To me, this book is Canadian literary awards bait. It’s hard to describe it but you know it when you see it – a writer who has won awards for earlier work, a timely topic (or something close to it), a whole lot of praise from orgs like the CBC, but very little coverage outside of that.

I wavered between flying through it and desperate to read something else. Subtlety and understatement work well if you make me care about the characters, but this fell short. It felt like the author was trying to echo the style of great Russian writers like Gogol and Chekhov, but something was missing for me.

It felt like a book that would be assigned in a university-level Canadian Lit glass – a good writer, a timely subject, excellent technical execution, and often a chore to read.