Losing Eddie

Losing Eddie is a first novel stunningly narrated by a nameless nine-year-old who sees herself as the outsider in her own family. Inside her home, disaster draws her mother into bouts of terrible sadness and drives her father to drink. Her brother-in-law is a drinker, too, and abusive, so her sister's come home with her twin babies. Her older brother, Eddie, just out of jail, seems determined to get put back in. Her accident-prone younger brother sops up whatever attention remains. Our little narrator watches, records, recounts. Seeing, hearing, touching, and storing it up to tell back to herself is one thing. Making sense of it is another. The physical setting of this child's story is defined by a two-lane road that cuts through a remote corner of New Brunswick. The emotional setting is the strife and struggle of poverty - in all its guises, a place laid open by a child's dear and unjudgmental account of one year's tribulation inside its farmhouses, graveyards, churches, inside its one-room school and its charity old folks' home. Privy to the inner workings of this jealous, scrappy girl's mind, the reader is witness to her discovery of herself against the dark backdrop of daily turmoil. To watch her turning her crystallized observations toward the light is to understand the staunchness of human curiosity and intellect. To hear her, at the very end of her story, name herself in a narrative voice that rings forth with her sharp, innocent perception of love, is to know how miracles work.