In boomtown Western Canada, a quirky young woman grows up amid a family dynamic that leaves her feeling misunderstood and left out. She's a child of immigrants from war-torn Germany and Croatia, parents who cling to vestiges of a traumatic past that never seem real enough for their daughter. To leave her stifling family behind and to forge a "new normal," she earnestly tries to fit in with her best friend Vera and family, and subsequently--crazily--an even more rigid life of Mormonism. Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot is a narrative of longing for self-creation, but also for self-destruction, restlessly twisting and turning through triangular friendships, teenage delinquents, Nazi killing hospitals for the disabled, the inane ex-boyfriend, a dying father's sudden conversion to parenting, and fantastic tales of the Mormon Angel Moroni on estrogen. One's own story, so she discovers as she invents it, is both an escape from, and a coming to terms with, the scrapbook that is life.

The language in this novel is sensuous, inventive, down-to-earth, poetic. Here, the Canadian novel--in the tradition of Robert Kroetsch, Joan Barfoot, Lisa Moore, and now Nicole Markotić--continues to develop personal histories that plummet readers into the world of storytelling.

Nicole Markotic is a poet, novelist, and critic. Her poetry books include Bent At the Spine (BookThug), Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, and Connect the Dots (Wolsak & Wynn); her novels are Yellow Pages (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) and Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot (Arsenal Pulp Press). She has edited a collection of poetry by Dennis Cooley, By Word of Mouth, co-edited (with Sally Chivers) an anthology of essays concerning representations of disability, The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film, is working on a critical book on disability and literature (McFarland & Co), and has an edited collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch (forthcoming with Guernica). She has published in literary journals in Canada, the USA, Australia, and Europe (including The Capilano Review, CV2, filling Station, New American Writing, Open Letter, Prairie Fire, Rampike, and West Coast Line). She won the bpNichol Poetry Chapbook Award in 1998, and was nominated for the Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Book of the Year Award and for the Henry Kreisel First Book of the Year Award. She edits the chapbook series, Wrinkle Press (publishing such poets as Robert Kroetsch, Nikki Reimer, and Fred Wah), and has worked as an editor for Red Deer Press and NeWest Press. Currently, Nicole Markotic is Professor of Creative Writing, Children’s Literature, and Disability Studies at the University of Windsor.

Nicole Markotic's profile page

Nicole Markotic's Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot is startlingly good.... The storytelling is so sweet, and her characters are so honest and genuine, you would swear this is a well-written diary. A terribly interesting well-written diary.
-Event

Event

Markotic has created a fascinating romp through multiculturalism, and she writes both comically and tenderly about family and the way families communicate (or not).
-The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail

An entertaining read.
-Feminist Review

Feminist Review

A pleasure to read. It reminds us that we can never become something we aren't, but neither can we entirely escape the self we have tried to become.
-Quill & Quire

Quill & Quire

Nicole Markotić's new novel is a dizzying, brazen, innovative, radical take on young women's lives in the middle of new urban conundrums. After the questioning of our cosmic systems of belief, she gives us a scrapbook of revelations, of memories, of confessions. She dares us to re-imagine our very identities. Readers, rejoice.
-Robert Kroetsch

Robert Kroetsch

Reading Nicole Markotic's second novel, Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot, is like sitting next to an acquaintance who's flipping through a scrapbook of photos and mementos, relating at length the stories they spark.... The narrator's tantalizing recollectons are vivid, funny, tender, and affecting.
-Vancouver Sun

Vancouver Sun

Memewar