Broken Windows

Claire Wilkshire is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

This first collection by Patricia Nolan comprises 12 carefully crafted
stories that explore dysfunctional families. Featuring an assortment of
violent relatives—often fathers—these stories are concerned with the
long-term effects of abuse on women and children.

The stories are not all uniformly grim. One of the strongest is
“Hugging the Urn,” in which a philandering father returns home to
take care of his wife, who is dying of breast cancer; the story is told
from the point of view of the daughter, a budding visual artist with a
rebel sense of humor. Framing the collection are two stories about the
same family. In the opening story, Johanne, together with her mother and
sister, escapes from her abusive father. The volume’s concluding story
picks up the story some years later; the narrator, Johanne’s
brother-in-law, brings a perspective that underlines the family’s
continued subjection to the whims of the father. Broken Windows is an
impressive debut.