By the novel's conclusion, Kiki's father has been found, but he is the victim of a land mine, and severely wounded. When he returns home, to hospital, Kiki's adjustment to her father's injury indicates that she is ready to stop playing the odds and settle for a different sort of reality.
PIECES OF ME
By Charlotte Gingras, translated by Susan Ouriou, Kids Can, 144 pages, $18.95, ages 12 and up
The 2009 Governor-General's Award for Translation is Susan Ouriou's reward for her work on this small jewel of a novel originally written in French (La liberté? Connais pas…, the winner of 1999 Governor's-General's Award for Children's Literature in French – Text ). The citation reads, “With Pieces of Me , Susan Ouriou has created a magical rendering of the exquisite original. Tenderly redrawing the portrait of a troubled teenage girl struggling to come into her own, Ouriou has sensitively captured all that is moving, poetic and funny about the novel's main character in a truly accomplished translation.”
The translation is indeed accomplished and, as the citation suggests, Ouriou had excellent material with which to work her magic. The deeply unhappy teen at the centre of this novel, Mirabelle, lives with her reclusive, mentally ill mother in a “half-basement.” Her father has left the family; it's unclear which came first, Mirabelle's mother's illness or her father's departure. Conditions at home have helped to make Mirabelle as unhappy, and almost as socially dysfunctional, as her mother.
Slowly, though, an unlikely friendship with a classmate as extroverted as Mirabelle is introverted, and a developing talent for art, nurtured by a remarkable teacher, begin to change Mirabelle's view of the world and her place in it. All her gains are demolished, though, when her biologist father is killed in a plane crash while doing research on the tundra of northern Quebec.
That Gingras can take her character and her reader on a moving and emotionally satisfying voyage back into the world is a testament to her skill as a novelist.
THE BRIDE'S FAREWELL
By Meg Rosoff , Doubleday Canada, 214 pages, $23.95, ages 14 and up
This latest book by British-based American writer Meg Rosoff brings her number of novels to four, each as different from the others as chalk from cheese, at least in terms of time and place.
All bear the mark of a hugely talented novelist for readers with an appetite for books that will take them deep into previously unexplored territory. Unlike its predecessors, though, The Bride's Farewell is set in time past. It begins on the morning of, “August the twelfth, eighteen hundred and something,” on the day that Pell Ridley, 20, was to be married to Birdie, the man with whom she has shared almost everything that has been good in her life.
On that day, Pell takes her horse Jack, and because she can't refuse him, her small brother Bean, and heads off for Salisbury Fair to find work. She's leaving because at the core of her being she knows that she doesn't want the same life as her mother's: unremitting poverty, endless childbirth, death in infancy of many of her children and an early death for herself. Pell's father, a hypocritical preacher and an abusive drunk, is no model of a husband or incentive for marriage.
Pell's time at the Salisbury Fair is ultimately disastrous: Duped by a horse dealer, she loses both her horse and her brother Bean. The novel becomes Pell's quest, and one whose trajectory includes a relentless search for her siblings, three of whom end up in a workhouse.
It also includes a Heathcliffian man, a poacher of few words who harbours Pell and … well, it would be giving away too much to say more. Safe to say, though, that this novel is played out in a breathtakingly beautiful but not always idyllic English countryside, which is soon to face the degradations of the Industrial Revolution, and that the central character is an incarnation and harbinger of the positive aspects of modernity. Pell Ridley will captivate the readers of this book.
