Excerpted from Canadian Literature, 5 May 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.5  

Precarious Terrain a Review by Sam Knowles

Cynthia Flood’s use of a Beckettian template is rather more effective; in “Care,” the vicious irony of the title is revealed in the opening paragraphs, as a “care” home superintendent summarily dismisses both her staff and the personal effects of a recently deceased inmate: “You idiots didn’t notice this garbage? Clean it up.” The narrative, like one character, “typifie[s] time served in care: rush rush, or so slow that rage beckon[s].” Flood is at her best with this focus on linguistic rhythm, from the detail of a character “thrash[ing] into her old winter coat,” to the shocking opening of “Such Language”: “FUCK YOU, THE MESSAGE TAPE SAID ONE OCTOBER DAY” (emphases original). In spite of this story’s beginning, however, it remains uncertain whether the titular phrase is meant to be positive or negative: Flood’s command of the multiple uses of “such language” remains throughout, shown in the interweaving of a tale of infidelity with book-club discussions in which the members “uncorked the wine and their own narratives.” Linguistic dexterity is Flood’s primary strength. “Red Girl, Rat Boy,” a fairy-tale narrative maintains Grimm’s gruesomeness; the female protagonist “[goes] off elsewhere, over the hills and far away and still with that hollow inside,” which has echoes of Angela Carter’s no-nonsense re-visioning of such narratives. However, Flood’s plotting can be tired, particularly in re-visiting familiar scenes of organised activism. While it is clear that “the comrades [and] hall” of the political group in “Blue Clouds” constitute an informed, accurate portrayal, it is the extended metaphor at the centre of the story (told by the hall cleaner), wherein “telling is cleaning,” that is most effective. Read the full review here.
Back to the top

Excerpted from Literary Review of Canada, March 2014,

Literary Review of Canada, March 2014 by Joel Deshaye

Stories challenge the stereotypes of left-wing activists. Although Cynthia Flood’s new collection of short stories, Red Girl Rat Boy, demonstrates her attention to the art of fiction much more than to politics, the recent grumbles of electoral campaigning in the east- central Canadian news turned my attention to her characters marked by political signs: social workers, pacifists, feminists. Flood knows the signs well, having been involved in leftist activities since the 1970s, when she began her writing career in earnest—later gaining accolades for books such as My Father Took a Cake to France. Her father, the historian Donald Creighton, leaned more to the right for most of his life and was outspoken in his politics. In contrast, Flood’s politically marked characters in Red Girl Rat Boy say little about their views aloud, or in their heads where readers can hear them. Instead, their actions do the work of characterization and politicking, as they were done in fantasy and myth in the days before movies. Read the full review on reviewcanada.ca. Joel Deshaye is an academic project manager and program developer at McGill University. He is the author of The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955–1980 (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

Best Books of 2013: Fiction

Red Girl, Rat Boy by Cynthia Flood (Biblioasis) It seems such a slender book to have grabbed this small spot among my favorites of the year, but that is the nature of Flood’s power. Here the Journey Prize-winning author packs a lot of that power into 11 taut stories that celebrate and challenge women of all types. Flood is unflinching, but her readers might not be so brave. The author is honest to the point of occasional emotional and unsentimental brutality. This is amazing stuff.
Read the full review at http://januarymagazine.blogspot.ca/2014/01/best-books-of-2013-fiction.html
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

Caroline Adderson , December 27, 2013, Special to the Globe and Mail

Globe Books 2013: Long story short, it was a remarkable year for short fiction

Come away from the hearth, little Cinderella genre! Wipe the smuts from your misunderstood face. This was your year – 2013! – when you were actually invited to the most important balls and everyone, I mean everyone, wanted to dance with you.Alice Munro’s Nobel Gives an Unloved Genre its Long-awaited Due,” ran the headline for Russell Smith’s Globe and Mail story on October 12th. He called the prize for Munro “a win for short stories themselves.” And that wasn’t your only triumph! Lynn Coady’s fabulous collection Hellgoing scooped up the Giller Prize! But wait, my unloved one. Perhaps things aren’t as magical as they seem. Yes, Coady’s stories were also on the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize shortlist. But only four story collections have ever been awarded the coveted Giller and two of those were by Alice Munro. If we assume Munro can take home any prize she wants, that gives short fiction a 2:17 chance. Furthermore, Alice Munro is the only writer of exclusively short fiction who has ever won a Nobel.

