Double Dutch
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Danuta Gleed Literary Award finalist
City of Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist
Intensely imaginative and darkly emotional, the weird and wonderful stories in Double Dutch deftly alternate between fantasy and reality, transporting readers into strange worlds that are at once both familiar and uncanny — where animals are more human, and people more mysterious, than they first appear.
Shape-shifters, doppelgangers, and spirits inhabit the extraordinary worlds depicted in Trunkey’s stories: a single mother believes her toddler is the reincarnation of a terrorist; Ronald Reagan’s body double falls in love with the first lady; a man grieves for his wife after a bear takes over her body. The collection also includes moving tales grounded in painful and touching reality: a young deaf girl visits Niagara Falls before she goes blind; an elephant named Topsy is killed on Coney Island by Thomas Edison in 1903; and a woman learns the truth about her son’s disappearance while searching with her husband in the Canadian Rockies.
This enchanting and, at times, heartbreaking debut collection of stories hails the arrival of an exceptional new literary talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trunkey's debut short story collection shows flashes of real creative and literary talent. Unfortunately, that talent often gets mired in sentimentality. Many of the stories are in the urban magic realism tradition, including "Night Terror," about a single mother who worries that her toddler may be the reincarnation of a terrorist; "Ursus Arctos Horribilis," in which a man's wife switches bodies with a grizzly bear; and "The Windspir Sisters' Home for the Dying," about sextuplets who open a hospice and divide the workload so that the four living sisters administer to patients' physical needs and the two deceased sisters administer to patients' spiritual needs. Others, such as the title story, remain firmly grounded in realism. Like the stories, the characters vary greatly including Inuit men, Thomas Edison, and a young kid goat and his ancestors and while Trunkey is courageous in her attempts to portray such a wide spectrum of characters, the results sometimes lack authenticity. Ultimately, Trunkey's imagination provides the seeds necessary for fabulous stories, but some of those seeds require a stronger voice and less mawkishness in order to thrive.
