Out of My Skin

Susannah D. Ketchum is a teacher-librarian at the Bishop Strachan School
in Toronto. She also serves on the Southern Ontario Library Services
Board.

Adopted while still an infant by white Anglo-Saxon parents, 30-year-old
Daphne Baird decides to search for her biological family. At the
adoption registry, she discovers that she is, in fact, still unprepared
to confront reality. Nevertheless, she does meet an aunt, Sheila Eyre,
who explains that the family came from Guyana shortly before Daphne’s
birth. Miss Eyre gives Daphne two notebooks saying, “they were our
fathers, from Guyana. The last of him.” As she reads the notebooks,
Daphne discovers more about her background than she really wants to
know.

A voyeur who is happiest when she witnesses conflicts, Daphne has a
destructive personality. After a visit home to Toronto, during which she
thoroughly upsets her adoptive parents and makes them feel inadequate,
she runs away in the middle of the night without even leaving a note.
She has handled other relationships in the same way. For example, while
living with Jeremy, Daphne “tested and challenged his attraction to
her as though some hidden disloyalty would soon be exposed and her
suspicions confirmed that love would always betray her.” When, on the
contrary, Jeremy begins to make wedding plans, Daphne escapes to
Montreal, again without the courtesy of a farewell or a note.

Set in Montreal during the hot, tense summer of the Oka crisis, Out of
My Skin is well-written, despite occasional overblown imagery, an
understandable flaw in a first novel. Nearly successful, ultimately the
novel fails because the only fully realized character is Daphne, and
Daphne’s self-absorption distances the reader and marginalizes both
the background and the other characters.