As teenagers in the ’70s, Sonya and Kat are trying desperately to be hip in the Ukrainian ghetto of North End Winnipeg. They experiment with everything from religion to marijuana, against a backbeat of Abba songs, Olivia Newton ballads, and endless reciting of the rosary. After her sister dies under mysterious circumstances, Sonya spends the next decade trying to figure out why. As she relocates to Toronto and creates a new identity for herself, her grandmother, Maria, moves backwards into memories of the Depression, her husband’s radical politics and her own attempts to heal the scars of immigration and poverty through herbal remedies and the occasional clumsy attempt at witchcraft. Maria pushes Sonya into a new understanding of her sister’s death, and a final reconciliation with the past.Moving back and forth in time from the 1930s to the 1990s, the novel traces a family’s journey from the old world to the new, from the Manitoba prairies to the queer feminist underground of Toronto, amid a complex web of secrets, half-truths and magic spells.

Marusya Bociurkiw received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia. She has published articles, essays, and reviews in academic, arts, and activist journals and books in Canada and the United States for the past twenty years. She is the author of four literary books, and her films and videos have screened at film festivals, art house cinemas, and universities around the world. She is currently an assistant professor of media theory and head of the Media Studies stream in the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto.

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