Should have won Canada Reads

This book was a Canada Reads nominee in 2016. It lost to The Illegal, which was a plodding, predictable, turgid, cliche piece of garbage. This, of course, shows the problem with the whole Canada Reads project--it can allow unmitigated crap to triumph over a great read (admittedly, The Orenda and February were worthy winners--though I can't claim to have read all of their competitors).
This book, in contrast Hill's pile, is beautifully written, clever, honest, and as a bonus actually Canadian! It traces the lives of two sisters in Montreal (Bina and Sadma) who are orphaned as teenagers and cope with two pretty authentic challenges: teenaged pregnancy (and then raising a son, Quinn) and anorexia. The lives of the three unravel with Sadma's death. So, the story, from Bina's point of view explores grief, sisterhood, motherhood, the stress of care, the longing for a parent (especially Quinn's desire for his father, but the girls' desire for their mother too), and the immigrant experience. It moves between the past and the present, using the one to inform responses in the other in ways that remind us how we are prepared or constructed by our experience. #audible1

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