The odds are worsening for you, little one.

So why doesn’t my favourite literary form fare better on prize lists? 2013 was the year I decided to puzzle it out, a task made easier by the fact that I was a juror for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. My conclusion is three-fold.

First, there is the problem of time. Stories are short, but they aren’t fast. A good story requires that you to build a little chapel around it and sit there awhile in quiet contemplation. You may read a story in twenty minutes, but then you have to think about it for hours, or days, or, in the case of Munro, or Chekhov, or Mavis Gallant, a lifetime. This is not conducive to a reading schedule of a jury member, which requires you to “consider” 115 books in nine months.

But why is this special contemplation necessary? Because – and this is reason number two – short stories, with their narrative compression and their reliance on imagery, rhythm and repetition, are essentially language-driven, like poetry. No one reads poetry fast. But the traditional novel – the kind that usually wins the prizes – is a scene-driven, dramatic form with built-in profluence that the keeps the reader turning the pages all the way to the climax. It can be read quickly. If we want to give short fiction a chance, we need to unskew our prize categories. Group short fiction with poetry or, better yet, give short stories their own Giller or Griffin.

Which brings me to the third reason stories tend to be underrepresented when laurels are handed out. No one would dream of putting a non-poet on a poetry jury. But a fiction jury may lack a story writer. Without a passionate champion, someone who has struggled with the form from the inside, who knows how essential it is to sit inside that chapel – good luck little form! I read many excellent collections this year. Here are some of the ones I’m still contemplating.

Lynn Coady’s Hellgoing. Please see the Rogers Writers’ Trust Jury Citation for my full gush of remarks.

Shaena Lambert gets to wear the Miss Munro Successor sash for Oh, My Darling. The wit is there, and the technical similarities (oh, those virtuoso time shifts!). Like Munro’s, the stories are so complex they simply vibrate with mystery. Read, for example, A Small Haunting and try to forget it.

Douglas Glover, the mad genius of Can Lit, came out with Savage Love, a grab bag of everything the form can do, in turns hilarious, intriguing and truly chilling. Intellectual pleasures abound just by recognizing the playful way Glover gives the nod to Borges, Thomas Bernhard, Cormac McCarthy. But Glover also seizes your soul. At the end of Tristiana, his McCarthyesque tale of a 19th century murderous duo roaming the American West, I scrawled in pencil, “I will never recover…”

The mournful, aching stories in Kelli Deeth’s The Other Side of Youth play both sides of womanhood – girls mired in the banality of suburban adolescence, adult women struggling with childlessness or empty marriages. Her layers of imagery build exact, poetic worlds. As in, “The house was quiet and dark, a tomb with pictures on the walls.” Or this, “I listened for coyotes, their ragged voices, the unloved wild.”

In Red Girl Rat Boy Cynthia Flood has pared her style down to a clipped staccato that is at first jarring, then mesmerizing. How does she scrape the narrative so close to the bone, yet still manage to emotionally engage the reader? Because she’s a master, carefully maximizing the potential of each word. Her description of a leopard escaping into a forest: “Her dapples soared to another tree. Her front claws nailed the bark as her tail curled and her hind-quarters swung up to complete a perfect leap that went on, and on, as patterned brightness lasts under closed lids.” Poetry.

Elisabeth de Mariaffi manages in How to Get Along with Women to lower the reader straight into the lives of others. The accrual of small details, the utterly true things her characters say – true as in both Truth (about life and love), and the naturalness of her dialogue – make the reader feel simultaneously uncomfortable and privileged, as though we’re overhearing a stranger’s deepest secrets. This remarkable debut collection was longlisted for the Giller Prize, for good reason.

