THE MILK CHICKEN BOMB
By Andrew Wedderburn
The Milk Chicken Bomb drops us into the hilarious, amoral, focused world of a neglected ten-year-old boy. In sharply detailed prose, Wedderburn gives us a tender and realistic look into the child’s inner life, his imaginative day dreams as well as his hilarious, slapstick, heartbreaking adventures with his friend Mullin and an assortment of the town’s eccentrics.
The little town of Marvin, Alberta, is their playground and their education. They reel from one misadventure to another in a series of exciting vignettes. Now they are selling lemonade in winter, exploring secret tunnels, stealing mail or setting up a betting operation at the bonspiel. They make missiles out of paint-filled glass tubes. They plan revenge on the violent school bully. They run away or hide away in their underground dugout. They outwit the mean hardware store owner and finally acquire the plans for the milk chicken bomb, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction open to them. I too have been successful with my humorous stories. I am told they too make people laugh but with a tear or two salted in.
I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHERE AM I?
By Heather Birrell
Heather Birrell, this brilliant writer, flings out her dazzling sentences to move us with ease into the inner dialogue of her characters. She flips us back and forth in time with Alice Munro-like precision. She flays her characters, opens them up, We see the spinning clocks of their souls., whether they are autistic boys, foolish people, lost people, people without balance or a centre; She slip-slides from one point of view to another, reels us into brief plots which may never completely end and we recognize all the vicissitudes each one of us encounters on the trail. Birrell is addictive. Birrell’s interior monologues offer wavering and diffuse glimpses into the human experience.
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