Quill & Quire
Hannah Holborn’s short stories, often set in the north or in rural Canada, depict bleak landscapes peopled by the emotionally dispossessed. These characters are, without exception, damaged goods: families ripped apart by alcohol, affairs, resentments, and jealousies. Unmoored children are often left to the care of strangers and foster families. And then there are the disasters: the fires, floods, and plane crashes whose wreckage mirrors the characters’ psyches. The female protagonist in the book’s unsettling first story, forced to forgo holidays for summer school, must live with the fact that her flippant wish for her family’s plane to crash gets tragically realized. Guilt keeps her from cashing the hefty insurance cheque, one she desperately needs after her town is devastated by floods. In another story, an 82-year-old female prospector who has retreated from civilization to escape her overbearing family is constantly harassed by visions of her fault-finding younger sister and the memory of her fierce Scottish father. The book’s strongest piece, “The Indian Act,” portrays a teenage boy shuffled between foster homes every time his volatile mother goes off the rails. After finally finding a sense of place in a First Nations family that wants to adopt him, he reluctantly turns down the offer because he has fallen in love with his would-be sister. Holborn’s focus and writing style is best suited to these shorter pieces, which work because of their fable-like economy and strangeness. The book’s final piece, the novella “River Rising,” about a young Yellowknife woman born into a legacy of scandal, struggling with her role as wife and mother, is its weakest. Holborn seems uncomfortable catering to the demands of plot in the longer format, even though the scenario she sets up calls out for it. There are bursts of inspiration here, but where the short stories often evoke poignancy, for the most part this one feels like a wallow.
Review
“Like Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, Fierce benefits from its largely northern setting, a still under-explored back road in Canadian fiction. . . . Penetrating and smart and a welcome antidote to the current vogue for alleged family values. . . . Treat yourself to its unique mix of irreverence, compassion and horse laughs. And then pass it along to a loved one.”
— National Post
“As strong a first collection as we have any right to hope. . . . Holborn repeatedly demonstrates her skill in handling utterly disparate, and wholly unique, characters in surprising, and often surprisingly effective, ways. . . . River Rising, the novella that rounds out the book [is] a painful, often funny, bitingly realistic yet archly surreal story [that] seems to burst at the seams with life.”
— Edmonton Journal
“[Fierce has] a bracing farcical edge that could hardly be blacker. . . . Holborn’s double high-wire act leaps effortlessly between funny and tragic. . . . [Her] visuals are cinematic.”
— The Globe and Mail
“The best stories . . . embody whole worlds. Such is true of the tough tales in Fierce. . . . The sassy grit of her characters and their tenacious humour — wry, raw, even twisted — get them through. Now and then, naked emotion pierces through their stubborn wit, like a shard of glass.”
— Montreal Gazette
“Holborn’s collection of stories is electric with wit and insight. Sassy, sexy, full of willful women, nasty business, a few freaks, some drunks, acts of adultery and abandonment, the voice of God and veins of gold. It’s fierce.”
— Lisa Moore, author of Alligator and Open
“Holborn, a gutsy writer from British Columbia, fills the pages of her latest collection with . . . one-of-a-kind characters, in stories that run the gamut from unfortunately heartbreaking to unaccountably hopeful.”
— Canadian Living
— National Post
“As strong a first collection as we have any right to hope. . . . Holborn repeatedly demonstrates her skill in handling utterly disparate, and wholly unique, characters in surprising, and often surprisingly effective, ways. . . . River Rising, the novella that rounds out the book [is] a painful, often funny, bitingly realistic yet archly surreal story [that] seems to burst at the seams with life.”
— Edmonton Journal
“[Fierce has] a bracing farcical edge that could hardly be blacker. . . . Holborn’s double high-wire act leaps effortlessly between funny and tragic. . . . [Her] visuals are cinematic.”
— The Globe and Mail
“The best stories . . . embody whole worlds. Such is true of the tough tales in Fierce. . . . The sassy grit of her characters and their tenacious humour — wry, raw, even twisted — get them through. Now and then, naked emotion pierces through their stubborn wit, like a shard of glass.”
— Montreal Gazette
“Holborn’s collection of stories is electric with wit and insight. Sassy, sexy, full of willful women, nasty business, a few freaks, some drunks, acts of adultery and abandonment, the voice of God and veins of gold. It’s fierce.”
— Lisa Moore, author of Alligator and Open
“Holborn, a gutsy writer from British Columbia, fills the pages of her latest collection with . . . one-of-a-kind characters, in stories that run the gamut from unfortunately heartbreaking to unaccountably hopeful.”
— Canadian Living
Book Description
Fresh, tough, and thoroughly addictive, this sparkling debut collection calls to mind the beloved and bestselling works of Lisa Moore, Camilla Gibb, and Mark Haddon.
With an irresistible combination of playfulness and empathy, these effervescent, sometimes heartbreaking tales of underachieving adults, unfairly burdened children, and the unaccountably hopeful of all ages explore the moments of grace in lives that are too often defined by loss.
A punky young woman comes to terms with the accident that took away all of her family except the grandmother who believes she is a bird, and an aging prospector — a woman — discovers that a physical “curse” might have been something of a blessing all along. “The Indian Act” is a compact coming-of-age story, charting the journey of a boy who, though bounced through many foster homes, holds on to the dream of love and unconditional acceptance; and in the novella “River Rising,” three generations in a small town struggle toward joy despite the accidents of fate and the foolish mistakes that almost, but not quite, derail their lives.
Fierce introduces Hannah Holborn as a shining new light in Canadian fiction.
With an irresistible combination of playfulness and empathy, these effervescent, sometimes heartbreaking tales of underachieving adults, unfairly burdened children, and the unaccountably hopeful of all ages explore the moments of grace in lives that are too often defined by loss.
A punky young woman comes to terms with the accident that took away all of her family except the grandmother who believes she is a bird, and an aging prospector — a woman — discovers that a physical “curse” might have been something of a blessing all along. “The Indian Act” is a compact coming-of-age story, charting the journey of a boy who, though bounced through many foster homes, holds on to the dream of love and unconditional acceptance; and in the novella “River Rising,” three generations in a small town struggle toward joy despite the accidents of fate and the foolish mistakes that almost, but not quite, derail their lives.
Fierce introduces Hannah Holborn as a shining new light in Canadian fiction.
About the Author
The influence of Hannah Holborn’s various parents — foster and otherwise — has lent her fiction a unique blend of British humour, Slavic melancholy, naturalism, and First Nations sensibility. She has taught life skills to aboriginal women, inner-city youth, and the mentally ill, and her prize-winning stories have appeared in numerous journals including, Room of One’s Own and Front and Centre. She is writing a novel in Gibsons, British Columbia.
