White Lies

Written by Sara de Waard

DCB

978-1-77086-649-2

224 pp.

Ages 13+

May 2022

Birthdays should be joyful celebrations, especially for young people. I know that lots have elaborate events (perhaps sometimes too extravagant) but for some the mere recognition of the day as auspicious would be enough. Sadly, for 15-year-old Missy Bell, her last three birthdays have been tortuous and her sixteenth is almost upon her and she has no reason to expect any different. Ever since the death of her younger brother Jeremy when she turned 13, Missy's special day has been marked by her parents behaving badly through their grief and Missy dealing with the fallout on top of her own loss and guilt. In fact, most of the time, they don't even recognize her needs, with her father Tim, whom she refers to alternately as Trick or Treat, wallowing in alcohol and other illegal substances, and her mother Susanna now in prison and unable to see beyond herself.  

An untethered Missy has found refuge at the vintage toy store of Ren Lin, where she organizes and cleans voluntarily for multiple hours most days of the week. Even though Ren's perfect daughter Valkyrie doesn't trust Missy and is often rude to her, the store is a far better choice than going home to a house with little, if any, food, and a father often drunk or high on the couch hurling abuse at her. By keeping the routine of working at the store, seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Tandalay every Monday, visiting her mother the first Wednesday of the month, and going to school, Missy is keeping it together. For now. 

But two new people enter her life and offer her something she's rarely experienced. First, there's the new custodian, Miss Maalouf, who extends supportive kindnesses to Missy. And then there's classmate Luke Geurtin, who also visits a mother at the penitentiary. Missy and Luke form an unorthodox relationship that is both supportive and hostile, as the two damaged teens try to navigate feckless parents, poverty and abuse, and systems purported to offer support. Only time will tell whether they can feel beyond their traumas and circumstances.

 

Sara de Waard, an author and screenwriter of Métis descent, has delved into numerous issues in White Lies, giving us a tough story about childhoods, or at least teen years, saturated with misery and discouragement. It's about young people not living their best lives because those who should be there for them aren't and, in fact, work against them, mistreating them with neglect or emotional abuse, and sometimes even physical harm. Those who should love them, their parents, give them very little but strangers like Miss Maalouf, Ren and even Missy and Luke for the other step up, offering what they can. But Missy and Luke are working at a deficit, trying to survive and, knowing that their parents are the only ones they have, make do. And still they persevere.

The soft ceiling tiles soften the profanities of the inmates, but can't silence them. The four-letter words puff from the ladies' mouths like rings of fire, blazing through the massive concrete gathering space. But they fall on my deaf ears. I'm used to it. Nothing shocks me now. I may look like china in a bull's shop, but I'm a matador of life's crap.  (pg. 22)

Thankfully, without solving all of Missy and Luke's problems, Sara de Waard has given them hope, in each other and in others–though perhaps not their parents–that perhaps a little kindness will help lift them out of difficult circumstances or at least sideways so they can avoid harm.

The Big Bad Wolf in My House

Written by Valérie Fontaine

Illustrated by Nathalie Dion

Translated by Shelley Tanaka

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-501-4

32 pp.

Ages 5-8

March 2021

It's International Women's Day and, to women who find themselves in abusive home circumstances and explore ways to cope including fighting back legally or finding shelter elsewhere, we stand by you, and Valérie Fontaine and Nathalie Dion offer hope.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

A little girl could always see through the wolf who married her mother.

He batted his eyelashes and purred like a pussycat

in front of my mother.

But he looked at me with cold eyes and sharp teeth.

The honeymoon was sour, like lemons.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

But when her mother gets home late from work one day, the wolf show his true self, shouting names and hurling food. The child removes herself from the situation, but she can see the impact it has on her mother whose smile begins to droop along with her body.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

Her mother tries to shield her child but the wolf is scary, leaving finger marks on the girl's arms and coming into her room as he chooses.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion

But one day, with only five minutes notice, her mother declares that they are leaving. They go to a house full of kind mothers and children but no wolves. 

The big bad wolf can huff and puff all he wants,

but this house will not fall down.

The little girl knows the tale about a big bad wolf. It's the one where he huffs and puffs to blow the house down. The little ones in the story try to protect themselves in shelters of straw and wood but to no avail. Same with this child. She tries a fortress of blankets to shield herself, or a closed door of wood but neither stops the big bad wolf. She does build "a fort made of bricks. I put it up around my heart." But it's not until they go to a new house, a shelter for women and children, that they find safety.

Told from the child's perspective and analogous to the story of the big bad wolf and the three little pigs, The Big Bad Wolf in My House makes a situation of domestic abuse very disquietingly elementary. The mother marries a man who is abusive to her and her child. He may appear sheep-like to begin with but he's dangerous. Both mother and child find ways to cope with the physical or emotional attacks, but coping is not safety. It's just a delay. Both in its original French (Le grand méchant loup dans ma maison, 2020) and this English edition (translated by Shelley Tanaka), Valérie Fontaine's story demonstrates the impact of domestic abuse on the whole family and how adults and children find their own ways to survive. Though she parallelizes the chilling abuse of a man against his new wife and stepchild with a child's fable, Valérie Fontaine never, never trivializes the situation, only gives it context. After all, the big bad wolf could be any one. 

I was just introduced to Nathalie Dion's work last week (I Found Hope in a Cherry Tree by Jean E. Pendziwol) and realize how versatile her art is, creating lightness and hope in one book and now tension and despair in The Big Bad Wolf in My House. Painting by hand with gouache and digitally with a pastel brush, Nathalie Dion still imbues her illustrations with the starkness of the family situation, engulfed with shadows and angles and using colour and lightness minimally and generally only associated with the child or situations outside the home. 

Some may despair of this tale of domestic abuse but Valérie Fontaine and Nathalie Dion have taken us through the darkness from a child's perspective and shown us an outcome that offers the promise of respite.

From The Big Bad Wolf in My House by Valérie Fontaine, illus. by Nathalie Dion