Book
Review: A Gentle Habit
By:
Christine Smith McFarlane
Imagine as
a little girl there’s a bead quarry in your elementary school yard, no one
knows where the beads come from but take great delight in digging them up every
day and collecting them. Never realizing that the beads come from an unlikely
source- another girl who is classified as a misfit and a victim of fellow
classmates bullying.
Or what
about the mundane fellow who lives in a cockroach infested bachelor apartment
and is not only addicted to crack but addicted to words and finds pleasure in
ripping up pieces of files at his equally boring job as a file clerk and eating
words like they are actual pills to make himself high to get himself through the day. Within this
story, you are drawn into how an addict’s brain can possibly work-wanting more
and more but never being really satisfied. “The urge to pop each of them into
my mouth is overwhelming. I want to suck on them, hear them clatter against my
fillings like forks dropped into a sink.” The file clerk- Mr. Moriarty asks
himself “How can I carry out my job when I have taken to cannibalizing it?
A Gentle
Habit follows the success of Metis writer Cherie Dimaline’s other two books Red
Rooms and The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy and is a collection of six short stories
that are characters trying to make it a world that they don’t necessarily fit
into. Some of the stories leave you feeling sad, intrigued and have you feeling
a myriad of other feelings as you delve into each new diverse character and
balance delicately in the journey that each character takes you on.
Published
by Kegedonce Press, A Gentle Habit is 178 pages long.
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