A Fine Daughter

Beverly Rasporich is an associate professor in the Faculty of General
Studies at the University of Calgary and the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

A Fine Daughter is an enchanting novel about mothers and daughters,
maternity and fecundity, prairie puritanism, and sensual release.
Although the book has something of an awkward beginning, with bits of
dialogue that don’t quite ring true, once the reader is past the first
few pages, she is sure to be captivated.

The plot revolves around the unwed mother who chooses to keep and raise
her child in the small prairie town of Little Cypress and to suffer
social disapproval in the manner of Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter.
A Fine Daughter, however, presents a more modern look at puritanical
repression. The time is the 1950s, and the author is extremely skilled
in reviving this period and its stultifying codes of behavior. Moreover,
she does not leave us, in the tradition of Canadian prairie fiction,
with naturalistic and desperate outcomes. Rather, when a cloud of
Monarch butterflies envelops the town, her cast of interesting and
highly credible characters not only reveal their secret lives, they
revel in the beauty and the pleasure of the moment. During the course of
the story, the author develops a magic-realist and poetic sensibility
that one can only describe as stunning.