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Offering a fresh take on what it is to grow up and discover who you really are.
Eleven-year-old Maya Devine has grown up with a warped view of reality. For one, she sees colour around people’s bodies and can sometimes hear what’s going on inside their heads. These insights make everyone a bit more interesting, but the one person she’ll never figure out is her mother. Marigold has never been like other moms, but still, Maya sometimes feels like she is all she has. When Marigold is diagnosed with cancer and vows to spend her final days in the teepee she’s set up in the backyard, Maya’s life quickly becomes unbearable. Neighbours and strangers, believing Marigold a prophet, camp out in the front yard, and Maya’s father grows ever more distant. Thankfully Maya has Corey Hart, from whose pouty lips "Never Surrender" seems to issue for her and her alone. But Marigold’s death leaves questions unanswered, and there are some wrongs that even Corey Hart can’t right. Moving from mid-1980s Saskatoon to the Indian countryside almost a decade later, Girl in Shades follows Maya’s search for her mother, her father, and above all, herself. |
Published by ECW Press in 2012
www.ecwpress.com |
An unflinching look at the human body and the ways it defines, fails, and frees us.
Building on themes introduced in her novel Girl in Shades, Allison Baggio explores the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds with In the Body, a collection of 12 short stories and the novella "As She Was." Baggio’s range of voice and breadth of vision are showcased in stories like "Spilt Milk," where an ordinary fare leads an Indo-Canadian taxi driver, who is unhappy with his current circumstances, to marry his passenger’s unattractive sister. In "Possessed," a man receives a heart transplant and begins to suspect that his new heart is still attached to its old owner. The novella follows a teenage girl who, after a motorcycle accident, is left with a serious brain injury that dramatically alters her personality and body. The five people closest to her must reflect on who she was in order to come to terms with who she has become. In the Body is a stunning examination of the clash between how we perceive our own bodies and how we are perceived by others. |