Other collections have also stayed with me: Nancy Jo Cullen’s Canary, Holley Rubinsky’s South of Elfrida, Sean Virgo’s Dibidalen, Astrid Blodgett’s You Haven’t Changed a Bit. In my work as a juror and in compiling this list of favourites, I’ve been heartened not just by the range of voices and styles, but also by the publishers, large to minuscule, still willing to put their money on Cinderella.

Now 2013 draws to a close. Winter is long, the nights, too. So let’s gather by the hearth. The space is small, but no matter; there aren’t that many of us. Let’s read each other stories.

Caroline Adderson’s next book, Ellen in Pieces, is a novel in stories. It will be published in 2014.
Read the review on The Globe and Mail website.
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

Judy LeBlanc, December 3, 2013, The Coastal Spectator

Collection chronicles difficult lives

Cynthia Flood, winner of the Journey Prize and the Western Canada Gold Award, amongst others, has published one novel and four collections of short stories. Her latest, “Red Girl Rat Boy” chronicles lives not easily led by those not easy to love; are any of us? Marcia, in the title story, is sickly obsessive; Ellen, in “One Two Three One,” rejects her own child. A host of battle-weary activists spar with one another in “Blue Clouds” and “Dirty Work.” In “Eggs and Bones,” a resentful young mother lies in bed listening to her husband cook breakfast. “ Foods catch, stick on that scaliness, scorch.” Syntax is frequently truncated and I’m disarmed, on edge, as if asked not to get too comfortable.With the agility of an acrobat, Flood navigates shifts and turns within time, often lifetimes, while employing a free indirect style that catapults the reader from a character’s most immediate experience to retrospective narration and then back again.

In “To Be Queen,” the best piece in the collection, Kenny, whose relationship with his lover has just ended, recalls growing up with siblings in a family where a sister died before he was born. With his remaining siblings, in the way that we do, he seeks to piece together the particular grief that shaped him. “Each sibling privately recalls their first sight of Mom crying.” In a psychic distance that could not be much closer, we are with Kenny in a playful childhood attack from his older sister’s friends; “They’re on me. First I laugh, then there are too many eyes and fingers, open mouths, teeth.” And a few sentences later, with a skillful widening of the aperture; “Thus I learned that if you don’t give a shit, or credibly pretend not to, even in defeat you have power.” At the end of this story, I am left yearning that my own children may never live with the absence of one another. Such is the emotional impact of this raw and honest writing.

Flood’s cast of characters cavort, love, grieve and rebel between the complicated layers of their lives. A montage of ailing elders subvert the meaning of the story’s title, “Care,” in a macabre nursing home setting. Several stories look back to Vancouver in the 70’s and 80’s. “Addresses” is a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of those who rented in the West End at the time. It is, paradoxically, their quirkiness that makes Flood’s characters both recognizable and tender. In “Such Language,” Lauren’s mother, out of love, leaves a foul message on the machine: a wake-up call in code, the only language mother and daughter are capable of speaking.

These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow.
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

Steven W. Beattie, November 29, 2013, Special to the National Post

Shortcuts: Red Girl Rat Boy

The term “writer’s writer” is frequently used to describe an author who privileges technique over story, whose artistic refinement is honed to a degree evident to other professionals, but not necessarily to a general audience. The corollary, then, involves an implied insult: a “writer’s writer” is too highly sophisticated to be considered a “reader’s writer.” But are the two mutually exclusive?

Certainly, there is technique aplenty in Red Girl Rat Boy (Biblioasis, 169 pp; $18.95), the fifth work of fiction from Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood. One need look no further than the postmodern commentary in “One Two Three Two One,” which begins with the narrator alerting readers to the fact that “this isn’t the kind of story that describes ad nauseam the characters’ feelings,” but rather is interested in “isolated linguistic phenomena … discrete, unlinked by storyline.” Readers who prize strong narratives might find themselves on notice; those who pay attention to the way stories are put together are apt to be charmed by the self-reflexive joke a few paragraphs later: “The lichen frilled up like egg white on a frying pan. (That’s the first simile, of very few.) … The lichen: a delicate leather. (Also few metaphors.)”

