to here as a "long conversation". As well as family, and belonging, and imposition, understanding, and proprietorship of each other and ourselves. Garner's narrator fascinating to consider, her motivations, what her words and actions reveal. This novel is quiet in its force, and enormous for the space it gives to ponder."
• The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. From my review: "The Children's Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt's best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn't mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here-- a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don't like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one-- there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children's Book is decidedly vivid and surprising."
• February by Lisa Moore. From my review: "February is a novel about moving forward, about never letting go and doing the right thing. Its characters are vivid and wonderful, their thoughts positively "thought-like"-- twisting, interrupted, irrational-- as Moore's style continues on in the same surprising vein, her technical innovation perfectly realized. The story is as funny as it is sad, and that sadness has meaning beyond itself. It's a rare thing-- a perfect book. I would call it one of the best books published in Canada this year, but I'm taking my chances on it being one of the best books from anywhere"
• The Incident Report by Martha Baillie. From my review: "Miriam's strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie's exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward)."
  
• The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. From my review: "Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, "That book is amazing. Buy it." I said, "I'm going to. I'm reading her new book right now." She said, "That's just what I'm here to get," and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. "It's fantastic," I said, because flawed or not, it is. And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore."
• The English Stories by Cynthia Flood. From my review: "With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn't even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what's around every next turn."
• What Boys Like by Amy Jones. From my review: "And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot? What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you'd never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails..."
• Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle. From my review: "Where Peelle is like O'Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you've been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you've ever imagined. I mentioned the end of "Kidding Season" already, and can't get explicit or I'll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers' awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. "Phantom Pain" has a similar impact. Everything is loaded."
  

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

Perhaps Lydia Peelle's stories seem a bit old fashioned because most of them are so blatantly about something. So that I finish reading one, for example "Phantom Pain", exclaiming that the story was amazing, and when I'm asked what it was about, I can say, "A one-legged taxidermist and a mountain lion on the loose." And then, naturally, whoever I've been talking to wants to read the story now.

A bit of their old-fashionedness also comes from these stories' deep investment in history, and a focus on farming and the land. "The Mule Killers" is three generations contained in one single tale, which navigates changes in farming life (mule killers are tractors). "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" looks less far back, an elegy-that-isn't-an-elegy to a summer two girls on the cusp of adolescence spent working on a horse farm. "Kidding Season" takes place in the present day, but recounts a troubled young man's experiences working on a goat farm. In "Shadow On A Weary Land", a motley collection of characters (one of whom is apparently communing with the spirit of Jesse James) search for treasure buried by James' brother on property outside of Nashville that is rapidly being developed into subdivisions.

Peelle's agrarian history is no idyll, however. A seminal moment in the "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" summer involves the head of a dead pony in the jaws of a dog. The ending of "Kidding Season" is so sickeningly devastating, you'll read the final paragraph again and again, willing it to say something different. The narrator of "Shadow On A Weary Land" is an octogenarian stroke victim/former drug addict, and the yarns he spins are a product of his past.

"Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" reminded me of Birds of America Lorrie Moore. The stories "Phantom Pain" and "The Still Point" paint the underside of the present day in stunningly vivid terms. "This is Not a Love Story" chronicles an abusive relationship, displaying a wonderful treatment of the "life as a flowing river" metaphor, when that river is a man-made lake that had flooded a town, and how there's nothing else to do but go around and around. This story in particular undercuts any notion of the good old days: "But wasn't it worth it?' she said. 'Wouldn't you do it all over again?'/No, it wasn't worth it, I told her. Not any of it./ Not one damn minute of it./Trust me."

Peelle displays some self-awareness in "This is Not a Love Story", her narrator a girl from Connecticut who in the early '80s decides to become a photographer and "move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era." Peelle, a native of Boston, might have been similarly naive when she moved to the South, when she started writing about the South, but her stories show she's since learned that the dangers are elsewhere, that the long-gone era is an illusion, and relics aren't the things you might have chosen to last.

But writing about the South, she treads on a dangerous tradition, and thus come the comparisons of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. There are moments when it feels like she might be striving toward these voices, but on the whole I would posit that, as an outsider, Peelle comes at the South from a unique point of view, and hers are even less elegiac than these writers' non-elegies for a long-gone era that never was and never went.

Where Peelle is like O'Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you've been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you've ever imagined. I mentioned the end of "Kidding Season" already, and can't get explicit or I'll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers' awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. "Phantom Pain" has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.

I like this book for the lines it crosses-- Peelle's history isn't dead and buried, but keeps coming up again year after year (and kudos for that wonderful asparagus image in "The Mule Killers"). Which is perhaps where she gets her lack of elegy from, for its hard to elegize something so close to the surface. Peelle's stories mix urban life and farm life, they're stories of home and of the road (and neither of these so much like the home and road you read in books). I like that if you picked up this book, and read it straight through, you'd have a hard time telling whether it was written by a woman or a man, and in that ambiguity, I think, Peelle's writing takes on tremendous power.

