Broke

City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows

young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton

neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.

Budding with creativity

that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her

parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling

just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family

to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing

plants and abattoirs, on death.

Written with tight

lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic

novel that reveals Christine's deepening knowledge of the adult world around

her and of her own complicated place in that world.