In either case, it will be clear that “One Two Three Two One” wears its technique on its sleeve, which is obviously a conscious choice, since elsewhere in the collection Flood as author disappears entirely. Which is not to say that the stories — even the most straightforward of them — become any less daring.

The final story in the collection, about the proprietor of a Vancouver grow-op whose pet — a clouded leopard named Pretty — escapes custody and begins roaming the city, changes perspective no fewer than three times over the course of a scant 14 pages. The story’s title, “The Hunter,” can variously be applied to each of the three central characters: Pretty, her erstwhile owner and the social worker whom she encounters at the story’s close. Unlike “One Two Three Two One,” which explicitly eschews description, Flood employs minute, almost forensic detail to portray the exotic cat’s journey through “a jungle of salal, salmonberry, morning-glory all wound through with tunnels.”

Flood is a highly accomplished stylist, whose technique is tightly calibrated and precise. “My ideal,” she has said, “is a story in which each word’s presence can be justified.” Anything superfluous is ruthlessly pared away, resulting in a presentation that frequently resembles pointillism. In both cases discrete elements — words, sentences or dabs of colour — congeal to create something recognizable and aesthetically pleasing, but the whole is utterly dependent on the interaction of its parts: change one thing and the entire piece suffers.

Because of this, Flood’s work can’t be read quickly. The stories in Red Girl Rat Boy are brief, but dense, requiring concentration and attention. And this is a function of the implied insult in calling someone a “writer’s writer”: it is assumed that general readers will not want to make the effort to engage with technically challenging writing. That this assumption is frequently correct (as a cursory perusal of any bestseller list will attest) should not in itself preclude recommending books by writers such as Flood, who can be as emotionally engaging as any flat-out storyteller.

“Care,” for example, is a fairly straightforward narrative about a co-ordinated revolt against the staff by put-upon residents of an assisted-living facility for the elderly. Equally subtle and scrupulous as some of the more elliptical stories in the collection, “Care” is also shot through with humour, not least in the (perfectly accurate) observation that there is little to be found on weekday television besides endless reruns of Law & Order.
Read the full review in The National Post.
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

M.A.C. Farrant, Special to The Sun September 20, 2013

Cynthia Flood challenges, enlightens, disturbs in stunning fifth book

“The point is,” says a character in red girl rat boy, Cynthia Flood’s new story collection from Biblioasis, “we can’t be for another person.” This statement might sound like a given but in each of the 11 stories the notion surfaces, usually with quietly devastating results. Everyone in the collection is suffering from a kind of fundamentalism, a rigid set of beliefs that cripples their experience of life.Best known for My Father Took a Cake to France, her collection from 1992 — the title story won the Journey Prize — this is Flood’s fifth book and it’s a stunner. Set in Vancouver, and in particular the False Creek area, the stories travel effortlessly between the ’60s and now.With rapid-fire narration, power-point prose, and darts of minimalist description, Flood nails her subject. Her characters are impatient to be heard, grabbing your attention, word bullets flying, hope and despair spilling over the pages. The subtext is anger, disappointment, hopelessness, cynicism, end of life ruminations, and what went wrong? Beloveds are suffering all over the place. Her characters are impatient to be heard, grabbing your attention

“What if nobody rebelled? Just grew old?” asks a woman in Blue Clouds of her time in the antiwar movement. She’s still stuffing envelopes in a hall that’s big and damp and empty.

Casual meanness is on tap in Care, a tale of old women enduring their “golden years” in an extended-care ward. The time served there is like a prison sentence: “rush, rush, or so slow that rage beckoned.” But then to the reader’s delight there’s a wheelchair and walker rebellion! Like high school deviants they’re flushing rags down toilets, flooding the floors.

