Lovely in Her Bones

Susan Manningham teaches sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston.

J. Jill Robinson’s stories have appeared in such publications as
Event, NeWest Review, and Prism International. Her story “Finding
Linette” was a co-winner of Event’s Creative Non-Fiction Prize in
1992, while her first book of stories, Saltwater Trees, won the Writers
Guild of Alberta Short Fiction Prize in 1992.

The women in this incisive and impressive second collection of stories
are haunted by the past and seeking definition of their various roles,
as mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and lovers. Above all, they are
searching for their own sense of self. The author is at her best when
articulating how this sense of self is inevitably shaped by resonances
from the past—the choking scent of a mother’s hairspray, the warmth
of piano keys after a father has played.

Robinson’s language is gutsy and innovative, and her evocative images
stay in the memory long after one has put the book down. Though unafraid
of emotion, she tempers it with objectivity and a total lack of
complacency. Here is a writer who confronts the paradoxes of
late–20th-century life head-on.