This is a stunning collection that deserves to be read and celebrated, and I think the one only leads to the other.

What Boys Like by Amy Jones

I'd previously read Amy Jones' "The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches" in The New Quarterly, and as I read the story again in Jones' new collection, I was hoping that this time the story might be different. This time, could it possiby have an ending that wouldn't break my heart? It didn't, though I was so hopeful that a little trick with italics caught me once again, and I dared to be tripped up by the same trick that caught me before.

And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot?

What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you'd never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails. The comic-strip touch suggesting a pop-cultural bent, and indeed, Jones' characters listen to pop music, they play video games, sports is playing on TV, and references are tied up in zeitgeist.

Jones displays impressive range, writing in first, third and an impressively-executed second-person. Her characters are male and female, young and older than young, on the cusp, over the edge, or past the point of no return. They lead such desperate lives, and then there are these moments of grace-- the pregnant lady who shares her peanut butter sandwich, the man who dares a young girl to be something, that Jenny goes home at all, Marty looking for bats in the garden, and all that love. The baby inside her. And when those who really get it had it coming anyway.

These are stories mostly of Halifax, in and around. In "The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches", the first sentence tells the story: "There is nothing more unseemly than a pregnant widow at a funeral". "Places to Drink Outside in Halifax" is the story of the first party of high school, drinking on Alexander Keith's grave. In "An Army of One", a woman attends the wedding of her male best friend (who she's been sleeping with for years). "All We Will Ever Be" is two sides of a woman from the perspective of the man she's just about to throw away and the other she's just sinking her teeth into.

In each of these stories, premise is realized into someting vivid and whole. Amy Jones' stories are easy to fall into, but complex enough that there is something new upon returning to them again and again.

The English Stories by Cynthia Flood

This weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of being utterly captivated by Cynthia Flood's collection The English Stories. The stories are linked by the experiences of eleven-year-old Amanda Ellis who travels to Oxford, England in 1951 with her parents. Her academic father is on sabbatical, researching for a book about Shelley and Keats, and the family spends their English year (which stretches into two) at The Green House guesthouse. When her father's research takes him further afield, Amanda indulges in every colonial girl's deepest fantasy by becoming a boarder at her school, St. Mildred's.

The story title "The Margins are the Frame" gives a good impression of Amanda's point of view. Amanda-- by her age, culture, language and nationality-- is alienated from everyone around her. And from the margins, her perspective of England, of home and away, of her parents and their relationship, of her schoolmates and teachers is surprising, misinformed, illuminating, tragic and true. And although Amanda is the anchor of the entire collection, the stories also come from additional perspectives-- from other guests at The Green House, from teachers at St. Mildred's, all of these characters on margins of their own.

This was an England not long out of war, in the throes of an age of austerity, coming to terms (or not yet) with fundamental changes in values and beliefs, and grappling with centuries of a empirical past that was quickly becoming irrelevant. And though Flood's protagonist is young, her stories' themes are not, which becomes the point-- Amanda struggling with the gap between the world as it is and her limited understanding. Understanding which is little achieved here, for Amanda is only eleven after all, and then just twelve, and thirteen. Far too young yet for "coming of age" and Flood doesn't do such neat resolutions anyway.

What she does do is a marvelous sentence: "At lunch on the rainy February day the King died, the sweet was custard and stewed damsons" opens "Early in the Morning", or "The Spring term in which Kay died and Constance disappeared from St. Mildred's, and I broke my glasses featured a school wide obsession with mealtime talk of sex" begins "Magnificat". These sentences both convey the way in Flood encapsulates the world wide and near, the great and small, inside her literary universe. And while I want to write about my favourite stories and what each one was "about", but I'm not sure I can contain all that in the space I have here.

But I will try: "Religious Knowledge" from the perspective of Miss Flower, teacher of religion, who has not yet mastered her own life and then becomes responsible for another when she learns about one of her pupil's disturbing homelife; "Miss Pringle's Hour", the headmistress's diary hiding a tragic love story inside it; "The Promised Land" shows the Ellis' at the end of their sojourn and provides them with a new perspective on Canada (amongst other things); "The Margins are the Frame" in which Amanda takes up shoplifting, is ostracized at school, and learns that the maid at The Greenhouse is an unmarried mother.

But really, these descriptions don't do these stories justice. With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn't even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what's around every next turn.

BONUS: Read "Religious Knowledge" at the Biblioasis Blog.

The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The thing about Lorrie Moore, I've found, is that everybody loves her. Except me, because I didn't even read her until I read her story "How to be an Other Woman" in the anthology My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. Which made clear why everybody loved her, so I read her novel Anagrams next, which might have been a mistake, because while it was good, it didn't leave me hungry for more. But then something about the buzz from her novel The Gate at the Stairs hooked me-- Lisa Moore's rave review definitely, and the novel's dealings with children and motherhood, as this is much/entirely my life these days.

