Shelf Unbound indie literary magazine is hosting a Twitter discussion with Annabel author Kathleen Winter. Please join us with comments and questions for Winter on February 24, 8-9 pm ET, hashtag #shelf. Following is a review of the book excerpted from our January 2010 issue.

Book Club Find

Annabel by Kathleen Winter
Grove Press
www.groveatlantic.com

Published last year by Canadian indie press House of Anansi, Annabel is Kathleen Winter’s first novel and earned her nominations for Canada’s Giller Prize, Governor-General’s Literary Award, and Writer’s Trust Prize. Like Jeffrey Eugenedes’ Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, Annabel uses the premise of an intersexed, or hermaphroditic, main character to explore issues of gender, identity, destiny, and familial and social connections and expectations. Annabel is a smaller, quieter story than the epic Middlesex, but just as compelling and thought-provoking. The setting is the frozen wilderness of the small Newfoundland coastal village of Labrador, where the men are gone much of the year on hunting expeditions and the women are home contending with a hardscrabble domestic life largely less than what they had hoped for. It is 1968, but the social revolutions fomenting elsewhere are unfelt in Labrador. Men follow the paths of their fathers, and women of their mothers. What to make, then, of a child born both male and female?

Raise him as a male, is the answer determined by the child’s father, Treadway, and the local doctor. His mother, Jacinta, follows along but silently mourns the loss of her “daughter” as the baby is christened with the name Wayne. Thus begins Wayne’s journey in the male world, being taught woodworking and trapline maintenance by his father from an early age. To Treadway’s annoyance, family friend Thomasina, who was present at the child’s birth, attempts to nurture an artistic side of Wayne, who she privately refers to as Annabel, her only daughter who drowned. That Wayne’s adolescence will be heart-rending and tragic is a given.

Winters graces her flawed characters and their flawed decisions with a tender humanity. She has said of Treadway, “I tried to walk all around him and look at his motivation and right in front of my own eyes he changed and became somebody that deeply cares about his son.” Readers cannot help but care about all of them. -- Margaret Brown