Edit: I listened to this on audio because I didn’t remember it very well and wanted to talk about it for the Giller Prize. The audio is a superior experience for me,mostly because on the page, sentence-to-sentence, it’s very boring, structurally. A child writes in uncomplicated, short sentences. It gets into an annoying cadence that is not as (most of the time) noticeable when narrated.

Using the lens of a child we uncover the family dynamics of a 9 year old girl, her mother, and her quirky old grandmother. Though it’s not new territory per se, I found the voice to make sense for the age while still managing to be pretty clever and surprisingly funny, in the way sometimes kids are; meaning they aren’t necessarily trying to be funny but their knowledge gap or disparity in age makes it so.

This lived up to my expectations, which is something, considering I am not wild about narratives framed like this unless they’re really short. It was engaging and thoughtful, believable, and heavy with an undercurrent of melancholy that feels true to the reckoning of age (many) old people seem to express. But it’s contrasted by the vivacious first person narrative, so feels balanced well enough. If you’re particularly interested in the framing, I feel many readers will click with this more than I did.