Another thing about my life these days, however, is that I'm tired. I am so unbelievably, unrelentingly tired that it's quite hilarious, and only because when I am this tired, I'll laugh at absolutely anything. (Baby no longer sleeps for more than three hours at a time, and therefore neither do I.) And for this reason, I think, as I read this novel, I kept thinking I was reading a book by Francine Prose. I am not sure why-- it had a bit of Goldengrove AND Blue Angel about it, and was nothing like Anagrams, or something you'd expect from a short story writer, and I was also (as I said) really, really tired. All of which is beside the point. (Yawn. And at least I didn't get her confused with Francine Pascal.)

I was fortunate, I think, to come to this novel as I did, having not read much of Moore before. Maud Newton posts her own thoughts on the novel and links to others', and the consensus seems to be that Lorrie Moore devotees are a bit disappointed. That the novel is brilliant and absorbing in so many ways, but flawed and unsatisfying at the same time. And it's true that this novel wasn't perfect, but I was glad to be reading it as one being awed by the power of Lorrie Moore for the very first time. Critics have been unconvinced by Moore's narrator, Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year old who seems much more like just a vehicle for Lorrie Moore's point of view and lingual deftness, but so entranced was I by such a pov and deftness, I wasn't about to complain.

The novel was so interesting. Which is such a lame way to describe anything, but what I mean by this is that I could think about it forever-- about the significance of the title, for example, and the narrative arc which isn't an arc, and the characters' stories, and how the narrative was utterly unpredictable, not because it was exciting, but because it was like how life is. How the novel was so accessible, and so challenging at the very same time, and the unending layers you could reveal inside it if you took the time to try.

Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, "That book is amazing. Buy it." I said, "I'm going to. I'm reading her new book right now." She said, "That's just what I'm here to get," and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. "It's fantastic," I said, because flawed or not, it is.

And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore.

The Incident Report by Martha Baillie

Something happens when you work in libraries for too long, even part-time. I learned this the day a patron came to the circulation desk asking to borrow a stapler, and I had to explain why this was against our policy: "If we gave it out to you, then we'd have to give them out to everyone." It was a sorry power trip, from up there on my desk-high perch, and I even felt like kind of a hero. Averting mass stapler lending, which really means holding off CHAOS in the library, the foundation of our society. Where would we be without me?

But I was not the worst case. One librarian where I worked had seen fit to apply labels to every object at the circ desk and the place where that object was to rest. "Pencils" said one tin, "erasers" said another. "Paper Cutter" lived in the "Paper Cutter" place. "Coats" on the closet. This was the Dewey Decimal System gone mad!! I wrote "Floor" on a post-it note, and placed it underfoot. My colleagues, being librarians, failed to see the humour.

But I love it. I don't think I've always been like this, but after a cumulative five years of library work, my own books (and CDs) are always in alpha order. Out at the library, I am always made steady by the sureness of call numbers-- that everything will be where it is supposed to. I used to relish shelf-reading, and not just because I got to browse the stacks, but whenever I found a volume out of place and put it back where it belonged, I'd performed a task even more worthwhile than keeping would-be stapler lendees tamed. I love libraries. I love cataloguing. May the god of order forever reign.

At the Toronto Public Library, as I now know, employees are instructed to log incidents which take place on their shifts. Martha Baillie's novel The Incident Report is made up of such logs, Miriam, her protagonist, seeing fit to order her life to fit the confines of these reports. Perhaps a way to order chaos indeed, as her job sees her engaging in bizarre (and sometimes dangerous) interactions with those on the fringes of society. Her incident reports "resembling a pack of cards" stacked in a desk drawer, containing records of what you might expect (and what you couldn't possibly imagine but some of which probably comes from truth [Baillie is a librarian in the Toronto Public system]), but also episodes from her personal life (which include a man she meets while sitting on a park bench during her lunch break), and from her history (usually about her father, and a tragedy in her past).

Miriam's strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie's exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward).

This is a clever little book, but not too clever, for it is mostly beautiful. Rich with literary allusions that aren't the point, but still round out the universe. And rich too with story, which goes to show that you can make stories happen anywhere.

The Children's Book's longlisting is good news

My two weeks on maternity leave before Harriet was born were spent so unbelievably well, perpetual sunshine and copious ice cream. Lots of reading and writing too. She was scheduled to be born on a Tuesday, and the Friday before AS Byatt's The Children's Book arrived in the mail. At more than 600 pages, the book was a rather daunting prospect for the final weekend of my wonderful, self-indulgent baby-free life. But I also knew that if I didn't get the book read then, it would sit unread for months and months. (I didn't know much then, but I knew enough to know that was true). And so into the book I plunged, 200 pages a day (in addition to all the other things that had to get done that weekend). It was such a brilliant way to read the book, to become so steeped inside it, and I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. And it stayed on my mind during those first few weeks of Harriet's life, when my mind was tied up on knots for various reasons, and the book is the one thing from that whole time that I remember vividly.

