Lydia Thrippe!

Lori A. Dunn is a ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster, B.C.

The premise of Lydia Thrippe! is that it is a collection of the found
papers of an “artiste.” The contents are essentially her diary, but
also some short compositions at the back of the book. The diary itself
is full of odd character sketches about the people in her life and
satirical moments, with a delightful touch of surrealism to sweeten the
mix. Lydia is ambiguous about her relationships with these odd
characters that people her world, and quite definitely tells her own
version of events.

In Lydia Thrippe, Daniel Sloate has captured the enigmatic style of the
eccentric diarist. Each entry is disconnected from the others; the
descriptions are entered into it with the familiarity of long
acquaintance for the writer, but leave enough of a word picture that the
reader is not left out. The voice of the “editor” intrudes slightly
in the introduction, perhaps explaining too much of what is to come,
instead of letting readers discover the oddities of Lydia’s diary on
their own. But then, it is the voice of the pedantic literary editor
that we expect, so again, Sloate is successful.

Lydia Thrippe! is a silly, fun, short book, most definitely not for the
realist.