   
|
"I wanted to go to Lourdes
and swoon, soft and gauzy like Jennifer Jones in The Song of
Bernadette, black and white and flickering with visions on the
movie screen. I dreamed of going to the very place where Our
Lady appeared to Bernadette and glorious rays of light descended
upon her bowed, veiled head. Me, my fucked up sister Kat, my
angry ma, my deadbeat dad, we'd be a perfect family, travelling
to France together, we'd learn French before we'd go."
~from The Children of Mary, by Marusya Bociurkiw
As teenagers in the '70s, Sonya and Kat are trying desperately
to be hip in the Ukrainian ghetto of North End Winnipeg. They experiment
with everything from religion to marijuana, against a backbeat
of Abba songs, Olivia Newton ballads, and endless reciting of the
rosary. After her sister dies under mysterious circumstances, Sonya
spends the next decade trying to figure out why. As she relocates
to Toronto and creates a new identity for herself, her grandmother,
Maria, moves backwards into memories of the Depression, her husband's
radical politics and her own attempts to heal the scars of immigration
and poverty through herbal remedies and the occasional clumsy attempt
at witchcraft. Maria pushes Sonya into a new understanding of her
sister's death, and a final reconciliation with the past.
Moving back and forth in
time from the 1930s to the 1990s, the novel traces a family's
journey from the old world to the new, from the Manitoba prairies
to the queer feminist underground of Toronto, amid a complex
web of secrets, half-truths and magic spells.
Advance praise for The
Children of Mary:
"A powerful portrayal of three generations of
women trying to wrest life and love from the secrets and tragedies
of history. Marusya Bociurkiw stares boldly at the truth of one
family's life and tells a story that is gritty, darkly comic and
lyrical"
NANCY RICHLER, author of Your Mouth is Lovely.
|
