The story centers around a girl named Alberta. It is a story told thru snagged vignettes of a girl growing up thru the first two years after her father’s death thru new home life and new school. p. 60
Long after her classmates reduced her to the girl with the dead father, she held it. It was hers. She held onto it like a blanket, a shroud.
She’s finding her place, and placelessness among her community and peers and in light of her mom’s rebound to new boyfriend. We see shifts in her relationship with her mom, and with herself as she finds and defines her powers.
Ten thousand miles from her last birthday, Alberta and her body, Alberta and her thickening body; she swore she could feel her thighs and hips widen, and her breasts grow. She welcomes her curves with a snarl pressed between her teeth.
Her mind, body and awarenesses are finding new definitions. Alberta is a girl apart. She carves her own decisions and breaks away from the pack of kids she was with. For example, kids hang out in the back forty shack, learning to smoke and drink, and burn the place down. Instead of hanging about literally onto the back of a boy, when she gets uncomfortable with the scene she’s in, she takes his snowmobile and drives off. And when it runs out of gas, she walks.
There’s a lovely self-sufficiency to her that makes her a gratifying sort of person to read. She’s a stronger female character than I’ve usually seen in fiction. It seems too often the basis of female character’s motivation comes from a history of violence. She does jujitsu, or became a police officer or, assassin, or werewolf, or any normal strong male role because of some anger imbued because of a male boundary violation. There’s something seriously messed up about this. And it’s wonderful to find that absent.
She’s not condescended to as a youth, nor is she raised as a spoiled enfante terrible while the adults are portrayed as inferior. There’s a sort of parity that’s respectful instead of caricatures of age. Her mother and her live parallel, rather independent lives.
Problems are dispatched with, acknowledged but not dwelt in, and not glossed over. It’s a tricky balance, but well-balanced. The structure of short scenes gives it some elements of a mood piece yet is not misty nor gauzy. It reflects lives I’ve seen — teens and pre-teens getting drunk while adults pretend to chaperone and/or don’t making any trouble. She is troubled by changes and this gets told by what she observes and is paired with dialogues so we see what it looks like on the outside and inside.
She navigated with a solid head on her shoulders, you see her cooly weighing the lecherous looks in town. She installs a lock on the door against mom’s boyfriend she feels an intuitive threat from. She admonished her friend who cuts herself. Her story is followed, panning in to overhear her with her mom and to survey her rather desolate scene, like many kids, eyes middle distance, focused on getting out of this dead end town or “this ridiculous backwater” as she puts it.
Here’s a video clip of rob mclennan‘s March reading at Dusty Owl when he did the Ottawa launch of his novel Missing Persons.