practically every last line of a paragraph or a chapter left me speechless. so beautifully and honestly written… my favourite line, and the one i think is the most intriguing: “the wind was my best friend, but i couldn’t smell it anymore, and i was glad because it was killing me.”

An interesting book. Nicely written – I wasn’t even that annoyed by the quoteless dialogue, which usually drives me batty. I didn’t really have much sympathy for our protagonist – a little too much drugs and too little respect for authority to really get my sympathies. The heavily-slanted inside view of a Mennonite community was interesting, though, and I did develop sympathy and a kind of weird respect for one of the other characters, so overall I’d say the book was a winner.

Won the 2004 Governor General’s Award for fiction; there were so many things I liked about this book.