Reading about Lily Piper and her exquisitely expressed evolution of self was such a pleasure! What a great character.

Joan Thomas's (deservedly) lauded novel Reading by Lightning (published by Goose Lane Editions) follows a young Canadian girl growing up in the pre-WWII years who is required to travel from her family's small farm in Manitoba to the erstwhile home of her father in Northern England. While not ordinarily a fan of bildungsroman novels in general (it's rather tricky working out a believable character under the weight of all those growing-up years), I found this one not only believable but effortless in the reading. Definitely engaging.

Written largely in first person (there is one integral perspective shift later in the book), Lily's childhood is revealed slowly, but with an eye to relevant detail. We are introduced to the conservative religious backdrop against which Lily will define herself, but we aren't ask to dwell on the theology. Everything is filtered through the wonderfully drawn Lily and her understanding and impressions of the disparate worlds she is forced to inhabit.

The first world, of dry prairie and thundering threats about the end of the world, is a charged world for Lily. She is forced to find her way around the 'spells' that plague her father and the seeming disinterest of her mother in anything outside of Lily's soul. Inquisitive, Lily attempts to make sense of her world through constructed narrative. She tells herself the story of her parents, their friend Joe Pye. She begins to invent a context for herself (not unlike her immigrant parents).

The second world, her father's England, the 'old' world with all that tangible history just laying about for the picking, is the world of her maturing, her love. She hopes to be able to leave the apocalypse behind, but it seems to dog her steps. As she takes care of her grandmother or stays on with her aunt and cousins, Lily opens herself up to a wider world. And the transition is believably charted, filled with interesting characters. None more so than Lily herself. And when she returns to the prairies, bringing that open world with her, what complications of responsibility and identity ensue. Fascinating stuff.

And such delicious prose! An excerpt (from Lily's time in England):

Instead of answering she launched into the refrain. For the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree . . . And while she sent the words out over the Edge in her raw, melancholy voice, we followed the wandering brow of the hill away from the town. It had been a cloudy day, and soon the sky was dark above us, and the lights of Oldham just a pool twinkling distantly below, the stars fallen into the valley, the constellations of the street lights disintegrating. Off somewhere on the dark slopes sheep bells clanged. The moor was full of movement and shadows, a darkness made up of things, not the absence of things that made up the bare darkness of the prairies. My dad would know this. He must have walked like this when he was young, with stout or cider singing in his head, not exactly here maybe, but on paths very like it through rough gorse. A north country lad.