All of which is to say that I'm glad it's on the Booker Prize long-list, and I'll be happy if it wins.

Read my review of The Children's Book.

February by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore's first novel Alligator was a revelation when I first read it. It was a novel composed of sentences, each one as meticulously and surprisingly crafted as the next, and I'd never read anything else like it. As a whole, however, the novel didn't completely satisfy. This might be asking too much of a book that did so many other things, but still, the project wasn't completely realized. With February, however, breathtakingly, Moore has built on her promise and in this, her second novel, she has created a brilliant literary achievement.

Now, I realize that by only reading books I'll probably like, and only writing about books I do like, I may come across as a bit hyperbolic in my literary praise. Indeed, I do love an awful lot of books, but February is something different. A cut above even the very best of the rest, her is my favourite book I've read it ages. Casting its spell from the first sentence, crafted as marvelously as I'd expect, I was completely swept up in this novel that reads (as Alligator did) like nothing else I've ever read before.

February is the story of Helen, a Newfoundlander whose husband was killed in the Ocean Ranger Disaster in 1982. (Helen is fictional; the disaster is not). The story is focused in late 2008, beginning when Helen's son telephones her to inform her that a woman he'd spent a week with seven months ago is now pregnant with his child. He is calling to find out if he'll be made to do the right thing, whatever the right thing may be, and so he will by Helen's guidance, because she is a distinctly honorable woman. Which is different than being deliberately so. Much of Helen's life has been an accident, but her goodness is still palpable to the reader. Which is Moore's first great achievement-- that goodness can be interesting, worthy of a story. Moore's second achievement being her depiction of Helen and her husband's absolute, pure and total love. A portrait of a good marriage even, which is even more rare in fiction than real life. A marriage so good that there's really no getting over it, no moving on or forgetting, and Helen's loss is so heartbreakingly rendered, captured in the details and avoiding any points cliched or saccharine.

February is a novel about moving forward, about never letting go and doing the right thing. Its characters are vivid and wonderful, their thoughts positively "thought-like"-- twisting, interrupted, irrational-- as Moore's style continues on in the same surprising vein, her technical innovation perfectly realized. The story is as funny as it is sad, and that sadness has meaning beyond itself. It's a rare thing-- a perfect book. I would call it one of the best books published in Canada this year, but I'm taking my chances on it being one of the best books from anywhere.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Fairy tales can be as tricky as the shadowy creatures inhabiting them, and at a Midsummer Party in 1895, the children of Todefright Hall discover just how much in A.S. Byatt's new novel The Children's Book. These children are the Wellwoods, progeny of children's writer Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphrey who is a Fabian banker (neither he nor Olive too uncomfortable with contradictions such as that). The children have just impressed by a terrifying performance of Cinderella by sophisticated puppets, and are intrigued by the differences between the story they're accustomed to and what they've just seen (Cinderella's stepsisters hacking apart their feet to make the slipper fit, and no fairy godmother or magic pumpkin coach). So it turns out there are many different versions of the stories the children know, and this one is by the Brothers Grimm.

The story wasn't exactly scary, one of the children remarks. Among the grown-ups present in this Bohemian circle is a scholar of fairy tales who agrees, "It should be scary, there was a lot of blood. [But...] these were memories of some other time, long ago, and... they weren't scary./ 'They are just like that,' said Griselda [the child], feeling for what intrigued her, not finding it." "Like that", being precisely what they are; not meant to entrance, to sanitize, to edify, to terrify. Folk tales, not children's tales, which means not geared to any particular audience, and therefore resonating wider.

But these are children who've been reared on fairies, whose parents are idealists committed to keeping magic alive in their own lives. Into this circle has also come Philip Warren, a working class boy run away from the potteries, discovered in the basement of the South Kensington Museum (which is to become the Victoria and Albert), and his presence does provide balance and make clear that the Wellwoods' privilege is rarer than these socially aware children might imagine. But of course Philip is taken with the Wellwoods, and their wild existence, scrambling up trees, riding up and down lanes on bicycles, by the personal stories their mother has written for each of them, by the way that each one of them is his or her own particular sprite.

The difference between the fairy tales the children are accustomed to, the stories their mother writes, and the "like that" stories of the Brothers Grimm is that the latter does not attempt to make itself of another world. Olive Wellwood's stories are meant to be as "through the looking glass", but as the story progresses, we see that life itself really is rather "tale-ish": boys found hidden down hidey-holes, children who appear to be changelings, dubious parentage among the offspring of the Wellwoods and their freewheeling circles, Bluebeardy locked doors with terrible secrets behind them, and vanishings without any explanation.

