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.
