Maggie MacDonald reviews Catherine Kidd's Missing the Ark (Conundrum, 368 pages, $20) in the Globe and Mail this week:

Catherine Kidd is a well-travelled performance artist who has published several CD/chapbook combinations. Missing the Ark is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the performance piece, Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Taxidermy, also published by Conundrum Books. Based in Montreal, Conundrum is a small press responsible for breeding eccentric talents, publishing poetry, graphic novels and prose books that fall outside the banal cottage reading that permeates the CanLit landscape. But it is in describing cottage-appropriate domestic details that Kidd's writing works best.

Missing the Ark begins with narrator Agnes Underhill slowly meandering through metaphors and animal imagery, while the story emerges only gradually. Agnes is living with her mother Berenice and her baby Rose, in student housing in Vancouver. Berenice worries that Agnes is mentally unwell, and assumes the role of mother to Rose, rather than grandmother. Berenice is cosmetically concerned and juggles several lovers, while Agnes reflects on various topics, ponders and addresses letters to Rose, sometimes about family, sometimes about random topics such as how real a swing set looks on a lawn, compared to other nearby objects, or how she left oil pastels out in the sun to let them blend together.

To read the rest of MacDonald's review, click here.

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