Douglas & McIntyre, March 2020
A fresh and imaginative collection of short stories, bursting with humour and magic.
Each story has surprises. 'The Virgin and the Troll' is a feminist retelling of Rumplestiltskin. A pig starts a wolf broth business in 'Ham.' The devil gets distracted at a daycare in 'The Devil and Miss Nora.' In 'Mycology,' the firing of a longterm employee brings a whole new perspective to the term ‘deadwood.‘ In 'Happy,' a married couple negotiate differing sexual needs:
By their third decade of marriage, sex simply didn't seem worth the effort. Like cooking risotto, she saw it as a messy nuisance with results that didn't justify all the stirring.
Katherine Fawcett's playful wordsmithing is evident in the following passages, which are from two of the three interconnected stories about a witch.
The place is a disaster. Witches are terrible housekeepers and this one is also a hoarder. There are bags of bones and boxes of buttons. Food scraps and beeswax. Birch bark and bike parts. Crumpled silk and rotting milk. Under floorboards are mushrooms; in the drawer, a dead duck. As for the grimoire? Alas, no luck. ('Mary Wonderful's New Grimoire')
One way for a witch to amuse herself, when the usual avenues of entertainment have been exhausted, is to have a child. [...] Everyone knows having a baby can be very, very good for getting a lady out of a rut, for breaking up routine when life begins to feel same old, same old. ('The Maternal Instinct of Witches')
My favourite story is 'East O,' told from the perspective of an ovum.
Conditions were crowded in East Ovary.
Imagine a quarter million eggs, each tethered to the rubbery pod wall by her own personal follicle, all squeezed together into a space the size of the twist-off cap from a two-litre bottle of Canada Dry. Honestly, you couldn't swing a papillomavirus around in there without hitting someone in the corona radiata. But we didn't complain. We were evenly spaced and everyone got along fairly well. We avoided calling it "cramped," with its negative cultural stigma, and instead referred to our East O home as "cozy."
To anyone who protests that fantastical writing isn't worthy of serious consideration, I offer these words from Lloyd Alexander: "Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it."
Giller chances: HIGH - This whole collection is delightful. It's going on my longlist and I hope the Giller judges feel the same way.
This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.
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