Why did Lorrie Ann look so graceful in beat-up Keds and shorts a bit too small for her? Why was it charming when she snorted from laughing too hard? Yes, we were jealous of her, and yet we did not hate her. She was never so much as teased by us, we roaming and bratty girls of Corona del Mar, thieves of corn nuts and orange soda, abusers of lip gloss and foul language. (pp 6 – 7)

We’ve all known that girl. The one so perfect you want to hate her, and yet so nice that you just can’t. Maybe that girl was even your friend, and maybe, like Mia in Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona del Mar, you chose to become wholly imperfect rather than even attempt to compete.

In the very first page, Mia asks Lorrie Ann to break one of her toes, because “it made a lot of intuitive symbolic sense to force the beautiful, pure, and good Lorrie Ann to break my toe and punish me for my abortion” (p 3). Almost immediately, Thorpe establishes the girls’ friendship: Mia is the purported bad girl who gets pregnant at fifteen and Lorrie Ann is so “pure and good” that she is almost an angel, vested with an almost divine right to dispense judgement.

The adult in us knows this can’t be accurate. No one can be as perfect as Lorrie Ann appears to be, and a young girl should not face corporal punishment for having made a difficult decision. Yet Thorpe does a great job in taking us back into the psyche of youth. We see the world through Mia’s eyes, and while we may believe her wrong to be the “bad twin” to Lorrie Ann’s good, we likely understand all too well the feelings of inadequacy that led to that.

We follow the girls as they grow up, and Mia inevitably not only becomes disillusioned by Lorrie Ann, but begins to realize she may never have understood her friend as much as she thought she did in the first place. The story is about Mia growing up, and coming into her own beyond the shadow of Lorrie Ann, or rather of Mia’s memories of her. And Mia is a richly developed character — slowly realizing her worth and freedom to define herself beyond the good twin/bad twin binary.

Yet it is Lorrie Ann who steals the show — given Mia’s idealized image of her, we never really get to know the woman behind the image. Mia describes Lorrie Ann’s story as a series of bad luck, and Lorrie Ann as a naive young woman struggling to keep her inherent goodness while coping with everything. Yet it isn’t until later that we hear a bit of Lorrie Ann’s own perspective and realize how much richer a character she is than we have known. This woman is compelled to be with broken men, yet unable to cope with the brokenness of her own child. She goes through a lot of bad and good things as an adult, as try as Mia might to explain her behaviour, the “real” Lorrie Ann remains elusive, to Mia and therefore also to the reader. A message near the end brings a harsh dose of reality, yet it absolutely needed to be said.

This story could easily have turned into a simplistic fable about growing up, and it is a testament to Thorpe’s talent that both Mia and Lorrie Ann emerge as such rich, vivid, complex characters. Thorpe resists the easy moral at every turn, and therefore makes the reader see how futile it would be to reduce the story and its characters into anything neat. Like real life, this book is messy. It’s confusing, and characters make unexpected choices, yet it all feels real.

There are things in the story that strain credulity — the episodes in Lorrie Ann’s life could be a soap opera, and the ending of her tale makes sense only if the reader remembers a minor detail mentioned once near the beginning and never brought up again. In contrast, Mia’s life appears almost too good to be true, as if the contrast between them that Mia set up as a teenager fully reversed in their adulthood. It’s a bit of apparent oversimplification that’s disappointing mostly because it stands in stark contrast to the richness of the character development.

Still, it’s a really good book overall, a wonderful exploration of the power of female friendship, such that one forged in childhood can have such a lasting effect even on your adult life. This is Thorpe’s first novel, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for her next.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

How does one deal with the loss of loved ones to a bomb on a plane? How does one cope when, twenty years after the attack, suspects are finally brought to trial for the crime? Psychologist Ashwin Rao, who lost his sister, niece and nephew in a fatal bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver, deals with his grief by writing a book on the families of other victims on that flight. He becomes particularly drawn into the story of one Canadian family, whose members have dealt with their grief in very different ways.

In The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, Padma Viswanathan explores various ways that people respond to loss. Through Rao’s eyes, we see the unique difficulties of facing such a violent, unexpected death for a loved one — in one particularly powerful scene, two men from the same family search through images of bodies salvaged from the crash, looking for anyone from their family. One of them looks through the photographs methodically, column by column and row by row lest he miss faces he recognizes. The other lets his eyes dart around, barely registering on one photo before moving to another spot, haphazardly chosen. The reason, the first man realizes and relates to Rao, is that the second man wants to register only his own family members; he doesn’t want the burden of anyone else’s grief.

Along with grief is an undercurrent of anger throughout the story. Rao refers to a book on the bombing written by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise, and the inadequacies of the text to properly represent the tragedy. For example, a passage in the book refers to the children on the flight, how well they and their families have assimilated into Canadian life, and how tragic their deaths were. Rao points out, and quite rightly, that the children’s “Canadian” traits were  and should be completely irrelevant — the tragedy of their deaths is simply because they died. Tied in to this is Rao’s anger at the Canadian government’s handling of the bomb. Other than their apparent incompetence in solving the crime, Rao compares the bombing to 9/11, and wonders why America took 9/11 personally whereas Canada seemed to consider the bombing an Indian tragedy, rather than a Canadian one, despite the number of Canadians on board.

The root of this anger is political, and it turns out that Rao was in India when Indira Gandhi is assassinated in 1984 and anti-Sikh sentiment turns violent. The horror of the riots is heightened by its contrast with the silly, manufactured horror of a haunted house Rao has set up for the neighbourhood children to introduce them to Halloween. Viswanathan is at her best when contrasting innocence with horror, and continues in this vein when dealing with victims’ stories, particularly families’ memories of the children on the flight. Later, some of the families blame Sikhs for the Air India bombing, echoing the violence back in India.

The thrust of the book is more personal than political however, and soon Rao sublimates his own grief and anger and focuses on the subjects of his book. While these stories are interesting in their own right — the family patriarch for example turns to religion, his daughter is stuck in a sexless marriage, and so on — the story to me loses some of the momentum that propelled the beginning so well. The writing is still solid throughout, as the author switches between perspectives, but the fire has been dampened somewhat, and the story never quite reaches its peak.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.