This text does not have the same interest in metaphor, imagery, or language as Glass Boys. In his debut novel, Jamie Fitzpatrick is seemingly self-conscious about how he portrays Newfoundland, Newfoundlanders, and Newfoundlanders playing hockey.

This seductive style covers over any of the concerns readers might have about the rather stereotypical themes that readers have come to expect from literature of the East Coast-poverty, alcoholism, desperation-not to mention the aestheticized depiction of such rural experience. Each sentence is as carefully crafted as a line in poetry, and each propels the next one forward in rhythm and sound. Lundrigan’s timing and ability to depict the evolution of the characters is exquisite, and her style is impressive. While at the novel’s opening, the murderer Eli Fagan seems to be the root cause of the cascade of evil in the text, at its close, readers see him as just as much of a victim of his circumstances as the other characters. The narrative studies the impact of this event on members of the two families over two generations.

The novel revolves around a young boy’s buried secret that, once released, evokes such rage in his father that he murders a neighbouring man who wanders into the yard on a jovial bender. Nicole Lundrigan’s skilled and beautifully told novel Glass Boys depicts two families intimately related through proximity and history in a small isolated Newfoundland community.

Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan