Cherie Thiessen

by Patricia Nolan
Polestar Book Publishers,
S.C., $16.95, 176 pp.

From the 10 year old Sylvia who distances herself from the pain of her father’s womanizing and her
mother’s illness through caricaturing his lovers and photographing her father hugging her mother’s
ashes, to the middle aged male traveling to the funeral of an aunt who abused him as a child, we
are shown a myriad of characters who are all battered by their past. We meet young girls attacked
by their lunatic father, teenagers grown up before their time who must cope with their fathers’
desertion, or womanizing, or madness, or alcoholism. We meet daughters struggling with their
mothers’ illness or death, or the tyranny of siblings who convince them they are worthless, or the
savagery and battering of their spouses. We meet a young husband trying to reconcile the happy
memories of his childhood past with the destructive energy of his wife’s and we meet the man sexually
and emotionally damaged as a child by his perverse, sadistic aunt.

Patricia’s skill is in managing to get into the heads of so many diverse characters, from children
without the insight or skill to verbalize their experience or feelings, to aging males, and to seem
perfectly at home there. Each character is very different, yet in a thematic way, the same. They
have not been defeated by life, and they are looking for or have found a lifeline.

These are well crafted, pithy stories from an Ontario writer and teacher of creative writing. The
characters she depicts will stay in your mind.