So that when the children venture out into the world, they find they've been sorely deceived. The world is not a firefly-chasing idyll, and the monsters aren't all fiction-- the abuse sustained by Tom Wellwood at public school traumatizes him for the rest of his life, turning him into a Peter Pan type character. The girls grow up to see that for all their scrambling and rambling, society (and their parents) expects something very conventional about the kind of women they're mean to be. They begin to recognize their parents' infallibilities, and are taken aback by a world more complex than a good-queen/bad-queen dichotomy. And then comes World War One, into which the boys are led by some kind of Pied Piper, by leaders suffering from "the childish failure to imagine the world as it was" (when "the world as it was" is precisely "like that").

The Children's Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt's best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn't mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here-- a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don't like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one-- there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children's Book is decidedly vivid and surprising.

It is true that by the end of the book, Byatt's immersion of her characters into historical events has perhaps become a bit too complete and the pages sweep by lacking the specificity we've seen in the earlier part of the novel. But so too did history seem to in the early twentieth century, and maybe we can understand it this way. Perhaps it's also the way that time goes when children are grown too, a single day holding far less possibility in and of itself, pages turning faster. Towards the end of the 600+ page novel, but this is the sort one is sad to get to the end of. And here Byatt offers us the possibility of some light, of a happy ending at the end of four years' bloodshed, and so we can dare to hope too that life and the world could also be like that.

You must read The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon

I like this picture, because my enormousness gets lost in shadow. You also get the blue sky, sunshine, leaves on the trees, that I've picked up a little bit of colour (really-- this is an improvement), and that I've had my nose in a book all day. Or at least for most of the day, when I wasn't napping, swimming, being visited by a wee delightful baby and her as delightful mother (who came bearing scones), making more strawberry sorbet and eating the first bbq pizza of the season. Obviously, it has been a really wonderful day.

But that book I've had my nose buried in has really been one of the very best parts of the day. Said book is The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon, which I'm not going to review because I read it for fun and it's two years old, but you can read great reviews at That Shakespearian Rag and Baby Got Books. (Outside of Canada, the book is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, which I bet is not as well designed as my Coach House edition, though it just might be.) Also check out Sean Dixon's blog related to the book, and I know you'll be intrigued.

The whole thing is brilliant. It's a book that is accessible and complex, hilarious and poignant, serious and light, important and whimsical, and brimming with bookishness for the love of bookishness, and inside jokes and outside jokes, and all the very best things about literature. A completely original story, startling in its specificity, and yet the implications stretch wide. I adored this novel about "a whole bunch of girls and... an intense little book club." And moreover, if I may say, I love that it was written by a man. Not enough books about a whole bunch of girls are. Reading about The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club was ever-surprising, ever-satisfying. And perfect for a just-as-perfect Thursday.

UPDATE: Largehearted Boy features The Official Lacuna Cabal Playlist: "In the interest of satire, however, Emmy might choose, for Missy, "Common People" by Pulp, adding with a cocked eyebrow that the character played by Sadie Frost in the video reminds her of Donna Tartt's slutty sister, so there's a bookish dimension to the choice."

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Oh, first person narrators, ever so cunning and manipulative. How luring are their points of view, and how they sway us from the very first sentence, because after all, they're doing the telling. As Helen, the narrator of Helen Garner's novel The Spare Room begins, "First, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis. Isn't that supposed to align the sleeper with the planet's positive energy flow, or something?" Stepping away, we can see that she's taking great care to appear to take care, but she also has no idea what she's doing.

Helen is preparing her spare room for her friend Nicola's arrival. Nicola has been suffering from terminal cancer for a long time, flitting from one experimental treatment to another with no signs of improvement, and she's arriving in Melbourne now to stay with Helen for three weeks whilst undergoing another round of treatment at a clinic there.

At first, Helen is happy to host her old friend, and while certainly shocked by her decline and appalled by the side-effects of the treatment she receives, she is willing to go out of her way to be helpful, to release her inner-nurse. She makes soups, changes the sheets, transports Nicola to and from the clinic. Behind Nicola's back, however, she notes considerable frustrations, primarily with Nicola's inability to accept her fate. Helen remembers her own sister's death from cancer: "She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her. We nursed her."

What Nicola requires of those around her, however, will not be so easy. What she demands of Helen, in addition to the nursing and the hosting that she seems to take for granted, is that Helen believe she will eventually recover, that the treatment will start working and by the middle of next week, she'll be rid of the cancer. Which Helen is unwilling to do or even just incapable of doing, the futility of Nicola's struggle staring her straight down in the face.

As the days go by, Helen becomes more and more frustrated by Nicola's forced insouciance, her smiles, her inability to face the truth. She is also exhausted by the effort of caring for her friend, and by the isolation of the caregiver role. She is soon unable to humour Nicola anymore, to accommodate her need for planetary alignment, and she breaks, forcing her friend to see the reality that this cancer is going to kill her.

It's a complicated climax, this moment, when we're relieved that Helen has finally out and said it, and yet it's discomforting to be feel our sympathy is with Helen, who has just proven herself to be an utter bully, who is behaving in ways most of us wouldn't like to admit we're capable of. It's disquieting to identify with a character acting in a way that is so unsympathetic, but she is the narrative voice, and she's so blunt and honest. It's perfectly understandable. You'll find yourself wanting to wring poor Nicola's neck.

This is a perfect novel. It's also quite short, but I've written this much, and I could go on and on (but I won't). Because there is substance, layers and layers of. At its root about friendship, which Garner refers to here as a "long conversation". As well as family, and belonging, and imposition, understanding, and proprietorship of each other and ourselves. Garner's narrator fascinating to consider, her motivations, what her words and actions reveal. This novel is quiet in its force, and enormous for the space it gives to ponder.

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

Stunning, stunning, stunning, let me sing the praises of Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. I fell in love with her novel The Monsters of Templeton last year, but anything so extraordinary could well have been a trick of hype. By "anything so extraordinary", of course, I mean Groff's literary talent, and so it thrilled me as I read her short story collection to realize she's definitely credible, and her work is enduring.

The stories are remarkable, but just as much is their collection. And not simply because of the gorgeous cover design (whose theme of loveliness is continued through the book entire). I will say, however, that this is a book worth judging by its cover, for the reader will not be disappointed. The cover's bird motif appearing throughout the collection, joining these stories otherwise so disparate by style, narration, location, characterization. But the birds are there, and so is water, bodies of big and small, and swimmers, and poolside loungers, and drownings and rain. So that to ponder all these stories together after the fact is to draw surprising connections, new conclusions. Here are nine stories that belong together, but not in ways that one might suspect.

Lauren Groff is a storyteller in the old-fashioned sense. Her intention is not to cultivate realism, but rather atmosphere, fully steeped. Her narrators take on a nineteenth-century kind of omniscience, have a sweeping way about them, and the storytelling is really as much of the point as the story itself. Characters sometimes taking on fairytale proportions, particularly male ones who are devious and dastardly, which might be regarded as limited dimensionality, but I think it's just another kind of dimension altogether.

The nine stories collected here are long and developed with slow subtlety. "L. DeBard and Aliette" tells the story of a poolside romance between a determined polio victim and a poet against the background of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. That its ending is wandering yet still shocking shows its force is much more than a trick. "Majorette" traces the life of a baton-twirling girl fenced in by limitations thought to be hereditary, but then shows this is not the case. I loved "Blythe", which traces the story of a high-maintainence friendship, and the plight of the friend called on for saving time and time again. "Watershed" was a tragic romance dark and never saccharine. And while "Majorette" reminded me of Revolutionary Road, "Delicate Edible Birds" had something of Suite Francaise about it, and what kind of a span is that? Her tropical locations were also a wee bit Joan Didion.

Which is not to say that Lauren Groff is derivative, and I mean these references as compliments rather than explanations for. Because stunning, stunning, stunning, I'm still singing-- that all these works can come from one author, particularly one still young, is incredibly impressive. That the short story form is celebrated here with such deftness, and confidence, is terribly exciting. And the whole career Groff still has before her-- it's exciting to contemplate all that lies ahead for us to read.

The Believers by Zoë Heller

As a novelist, Zoë Heller's tendency has been to write against her readers' expectations. Certainly, readers accustomed to her "single-girl-about-town" newspaper columns during the 1990s were uneasy embracing Willy Muller, the nasty piece of work/wife-murdering protagonist of her first novel Everything You Know. Readers were hard-pressed to find sympathy for either of the two main characters in her second novel Notes on a Scandal, which all the same went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and received acclaim as a film.

Her third novel The Believers has something more of convention about it than the other two. Reminiscent of Zadie Smith's On Beauty in that it is a domestic novel of ideas written by an English novelist about America, Heller this time has created an ensemble piece about the Litvinoff family, crusading left-wing lawyer Joel, his wife Audrey, their daughters Rosa (who has recently converted from athiest socialist to Orthodox Jew) and Karla (who has started cheating on her bland Union official husband), and their adopted son Lenny the deadbeat. When a stroke puts Joel into a coma, the family must realign itself without its centre of orbit, and each character is significantly changed in the process.

The novel begins in 1962 London when Joel and Audrey first meet at a party. He stands apart from the crowd, older and American. She notices that as he's listening to others talking, he'll periodically lean back onto one foot and mime throwing a ball. He notices her too, intrigued her seeming sense of dignity, "[b]ut he was anxious to have it done with now-- to be told the trick of it. A girl who could never be talked down to would be exhausting in the long run." And it is through a series of misunderstandings that these two people, within a day of meeting one another, end up signing on together for the rest of a life. Near the end of which is where the novel formally begins a page later, in New York in 2002.

