![]() ![]() This is an extremely rare little girl who has seen and heard too much too early in life. Cynical readers might object to a young character being able to articulate her baffled thoughts and feelings with such wisdom and precision. If the book’s overwhelming tenderness makes the reader cry, they’ll be, as Swiv’s mother teaches her, 'tears of happiness.' Read Full Review > The pregnant mother, the dying grandmother - the end is in sight from the beginning, and Toews doesn’t steer away from a climax that knots the bow too perfectly. This book lives so much further from the flame than some of Toews’s others that the sweet threatens to overpower the bitter, to edge toward the saccharine. ![]() The reader is pulled into the intimacy of a dysfunctional family whose unconditional love would make any truly dysfunctional family jealous. Toews is a master of dialogue, and she swirls the adults’ perspectives through Swiv’s imperfect ventriloquism as if she were mixing paints. Her books are an excavation, an attempt to give shape to her own pain, like a moth who longs to catch the candlelight in its wings. ![]() She is the kind of writer for whom the act of writing is clearly more important than being read. Miriam Toews gets so close to the fire that the pages of her books may as well be singed. I’ve heard it theorized that every great artist circles her own central fire, a core trauma too bright and too hot to touch yet whose light is caught, refracted, in her works. ![]()
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