The story Sister-in-Law concerns a family “corroded by dislike.” Such Language is a tragicomedy about a librarian whose husband everyone calls Mr. Sunshine. They have great sex on a nightly basis and what could be better? But heaven, it turns out, is not all it’s cracked up to be; her husband’s shine has a further reach.

And poor Julie in Addresses is a prisoner of the marriage ideals of the ’50s. Trained as a typist, she got her man — a lawyer! — and her baby long before her friends did, a kind of accomplishment. But the husband’s a contemptuous brute. The distance between the marriage dream and the reality is beyond navigation. “None of this could appear in any magazine,” she notes bitterly.

Another woman, Ellen, in One Two Three Two One, is also imprisoned by the ideals of her culture. She yearns to cut the vines of parental opinion, prune the fantasy tree of cultural expectations and she does so by abandoning her infant daughter: “Some women take to it, some don’t.” Bad fallout results as you’d expect in this Lorrie Moore-like story with its smart, self-conscious narrative.

So what to do? Find a greater cause? Catherine, in Dirty Work, joined the antiwar movement in the ’60s, bought wholesale into the Age of Aquarius. She, too, has been imprisoned by hopes of marriage, the ideals of the movement. Now in her early 70s she’s come to realize she’s missed the happiness boat: “No later chances of long-term connection came my way.” Retired from “witnessing how rough human existence is, how knotty, contaminated” her sarcasm remains intact. That’s something. As for Catherine’s life choices, and the life choices of the rest of the characters in red girl rat boy? It turns out they’re mostly determined by random events. Or by the opinions of others — parents, friends, the larger society. We mostly blunder through life unconsciously, Flood is telling us. Lives don’t tidy up at the end; only a few win the prizes. “Shut up, the lot of you! Can’t you see it’s a tragedy?” says the “old one” in Blue Clouds, another woman inhabiting an angry, shut-off life. The best fiction challenges, enlightens, even disturbs and these qualities are evident in Flood’s collection. Here’s a mirror, she is saying, now take a long, hard look. Read the full review in The Sun. M.A.C. Farrant’s new work of fiction, The World Afloat, will appear from Talonbooks next spring. Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

Review: Red Girl Rat Boy…showcases her narrative sensitivity…

“The point is,” says a character in red girl rat boy, Cynthia Flood’s new story collection from Biblioasis, “we can’t be for another person.” Journey Prize–winning short-story writer Cynthia Flood has a new collection, her fourth, and it showcases her narrative sensitivity, historical range, and courage in using foul language.This relatively slim collection of 11 stories features a large wildcat, domestic troubles, and memories of the West Coast’s extreme left in the 1960s and ’70s. “Blue Clouds” and “Dirty Work,” for example, recount class struggle and the sex lives of “contacts” and “comrades,” but they are more anthropologically interesting than examples of stunning short-story technique.Flood shows significantly more range in stories like “Addresses,” “One Two Three Two One,” and the title story, which engage the author’s playful and tender sides. In “Red Girl Rat Boy,” for example, a school-age girl is obsessed with red hair. She clips photographs from magazines and covets the hair of the girl who sits in front of her in class. This obsession is arbitrary and also believable; such are the ridiculous predicaments that people get themselves caught up in. It ends badly, of course. So does the marriage in “Addresses” and the motherhood in “One Two Three Two One.” But the gold here is not in the endings, which is counter-intuitive for a genre in which they are normally considered key. Flood spreads out her narrative nodes (as Douglas Glover would say) evenly. But the gold here is not in the endings, which is counter-intuitive for a genre in which they are normally considered key. Flood spreads out her narrative nodes (as Douglas Glover would say) evenly. The story “Such Language” begins: “Fuck you, the message tape said one day.” The poor wife and mother at the story’s centre is distressed. Yet the story is told retrospectively: the first-person narrator is already beyond it all. Flood presents the crisis as both fully present and miles away. We get reflections on the ancient nature of tape-message technology and hyper-anxiety about the source of the message’s aggression. The result is that we don’t anticipate the conclusion so much as pay attention to the journey.As we have come to expect, Flood’s stories reward attentive reading. Realism is the dominant technique, but there are also quirks that bend the reader’s ear and excite. Carol Shields used to talk about female storytelling that avoided the “classic” duality of climax and release. Flood’s stories are Shields-type stories: multi-orgasmic. Ahem.
Read at Quill and Quire.
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

…Cynthia Flood’s new collection showcase a unique breed of confident, highly stylized writing.