The Believers is a book about faith, about the nature belief, though of course like any truly successful novel of ideas, it is also a book about people. Joel is only slightly dealt with before the coma writes him off, but we get a sense of his charisma, of perhaps its obsolescence, and that, for a multitude of reasons, he mightn't have been the easiest man to be married to. This is underlined by the woman Audrey has become forty years after meeting him, the latest of Heller's "nasty piece of work" characters. She's the kind of woman who "tells it like it is", even when it isn't, doesn't suffer fools gladly, or pander to anyone, and carries a sense of superiority for all of these traits. She's disappointed in her daughters, indulges and enables her deadbeat son, and is in general quite impossible, offensive, and an absolutely marvelous character construction who absolutely rings true.

That the other characters are less realized in comparison really says more about Audrey. Their characters also formed in such reaction to hers that they will be more predictable, understandable, while Audrey might be compared to that proverbial bull in a china shop or a ticking time bomb. This would especially be the case now that she's lost an anchor to her self in Joel, and more over their entire marriage has been undermined by a woman who's turned up claiming to be Joel's ex-mistress, the mother of his three-year old son. The revelation shattering illusions about Joel, and forcing his wife and children to redefine themselves in light of this now altered sense of who he was.

In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible.

(Almost) Definitive

Oh, this is good. Melanie from Roughing It In the Books gets a bit more definitive than I did about what she'd recommend for the nation to read. Her choice is Thomas Trofimuk's Doubting Yourself to the Bone, which I've never heard of, and have requested at the library. And I've managed to narrow it down to two, which is the best I can do. Pickle Me This's recommendations for Canadian books the whole nation should read is The Fire Dwellers by Margaret Lawrence, and Russell Smith's Muriella Pent. The first because I bet you have strong opinions of Lawrence based upon having read The Stone Angel in grade twelve, and this might challenge some of them. The second, because it demonstrates that contemporary Canadian fiction can be fabulous to read, and different than anything else you've read before.

Top Eleven Picks of 2008

That any book was reviewed here during this past year means that I liked it enough to recommend it to you, though my very favourites are listed here. And of that crop, I've narrowed to eleven for the sake of conciseness. My top eleven of 2008 as follows:

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson: "If this was the first book by Atkinson you'd ever encountered, you'd forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her."

• American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld: "...this a marvelous achievement of Sittenfeld's work, that she makes love for a George Bush-y character seem plausible. Not that it's all sentimental, and throughout the book Alice herself is at times downright unsympathetic, but these aren't caricatures, or even 'characters'; they're people and they're real."

• The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews: "...the book is a joy to read, however disturbing and awful. The Flying Troutmans is touching but without compromise, and only a really great writer could do that."

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer: "That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best-- an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book's passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that's used as a weapon."

• Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith: "But Smith's language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all."

• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins: "Perkins has created a puzzle of a puzzle. I read this book in anticipation of the ending the first time, and then the second time I pored over the text in search of clues. But both times I was entirely caught up in both this extraordinary story and its more ordinary concerns."

• The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala: "Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package."

• The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear: "...this is rumination after all. The Letter Opener is primarily the story of Naiko's own self-discovery, as she realizes her constructions of others through their objects tells more about her own self than anybody else's. And this story is fascinatingly beautiful, a satisfying read."

• Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, translated from French by Lazer Lederhendler: "'Nothing is perfect,' so goes the next line in the story, but I really might put forth that Nikolski is... Dickner has married cleverness with depth, sustaining his ideas with a tireless deftness."

• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk: "So I was prepared for something Woolfian then, which in my experience has always required a different kind of reading. One in which you let the prose lead you where it may, but paying utmost attention. It's a significant cerebral investment, and necessitates a period of adjustment upon returning to the real world once again."

• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff: "With a spirit threatening to fade when the monster dies, when all seems bleakest, but there is so much hope, and such a gorgeous ending: 'and it is good.' I finished reading this last night near 1am, and couldn't sleep for a long time, just thinking about it, and smiling."

Giller Hopes

Various circumstances conspired against my reading the entire Giller shortlist, one of which was the fact I had no desire to, but one book I did read was Mary Swan's The Boys in the Trees. I'm in no place to say it deserves to win of the lot, but I do know that this is a book deserving of celebration. So of course I would be most pleased if it took home the prize tonight.

UPDATE: Alas, was not to be. But do read The Boys in the Trees anyway. Congratulations to Joseph Boyden, and perhaps read his book too?

Once by Rebecca Rosenblum

Rebecca Rosenblum is too close a friend for my opinion of her book Once to be considered impartial, and so however much I loved her book (which is very much), you needn't be concerned with that. In lieu of my own opinion, however, I give you some from a few less biased sorts:

My husband Stuart says, "I don't know if I've ever read short stories before that so stayed on my mind for days afterwards. "Linh Lai", and "Pho Mi 99", they're stories, but they're also whole worlds and I couldn't stop thinking about them."

