Five Roses

July 11, 2016
Zorn's second novel (Arrhythmia) wavers between being a thriller and literary fiction and so does not succeed at being either. Fara is a middle-class young woman looking to purchase her first home with her husband. Rose is all alone in Montreal after moving to the city from the secluded cabin in the woods where she was raised. Maddy makes do by renting a couple of rooms out in the little house she owns. The three come together in the gritty but gentrifying Montreal neighborhood of Pointe St-Charles. Fara and her husband, Frédéric, move in next door to Maddy. All three women are haunted by similar ghosts: Fara by the suicide of her sister; Maddy by the loss of her infant daughter, who was kidnapped 27 years earlier and never returned; and Rose by the death of her mother. The interwoven narratives that Zorn attempts don't quite work, because she does not develop her characters or their motivations deeply enough to carry readers with her into the intersections of their lives or to make the plot revelations feel like bombshells. Agent: Shaun Bradley, Transatlantic Agency.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
Elfrieda’s a concert pianist. When we were kids she would occasionally let me be her page-tuner for the fast pieces that she hadn’t memorized.” This sentence, in the voice of the younger Yolandi, crystallizes the dynamic of the two sisters in Toews’s (Summer of My Amazing Luck) latest novel. While Elfrieda is the genius and the perfectionist, it is the practical, capable Yolandi on whom she depends. Over the course of this tender and bittersweet novel, Elf tours the world while Yoli stays put, has two kids with two different men but stays with neither of the fathers. It is Elf’s debilitating depression and suicidal tendencies that keep the two urgently close as Yoli, for decades, does everything she can to help Elf ward off her psychological problems. The prose throughout the book is lively and original and moves along at a steady clip. Though there are some underdeveloped aspects (their upbringing in a Mennonite household, Yoli’s experience of motherhood), the novel is a triumph in its depiction of the love the sisters share, as Yoli tries, just as when she was a page turner, to stay a few beats ahead.