Reading material

Maybe it’s because I have been so insanely busy that I’ve managed to acquaint myself with antibiotics again, a joyful exercise I can recommend to absolutely no one. Or maybe because I spend so much time focusing on the biz that I forget that what really matters is what we read.

So, to tide everyone over till I run the Weekend Update on Sunday, here’s your mission: pick one book you have read recently — however you want to define “recently” (for me, it’s the past week. For others, the past six months)– that you adored or felt compelled to press into the hands of others and beg them to read. Then give a brief spiel as to why.

I’ll go first with a slim novel that likely got a fair amount of attention when it was released but was inexplicably off my radar until I found mention of it while Googling for something else. Intrigued by the cover and back copy, I resolved to pick it up at my next opportunity in a bookstore, thinking I would like it.

Boy, did I.

The book was Rebecca Godfrey’s THE TORN SKIRT, first published back in 2001 by HarperCollins Canada (and later by the publisher’s sister company in the US.) It mines some of the same territory covered in recent attention-getting books like Martha O’Connor’s THE BITCH POSSE and Colleen Curran’s WHORES ON THE HILL, but is not only more Canadian (what with it set in Victoria, BC, in and around a high school known as “Mt. Drug”) but much more noirish. Sara Shaw is looking for a way to feel more real, to escape from the poseur atmosphere of high school. She thinks she finds it when she glimpses Justine, who is skinnier, cooler and can pull off wearing a torn skirt and make it fashionable. Instanly, Sara is hooked and looks for Justine wherever she can — in dark alleyways, seedy apartments and hooker’s dens — until of course, it all goes horribly wrong.

I’m not sure how Godfrey did it, but she gives Sara a voice that’s both utterly authentic and very literary. It sounds the way a teenager would talk without all the “likes” and “you knows” that pepper normal conversation. And even though the teenage quest is territory much mined, Godfrey brings something extra to the table with lines like these:

I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. High school, I was a good girl. I was pretty, I smiled, I fit in fine. And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned, though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me. 102 degrees, it returned for no reason. It returned around the time I met Justine, but blame it on her bad influence and you’d be all wrong.

The effect is immediate and grabbing — why does Sara have a fever? What does it represent? And as the story continues to its eventual conclusion, the urgency never subsides.

Your turn now — the backblog’s yours.