The eleven stories in Cynthia Flood’s new collection showcase a unique breed of confident, highly stylized writing. Most of these stories demand a careful reading, and earn it by offering unique points of view and narrative techniques to command your attention.Perhaps the most notable feature of this collection is how the majority of these stories spell out very little for readers. Few writers employ such “all show, no tell” restraint in their writing. As a result, Flood’s work is very fly-on-the-wall in how it’s experienced by readers. The stories make you a voyeur, with few cues and clues as to what you’re witnessing. This makes the author applaudable for her purist’s style of fiction, but it also makes the book less accessible than your average collection. Flood understands her genre and how to use it. Creative writing courses would benefit from studying why she does what she does in these stories, because what she does with short fiction, one simply couldn’t pull off in a novel. Flood understands her genre and how to use it. Stand-out stories include “Eggs and Bones” (a two-sided view of how caustic relationships can get), the oddball title story, and one of the book’s most straight-forward stories, “Sister-in-Law” about a widowed sister-in-law who returns to visit her former in-laws. Her return reveals much about the brother and sister she visits.In another stand-out story, “One Two Three Two One,” a translator tells the story of her relationship with a lichen biologist. Ellen, the narrator, overtly draws the reader’s attention to her distaste for poor similes, reaching metaphor, and awkward personification by parenthetically apologizing for, or by rationalizing her use of those writing devices in the story. All in all, it’s a strong collection from a journey prize winner who knows how short stories ought to work. Flood’s stories are also commendable for covering much emotional ground and character history in very little space. Originally published in Telegraph-Journal.
Back to the top

…Flood freely experiments with a style she describes as ” elliptical, compressed, imagistic”

Do not search for a grand overarching theme in this collection of short stories by the prize-winning Canadian author. Flood freely experiments with a style she describes as ” elliptical, compressed, imagistic” and features protagonists who are flawed, varied, and – enticingly – only partially relatable. Release Date: September 10, 2013. Toronto Review of Books Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top

This collection of short stories deals with a pool of characters who are written to be just like us — humans with problems of our own

My first impression of finishing the eleven short stories of Cynthia Flood’s Red Girl Rat Boy was “What the hell was that about?”, and that kind of reaction is my favourite kind to extract from books. This is not one of those easy reads that follows a predictable story formula where a problem is introduced that eventually gets solved in the end and the girl gets the guy. This collection of short stories deals with a pool of characters who are written to be just like us — humans with problems of our own — but they’re the type of humans who appear more vulnerable than others. Since all stories are written from a first-person perspective, readers are given a peek into the minds of these people. The great thing about this short story collection is that you have to read these over again to get to know the characters.This is a piece of work that stands out amongst others because instead of focusing on the story, it focuses on the complexity of the characters, which is a recurring trait that is found in the most successful works. You’ll never fully understand their stories, as each only gives a glance into their lives, but the beauty of this ambiguity is that Flood basically gives us the upper hand in deciding how the rest of the stories play out.This is a piece of work that stands out amongst others because instead of focusing on the story, it focuses on the complexity of the characters, which is a recurring trait that is found in the most successful works. Would I suggest this for a night of relaxing reading? Most certainly not. This requires a bit more concentration, but once you figure out your way through the complexity, it certainly is rewarding. My best way of truly enjoying this book? Grab some friends who you think might be into this kind of stuff and discuss! I have read a lot of disappointingly predictable works in my time as a reader, and trust me, that time hasn’t been long, but Red Girl Rat Boy is certainly not going on that list.
Imprint, University of Waterloo Official Student Newspaper
Read an excerpt from Red Girl Rat Boy
Back to the top