by Saleema Nawaz Freehand Books
“There is a photograph of me and Kathleen in the rec room with Maggie, our dead baby sister,” begins Nawaz’s award winning short story, My Three Girls. “A picnic pose.” Their mother never stops grieving and years later refuses to visit her new grandchild. In Bloodlines, two sisters react to their mother’s death, one ballooning in pregnancy, the other fasting into anorexia “with shoulder blades like axe-heads ready to slice through skin.”
Many of the stories in Nawaz’s collection talk of motherhood, of being a daughter and of loss and untouchable grief. The relationships flow easily on the page, often with understated humour and always with awareness of the complications of families. Sometimes mothers fail, but never completely.
The White Dress is the story of nine year old Shay, secure and adoring of her adoptive parents. Until she reads her mother’s notebook which “threatened things, that hinted at something outside our tiny world of three.” Shay begins to believe that she “was a replacement child, the new hope for the family.” She is willing to play the role.
Kate’s constant admonition to her mentally disabled brother is Look, But Don’t Touch. She cares for him, staying at home to create a cloak of protection from her mother’s cold disapproval. Until one day, she forgets to repeat the mantra. “I don’t blame my mother for feeling exasperated. She probably didn’t expect to have two children who would never leave home.”
My Three Girls won the coveted Journey Prize in 2008 and The White Dress won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis at the University of Manitoba. This is a spectacular debut collection by any standard.
