SarahJanet's Books

No Fixed Address

It's a miracle! Actual book reviews! With content!

No Fixed Address, by Anita van Herk

This is this month’s book for my regular book club. It was chosen by my former roommate, and it’s a book she’s been bugging me to read for quite a while. Again, it took book club to get me to read it (I have so much to read these days that I often need some kind of external motivation to get me reading something)

It’s a Canadian author, one that has a very distinctly Canadian style. (I’d be hard pressed to define exactly what Canadian style writing is, but this is definitely it. Perhaps I should have taken a Can Lit course in University, but I dodged that with a couple of other CanCon courses.)

It’s the story of a traveling underwear salesperson and her unusual life on the road. Set in Alberta, it’s one of those books that works particularly well for locals. It’s always more effective in a book about the road when you know exactly which roads they’re talking about and what they look like. While I found the main character kind of off-putting and was not at all able to get into her head, I thought her story was interesting and unusual enough that I enjoyed the book almost despite the unlikable main character.

I found the bookending structure of the book to be kind of unnecessary and actually rather annoying, and I found the ending to be pretty unsatisfying. Overall, though, I enjoyed the book and I’m curious to see what other people thought of it on Sunday.

posted by SarahJanet @ 3:01 PM