Going to the Zoo

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario.

“Shortly before my sister George’s tenth birthday, she is thrown out
of Brownies for hoofing the toadstool across the basement floor of the
Seventh Day Adventist Church.” With the very first sentence of Going
to the Zoo, the reader is hurled into the 1970s world of 12–year-old
Grace. By the end of the book, it is the 1990s, and a 30-something Grace
realizes that she now has to face the rest of her life.

The author traces Grace’s difficult life by way of 16 linked short
stories that are divided into sections according to the stages of
Grace’s life: “Rat Tails,” “Women Who Run with Buffalo,” and
“The Evangelists of Erotica.” We see Grace as a young girl whose
mother leaves training bras on her bed, as the teenaged Worm Girl in a
rural Ontario bait shop, as a hostess in a club in Osaka, as a drunk on
welfare in Toronto. She goes from innocent and playful to world-weary,
lost, and confused.

Lush lets us get close to Grace, to feel the joy and sadness in the
life she leads. And she leads us to Grace’s world through our own
senses and memories. Do you remember Elmer the Safety Elephant, Towers
department stores, the Girl Guide oath? I had forgotten them—until I
met Grace. That’s part of the beauty of this book: when Lush gives us
something of Grace, she gives us something of ourselves, too.