Miriam Toews

After receiving a call from her niece, Hattie returns to Canada to find her sister, Min, is on her way to the psychiatric ward, and Hattie is left to take care of Min's children, Thebes and Logan. When she realizes that this may become a permanent arrangement, Hattie hatches a plan. Without much more than an old address to go on, the three of them set off on a wild road trip to find the kids' long-lost father.

The Flying Troutmans

Sarah Sammis

The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews is a perfect example of when audiobooks work best for me. In text form, the narrative is written without grammatical markers for the dialog. Everything is run together with just a comma, and a he said or I asked, etc. The choice to leave out quotation marks leaves me with a single run-on sentence type monotone for my inner voice when I'm reading. It's very distracting and often results in a headache for me.

As The Flying Troutmans is a Canadian road trip and thus qualifies for the Canadian books challenge and is relevant to my ongoing road narrative project, I was motivated to finish this book. Rather than struggle through the print version, I bought the audio version, read by Erin Moon. Moon was able to bring the characters to life in a way my inner voice could not. That she was able to also differentiate between the Troutmans' Manitoban accents and the similar American upper midwest accents made it all the better. 

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Hattie, living in Paris, has just been dumped by her boyfriend when she receives a phone call from her eleven-year-old niece, Thebes. Hattie's sister Min is having a particularly dark episode and Thebes asks Hattie to come and look after her and her brother Logan. When Hattie arrives back in Canada, and realises that she is out of her depth, she hatches a plan to find the children's long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead, she piles Logan and Thebes into the family van and heads south. Hilarious and heart-rending, The Flying Troutmans tells the story of a fractured family on the verge of spinning off its axles and a road trip that might just keep them together.

The Flying Troutmans

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