
death like so much space junk destined for burning reentry.” The author’s facility in making Kim’s pain the reader’s own makes this a powerful depiction of the struggle to overcome adversity. If the general plot outline doesn’t break new ground, Helm’s often mournful prose does one character looks at the future arc of his life and anticipates floating “for years toward. Kim’s father suspects that the attack might be linked to his daughter’s work for an advocacy group for undocumented aliens, and Kim withdraws and retreats as much as possible, unable to engage even in identifying her assailant.
She resists plastic surgery to fix her nose, believing that its altered appearance should reflect her state of mind in the wake of the assault. Twenty-eight-year-old Kim Lystrander is riding her bike to her Toronto home after having dinner with her parents when she’s brutally attacked by a masked rapist, escaping with injuries both mental and physical. Inflation and the collapse of wheat prices sorely affected the prairie city: "he city's old ambitions were beginning to slip away." Unemployment, unrest, and a concomitant rise in xenophobia also characterized a period that was to.The humanity that informed Helm’s previous novels, including The Projectionist, is again in evidence in this standout about the aftershocks of a brutal crime. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 led to a rise in the economic fortunes of rival Vancouver and to the reverse in Winnipeg.

These were turbulent times that saw the end of immigration, a postwar depression (1920-1925), and the ongoing dispossession of First Nations. He begins with the inauguration of the new Legislative Building in 1920 and ends with the opening of Memorial Boulevard ten years later. Jim Blanchard's A Diminished Roar: Winnipeg in the 1920s is the third volume of what is to date a trilogy on the history of that city. /rebates/2f97819356394972fCities-Refuge-Helm-Michael-19356394982fplp&. Winnipeg also had to contend with the aftermath of the General Strike of 1919. Vernon us $60.00Īfter the First World War, many cities had to contend with the influenza pandemic and the housing problems faced by returning veterans. One summer night on a side street in downtown Toronto, Kim Lystrander is attacked by a stranger. The Urban Condition: Literary Trajectories through Canada's Postmetropolis. Cities of Refuge weaves a web of incrimination and inquiry, where mysteries live within mysteries, and stories within stories, and the power to save or condemn rests in the forces of history, and in the realm of our deepest longings. A Diminished Roar: Winnipeg in the 1920s.
