Book Review: The Children of Mary

By Marusya Bociurkiw, Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2006.  220 pp.; $19.95.  ISBN NO. 0-9736709-4-0

 Reviewed by Lindy A. Ledohowski

Reading the first few pages of Marusya Bociurkiw’s The Children of Mary, I found myself quickly immersed, and felt destined to enjoy the book. Like the novel’s protagonist, Sonya, I was once a young girl of Ukrainian descent, raised in Winnipeg on pyrohy and religion, who finally found her adult home in Toronto.  However, it soon became clear that the book’s appeal goes beyond the cultural or regional audiences that can identify themselves in the book.

The Children of Mary is Bociurkiw’s first full-length novel; her earlier works include a collection of short stories, The Woman Who Loved Airports (1994), and a book of poetry, Halfway to the East (1999).  It takes the best of her earlier works and synthesizes them into a narrative form that is structured in episodes evocative of her shorter works, with a lyricism that echoes her poetic voice. 

The novel is Sonya’s coming-of-age story in which she learns how to deal with her abandonment by her father, her sister Kat’s death, her mother’s cancer, and her own sexual orientation and heart-break, all within a Ukrainian-Canadian milieu. It is also about the pain and love that we experience at the hands of our families. 

Sonya begins her life in Winnipeg’s North End Ukrainian enclave and later moves to Toronto where she is employed as a “nine-to-fiver.”  In Toronto, she forms a lesbian circle of friends and meets Zoe. After their 14-year relationship dissolves, Sonya returns to Winnipeg to nurse her mother through breast cancer treatments. She also heads further west, to Alberta, to find her estranged father.  Through these reconnections with her family and with her first boyfriend, Terry, a closeted gay man, and with Anglique, her sister’s first girlfriend – Sonya begins to come to terms with her past.

In the process, Bociurkiw explores memory, womanhood, family, and grief–and the interplay of these very personal things in a larger, public context. The author often casts the private sense of Sonya’s loss and grief in the public domain, with references to TV shows, pop culture and news events. In addition, rusalky, or mermaids, figure prominently, representing a commingling of the female in Ukrainian folk culture and the sisterhood of lesbianism.  Their image haunts Sonya; they are symbolic of not just specific lost women, but of a loss of womanhood that Sonya finally learns to begin to claim by taking over her baba’s role as a healer and herbalist.

Like the motif of the river that winds its way throughout the book, Sonya’s pain is concealed behind a crisp outer shell, which is upheld by her sardonic voice that cuts like a razor.

With a tone of affection and an insider’s eye, Bociurkiw satirizes both the Ukrainian-Canadian community in Winnipeg and the lesbian community in Toronto.  For example, when Sonya returns to Winnipeg, she says: “My memory of Mrs. Woshinski is giant, out of proportion.  How strange to see her now, a tiny, well-meaning elderly Ukrainian lady, who had gone to the trouble of putting on nylons, and a dress, and a pale blue summer coat, just to meet my train.”  While the description gently mocks Mrs. Woshinski, there is a rich and heart-warming recognition that Sonya is touched by this “well-meaning elderly Ukrainian lady.” 

Though Bociurkiw’s characterizations are well-rendered, the book contains inaccuracies, particularly, when historically significant moments are used to place Sonya’s story in a larger context.  For example, Sonya reflects upon the 1971 murder of Helen Betty Osborne in The Pas, Manitoba. However, she refers to “La Pas” and says the crime was committed “in the ‘60s.”  The most glaring discrepancy is the placement of Winnipeg’s “flood of the century” in 1998 rather than 1997.  The image of the Winnipeg flood both opens and closes the novel and functions as a major symbol paralleling the movement of the women in the novel.  These errors may have been unconsciously made by Bociurkiw and overlooked by the book's copy editor, but their number makes one wonder whether they might be tools in the service of thematic ideas about the unreliability of memory in accessing truth.

Nevertheless, the novel’s heroine is compelling and her story is engaging and touching.  The various communities to which both Sonya belongs are treated with the kind of teasing that we accord to those who we know and love, despite their many foibles.  Therefore, I couldn’t help but overlook some of the awkward errors as I fell a little bit in love with Sonya and her family.

Lindy A. Ledohowski is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Toronto.