Reflections on Kathleen Winter’s Annabel

Annabel focuses on a child born a hermaphrodite in small-town Labrador. When I picked up this novel from a local used&new bookshop, the cashier put her hand over her heart, said “oh, that is a beautiful book,” and lapsed into a smiling-eyed silence while she rang up my purchase.

Having now read the book and let it resonate with me for almost a month, I concur that this is a very special piece of literature. Some reasons why:

• It resists categorization. You could call it a coming-of-age tale, I suppose; it is that, and more.
• All the characters, including, from the first paragraph, the land, are integral elements of the story, and they are allowed to have full personalities, to change, and to grow. Though the characters occasionally judge each other, the author never seems to judge any of them. True, we never get to find out what drives certain bit-part assholes, but the way that the other characters’ lives move on without and despite these would-be villains is a joy on its own.
• There is nothing sensationalist in this book. The issue of sexual identity, so fascinating in its own right, and such ready fodder for tabloid gossip, is experienced so vividly in context of the full lives of real people, that it becomes rather a mirror on which anyone can project one’s own identity issues.  Surely we all have things we don’t know how to discuss with others, things that keep us from “fitting in” (as much as anyone could ever “fit in” to a changing world in any way other than by living one’s own truth – this was one of the points the novel strongly illuminated for me).  Certainly all the main characters here have their own such issues.
• It contains abundant passages of breathtaking beauty. Treadway’s conversations with the birds (and Treadway’s character as a whole) were some of my favourites.

When I closed the book I found myself longing to know more about everyone inside it… a sequel? A prequel? A spin-off or two or three? …and then I accepted ruefully that the story as it had been told was complete. The final movement of the novel took me smack-dab into the Now, into this moment of awkward beauty, pain and completeness.

And I am grateful.

♥