The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews
Suicidal single mothers, delinquent teenagers and unwashed children sound like the ingredients for a standard-issue misery memoir with an embossed, hand-scripted title and a toddler in tears on the cover. Fortunately, Miriam Toews has instead shaken them with wit, warmth and a firm pinch of absurdity, and produced a grittily sparkling cocktail of a novel.
The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter.
Hattie Troutman has fled to Paris to escape the emotional masochism of proximity to her disturbed and chronically depressed sister, Min. But after three years of European self-indulgence, she boomerangs back to Canada when summoned by her 11-year-old niece, Thebes (Theodora). Once home, she discovers her sister is bedridden and refusing to eat; 15-year-old Logan is on the verge of being expelled, and his sister Thebes has developed a profound aversion to soap and water.
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