Showing results by narrator "Laura Kyswaty" in All Categories

Fortune Cookie is a diary-style novella set in Montreal during the turbulent year of 1989. This subversively feminist work, aimed at young women, is told in first-person vignettes—written in the informal and often humorous voice of 24-year-old Robin. Robin’s vignettes are at times intercut with news headlines, which highlight the political and social events of the year–including Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Montreal Massacre.

From the waning flower-power ’60s in Toronto through her East Coast university years, Ari fights to discover who she is and what it means to be the child of an addicted mother and depraved father. When her friend Natasha, the perfect girl from the nicest family, suddenly vanishes, Ari sets out to find out what has happened to her — are her troubled parents to blame?

When Henry Robinson’s first daughter, Starr, is born with Williams Syndrome, he swears to devote his life to making her happy. More than 20 years later, we find Henry working at Frankie’s Funhouse, where he repairs the animatronic band that Starr loves, wrestling with her attempts at living outside the family home. His wife, Kathy, wishes he would allow Starr more independence, hoping that Henry will turn his attention a little more to their own relationship and to their other daughter, who is pregnant.