I'll Buy You an Ox

Lois Provost Turchetti is a professional children’s storyteller (in
English and Caribbean Creole), who also conducts educational workshops
in Toronto.

This autobiographical fiction synthesizes and reflects Acadia’s
beginnings from a blend of French, English, German, American, and
Jamaican Maroon cultures.

“Fetch my tobacco ... I’ll buy you an ox,” Antoine promises his
daughter Zoé. Trip after trip to get it “buys” the legs, the eyes,
the tail, and so on, but the miniature wooden ox her father carved is
the closest Zoé gets to the reality. Poverty and passion, encounters
with death, sibling rivalry and devotion, gossip, a lecherous classmate,
family skeletons, and true friendship—Zoé’s rites of passage
include them all, as well as a version of the Canadian Exodus (Tante
Marceline and Zoé’s sister Priscille are married to Americans in New
York).

Faced with Antoine’s cruel jealousy, Zoé’s mother moves to Toronto
with the two youngest, leaving Zoé to finish high school, hold down a
job, and care for her father and brother. Only then does Zoé recognize
that she is just as much her mother’s daughter as she is her
father’s “p’tit Zoé.”

A strong sense of metaphor unites the threads of history and balances
obviously didactic details. Built on a foundation of family ancestry and
pride, I’ll Buy You an Ox shows that blood is thicker than the
sometimes troubled waters of Cape St. Mary. Highly recommended.