Over the years Trish and Ray have forged a stable family life, despite a rocky beginning almost twenty years earlier — living with their friends on a communal farm that ended badly. Now they are all coming to terms with life in their forties, but Trish has turned angry and insecure. She suddenly finds herself faced with an ailing marriage, a teenaged daughter who would prefer to live with her alcoholic grandmother than at home, and an annoying half sister, Olive, who Trish has been taught to believe is no blood relation. This cheery take-charge half sister, now living in Trish’s childhood summer home, seems bent on destroying the last shreds of Trish’s sense of self. When a freak April snowstorm hits Thunder Hill and the power goes out, Trish finds herself in a compromising situation with her hermit/hippie friend, Bear James, who also happens to be her husband’s closest friend. Later, when forced to seek refuge at her half-sister’s home, Trish feels she’s living a nightmare, one which drives her to face her past. Will the future hold anything for Trish other than that of becoming “a bitter old woman” and “immature freak,” accusations her daughter Gayl has flung at her recently?

Connie Barnes Rose was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia and moved to Montreal where she completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Concordia University. She published her first short story in 1987 in Fiddlehead Magazine and went on to publish stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies, such as Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops (1997), and local anthologies such as Telling Tales, New Fiction from Quebec. In 1997 she published her collection of linked stories entitled Getting Out of Town, which was short listed for two prestigious awards, The QSPELL Award and the Dartmouth Award. She lives in Montreal, teaches Creative Writing at Concordia University spends her summers in Nova Scotia. In 2005 she won the C.B.C. Short Fiction Award.

Connie Barnes Rose's profile page

Barnes Rose has that rare talent for character building that can make a novel pop from its pages, each character fully drawn, rich and utterly believable. Trish is complex: whip smart but resolutely unpretentious; self-possessed and critical, yet at the same time vulnerable and profoundly loving. The half-sister character, Olive, is one of the most comical and deftly delivered characters I have encountered in a novel in a good while. Barnes Rose also has a gift for gracefully moving her reader about in the plot line, dropping hints about stories in a character's past or future. Unlike some authors who abuse this technique, Barnes Rose manages to relieve the tension of that flashback or foreshadowing at just the right time, gently teasing us forward like a host mentioning a surprise desert at the door, thus making the whole meal all the more appetizing.

A great read

by zoe.r2005