by Kathleen Winter
This was the first novel I have read centred around an intersex person (outside of fantasy fiction, of course). I'm glad it was such a good one. I got a very strong sense of Annabel/Wayne as a person, and sympathized with her struggles rather than being distanced by them. I was also grateful that th...
Pretty writing, an interesting story, and good parallels and symbolism (including some subtleties, like the mention of a seam ripper). However, Wayne/Annabel was so understated as to be something of a cypher. I found myself more and more frustrated by this drifting passivity, which isn't really reso...
Annabel is mostly about the way a remote community chooses to deal with a breach in the normal way of things: Wayne, the child that was born with both male and female genitalia. While it is a good book, with deep characters that suffer minor changes across the story, thus being relatable, and writin...
Wow. What a fantastic, unique novel. There's a blurb on the back of my library copy that recommends Annabel to "fans of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex", and while the comparison is apt, this is a wholly different novel that stands on its own. The story takes place in a small hunting town in Labrador,...
It's rural Canada in the 1960s and Jacinta Blake gives birth to a child that has features of the both the male and the female. Advised by doctors who have never seen a true hermaphrodite before, the child is bought up as Wayne around parents that are always anxiously watching him for any signs of '...
Tremendously sad and well written, Annabel is a story about a hermaphrodite raised as the boy Wayne in remote eastern Canada. The characters had such depth, particularly Wayne and his father Treadway. Actually I found many of the characters fascinating--the family friend Thomasina as well as Wayne's...
Nope, not for me.
Powerful, sad, amazing, human - damn fine writing.
Like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, it’s impossible to imagine Kathleen Winter’s Annabel being set anywhere other than the landscape therein.“In Croyden Harbour human life came second to the life of the big land, and no one seemed to mind. No one minded being an e...
I'm conflicted. Beautiful but maybe falls into a weird trap. Review to come.
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