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![\"Elisa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/3435846_web1_Heather-and-Arizona-O-Neill-credit-Elisa-Harb.jpg\")
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Elisa Harb photo<\/p>\n
Heather O\u2019Neill (right) has enlisted her daughter Arizona (left) to illustrate her two most recent books.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill is probably most famous as the unicorn double winner of CBC\u2019s Canada Reads: her own extraordinarily beautiful and moving novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006), won the 2007 competition, and she last year was victorious in championing Catherine Leroux\u2019s 2020 L\u2019Avenir (in English as The Future, 2023 translation by Susan Ouriou).<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill\u2019s credentials roster is long, wondrous and vigorous, including cherished novels in 2014, 2017, 2022 and 2024 (the most recent The Capital of Dreams), as well as collections of poems (1999) and short stories (2015). Throw in the scripts for a difficult-to-find but lovely-to-behold feature film, Saint Jude (2000), and the eight-minute short End of Pinky (which can be found on YouTube), and you have here an artist bursting with talent and skill at the absolute and sustained top of her astounding game.<\/p>\n
Our micro-epic voyageur here is Valentine Bennet, a young, shy, lone-but-not-lonely and humble heroine who is utterly content with her modest work at a d\u00e9panneur at the Berri-UQAM m\u00e9tro stop. <\/p>\n
Valentine lives to dwell in her m\u00e9tro beneath and amidst the city, and is therefore deeply disturbed when her entrenched patterns are upset. She is quickly thrown much outside her world \u2014 or at least much further into it.<\/p>\n
Valentine, orphan (Dickens!) and amateur poet, learns that she has a doppelganger, Yelena, a ballerina, an artist of a different stripe. Valentine must quest out into the urban world, more Yelena\u2019s than her own, using her m\u00e9tro as her steed. She must acquaint with eccentric strangers, she must dodge the dodgy and she must figure out who she really is. All this in 30 quite steadfastly short, serial chapters.<\/p>\n
These instalments are all discrete and intended to be read, as O\u2019Neill herself announces, in a single, Saturday-morning-with-coffee-and-eggs sitting. To be sure, there are recaps of whence we\u2019ve been and dangles of whither we go, but it is all done without inelegant intrusion.<\/p>\n
En route, there are cases of mistaken identity, there in an unearthing of an aged common ancestor who herself used to galivant across Europe in full bohemian but somehow lucrative mode. And there is a forbidding Montreal underbelly, something literally called \u201cthe Mafia,\u201d but barking more than biting.<\/p>\n
And there is also a very dear romance in this little Romance. The dalliance cannot and does not fully fruit, but it is there, and it brings with it, too, the requisite wisdom and sadness.<\/p>\n
Valentine in Montreal just abounds in interlude. There are moments in each of the 30 little pieces to make you grin, to make you chortle aloud; all gracefully connect and carefully construct.<\/p>\n