The thing about reading the third Linnet Muir story is that I know her now. At least, I feel like I do. Which is the deep appeal of a linked collection, the sense of gradual immersion. It’s the same phenomenon that pulls you back to a familiar series, a fledgling
All the questions that Linnet poses at the end of this story? I wonder about them straight away. “How do you stand if you stand upon Zero? What will the passage be like between Zero and One? And what will happen at One? Yes, what will happen?” Straight away, straight
Vera’s sister-in-law sends tins of aspirin in her care packages, always with one pill missing. Nobody knows why, and, at the heart of it, this is what this forty-page-long story is all about. Nah, I’m making a joke. Actually, stealing one. Because it’s Vera who thinks it’s amusing to lend
The family stories in contemporary CanLit are not all that different from the stories and novels read by my grandmother’s generation. The women in my family did not read obsessively, no, but regularly, yes. What else was there to do in the evenings when your favourite show was in reruns
Language is important in “Orphans’ Progress”, specifically the relationship between English-speakers in Ontario and French-speakers in Quebec (predominantly Montreal, with a reference to Chicoutimi). It matters, immediately and lastingly, because the orphans, Cathie and Mildred, are the children of an English-Canadian man and a French-Canadian woman. Governor General's Award Winner