The Globe & Mail's Jim Bartley writes, "Plot is the least of this intricate story. What matters, tickling the sense memory, is the prickling pleasure of Isobel's tired feet freed to the air at bedtime; the sugary baklava stuck to its crumpled carton; the florid, chewing face of the tax teacher as he negotiates a wad of honey and nuts. Rosenblum builds and subtly rounds off a story arc, but the sustaining life humming all through this tale comes straight from the sensory input. In Isobel's word-picture ramble, Rosenblum's meanings arrive on the reader's intuitions. Her art remains veiled. The quotidian is rarely so riveting."

Daniel Baird writes in The Walrus, "Rosenblum can also register the aching and melancholic, but with a remarkable lack of sentimentality... These young characters' futures are a sea of uncertainties. But what we can be certain of is that Once is a first by a young author of singular talent."

From Christina Decarie in The Quill and Quire, "Each story stands alone, but Rosenblum sometimes weaves the characters in and out of each other's lives, and when, say, the restaurant in "Route 99" is revisited, it feels as good for the reader as it does for one of the characters, a single dad with kids in tow: 'The buggy's thin wheels wobble over every lump of snow, salt, ice, and Jake whined unintelligibly through his scarf. But it was worth it ... I could smell fish sauve and cilantro, hear Koenberg's rusty mutter' ... Fantastic and realistic, sad and unnerving, these stories are a delight." -- Christina Decarie

When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson

"Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street" is the definition of Kate Atkinson's writing, I think. Her literary roots are deeper than deep, but she's so fully aware of the actual world. So fully aware, as well, of how frequently these roots surface in life, of how relevant literature and literary-ness still truly are, and in the most unexpected ways and places.

Atkinson's first Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread award, and is one of the finest novels ever written in the English language. I liked her second novel Human Croquet a little bit better. In 2005 she shifted gears a bit with Case Histories, the first of her crime novels about Jackson Brodie, which I enjoyed as well as its follow-up One Good Turn. And now with the publication of the series' third novel When Will There Be Good News?, I officially retire from asking, "When's she heading back into real literature?" One bit of good news: Kate Atkinson's new novel is as brilliant as anything else she's done before.

There is a solidity to When Will There Be Good News? that was missing from the previous two Jackson Brodie novels. They were about coincidence, connections, the most unexpected links, and were both infinitely readable (devourable) but lacking the containment and control distinct to literary fiction. The shape of this novel is different, tighter, which is not to say standard or unsurprising. Mystery has always been at the heart of whatever Atkinson writes, and she is so deft at bending time and place to create just the right amount of space, to give clues but never answers.

The solidity comes from the novel's more singular focus, on the disappearance of a doctor and her baby. The twist in this being that the doctor has not even been reported missing, but sixteen year-old Reggie Chase, the mother's helper, is determined that something is not right. Which is usually the case for Reggie, whose mother is dead, whose scumbag brother has set scary thugs on her tail, who finds herself giving Jackson Brodie CPR after a train wreck. The wrong place at the wrong time, always, though this time the right one. Having saved Jackson's life, Reggie refuses to absent herself from it, hoping to take advantage of his skills as a private detective to help find Dr. Hunter.

Reggie has ample reason to worry about her employer, though she doesn't know most of it yet. That as a child Dr. Hunter had been the sole survivor of an attack that killed her family, and the killer has just been released from jail after thirty years. That Dr. Hunter's husband is involved in shady dealings, burning down his businesses to collect insurance, and there's every chance he'd pull a similar stunt with his wife. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe knows all this well, however, though she is surprised to find the case reconnecting her with Jackson, the two rather gruff police types having flirted with attraction in the previous book.

Reggie, the hard-luck A-level studying orphan is a marvelous creation, Homer on her lap and Corrie on the telly; she is indomitable, fearless and smart, and so funny we forget how perilous her situation is. That such a character, with that mouth and that attitude, is book-smart too makes for a perfect marriage between two equally brilliant but quite different things. In Kate Atkinson's work, we can ask for that much, though Atkinson knows also there can be too much, so the world goes. "Just become something happens once doesn't mean it won't happen again," and people like Reggie Chase, Louise Monroe, Joanna Hunter and Jackson Brodie know this. That the world doles it out unfairly willy-nilly, cruelty and brutality altogether ubiquitous, and to think otherwise is just naivete (and luck).

Jackson spends much of the novel unconscious or out of the picture, Louise Monroe serving as the crime solver, day saver. As strong a character as Reggie, she is funny and dry, wary of the world she sees through her work. Of her marriage as well, to a man she's not particularly in love with, however he is good and safe. And she's finding herself obsessed with women who've been victims of men quite otherwise, women like Joanna Hunter who've found themselves as prey.

What Kate Atkinson does with language, with allusion, I've yet to see another author do-- it's a kind of mastery. Her turns at genre writing demonstrating her ability to plot a plot, and she does that here better than I've ever seen her do before. The first of her crime novels in which "genre" is quite irrelevant, really. If this was the first book by Atkinson you'd ever encountered, you'd forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.