Review: Joni Murphy's Double Teenage is a a novel Canadians should read

On finishing Roberto Bolano's 2666 – a novel centred on the real-life murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez – I thought, "This is a feminist masterpiece." Also, "a novel Canadians should read." Those reactions could equally apply to Joni Murphy's Double Teenage, the story of two girls growing up in 1990s Las Cruces, N.M., across the border from Ciudad Juarez. The thing about 2666 is how Bolano places femicide within a field of violence that ultimately implicates you, Dear Reader. This should be a familiar feeling for Canadians, implicated as a society in the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of women. In Double Teenage, Murphy makes this connection explicit, depicting a system of femicide that ties Ciudad Juarez to Robert Pickton's pig farm. Murphy's novel is more specific than Bolano's, concerned with our pan-NAFTA present (the free-trade agreement comes under blistering critique). Brilliant and necessary, "a spell for getting out of girlhood alive."