Review 1: Fishtailing by Wendy Phillips

Fishtailing

Wendy Phillips

Regina, Saskatchewan: Coteau Books, 2010.

196 pp., pbk., $14.95.

ISBN 978-1-55050-411-8.

Grades 10 and up / Ages 14 and up.

Review by Sheela Sur.

****/4

excerpt:

Tricia

When the police come

they say

The neighbours made

a noise complaint.

When Kyle staggers

bleeding

down the stairs

they say

Let’s go, kid.

We’re bathed in

flashing blue silence

at the doorway

and I realise

the music has stopped.

Wendy Phillips’s Fishtailing tells the haunting story of four Canadian high school students during the fall and winter of their senior year.  Through a series of short free verse poems told from the perspectives of each character, we learn about their lives and how their fates become intertwined.  We meet Natalie, the manipulative new girl at school with a troubled past and a destructive plan for her new classmates; Tricia, the product of a mixed-race marriage struggling to form an identity and fit in; Kyle, whose new-found love of music causes tension between him and his mechanic father; and Miguel, a recent immigrant who fled a war-torn country with few surviving family members hiding a dangerous secret.

     By peppering the narrative with commentary from the high school’s English teacher and counsellor, Wendy Phillips creates a rich, authentic, and believable world that draws the reader in.  The breathless pace of the narrative excels the reader to the book’s climax: a party at Natalie’s house that ends in tragedy.

     Fishtailing is a very quick read and thus may appeal to reluctant readers.  However, its free verse prose style may not be enjoyed by everyone. The content is quite mature and may not be appropriate for younger readers (includes scenes of child pornography and rape, suicide, and cutting).

     This is Wendy Phillips’s first book.  It was awarded the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature (English text).

Highly recommended.