The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life
Camilla Gibb
English-born, Toronto-raised, and Oxford-educated Camilla Gibb won heaps of praise and a Toronto Book Award for her debut novel, Mouthing the Words, which told a harrowing yet humorous tale of an abused girl growing up. For her sophomore effort, the curiously titled The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life, Gibb is back on familiar ground but with double the trouble. This novel follows the dysfunctional childhood and subsequently twisted adulthood of siblings Blue and Emma. When their dad gets fired from his job as an architect, he goes haywire, imagining he’s an inventor, though he can’t get anyone else to believe in his ideas. Eventually, he takes off, leaving the kids to fend for themselves as their to mother sinks further into alcoholism.
While Emma seeks a surrogate family, Blue goes in search of his dad–and unfortunately for Blue, he occasionally succeeds in finding him. Each encounter with his father, a nasty piece of work, pushes Blue further down the path of self-destruction. Emma, meanwhile, fares better in her struggle to overcome the burdens of her personal history. Though leavened with less of the humour of her first novel, Gibb’s tracing of Blue and Emma’s separate paths allows her to explore how two children can respond quite differently to the same situation, and the ‘petty details’ of their lives are often wondrously weird. –Nigel Hunt
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Details
| ISBN | 385658028 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publication Date | 30-Jul-02 |
| Publisher | Doubleday Canada |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 318 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| BookID | 9861 |
