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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Engrossing window into mind of bright, troubled teen

Reviewed by: Bev Sandell Greenberg

Posted: 11/14/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Cordella Strube resists sugar-coating her novel.

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Lemon

By Cordelia Strube

Coach House, 274 pages, $20

Readers, take note. This tasty novel is neither about a food, nor a flavouring.

In fact, Limone, a.k.a Lemon, is the moniker of its smart-mouthed, world-weary Toronto 16-year-old protagonist.

At first glance, she's a brasher version of Nomi Nickel, the rebellious Mennonite teen in Winnipegger Miriam Toews' Governor General's Award winner, A Complicated Kindness.

However, unlike Nomi, history-obsessed Lemon eschews sex, drugs, booze and cigarettes, railing instead against the injustices of the world rather than the confines of her religion.

Cordelia Strube is a Toronto author and playwright. She was nominated for the 1996 Governor General's Award for her novel Teaching Pigs to Sing, the story of a dysfunctional family. Three of Strube's other novels have been shortlisted for the Relit independent publishers award. Lemon is her seventh novel.

At the outset, she introduces Lemon's off-kilter family: her mentally ill adoptive mother, her agoraphobic stepmother, a birth mother whom she has never met and her lascivious dad. Not surprisingly, Lemon has only two friends.

The plot heats up when the school counsellor suggests that Lemon write a play to improve her English mark. During the auditions, she humiliates a group of kids who later exact their revenge on her. Things start to unravel, forcing Lemon to come to terms with her problems.

Written in the irreverent, X-rated voice of the heroine, the first person linear narrative is a cross between the cynicism of The Catcher in the Rye and the sardonic humour in Winnipegger Daria Salamon's novel The Prairie Bridesmaid.

Lemon has opinions on just about everything, and she's not afraid to express them.

"My real mother is in my heart," she says. "In my head she's that girl who gave birth in the can at Walmart and left the baby in the toilet bowl. Gives new meaning to the phrase shop till you drop."

Strube excels at depicting Lemon as a multi-layered character by allowing us to see her in a variety of settings -- at home, school, her friend's house, on the job at Dairy Dream and at the hospital where she volunteers.

Not only is Lemon compassionate to the young cancer patients she visits, but she maintains her individuality at all costs, even at the expense of being unpopular. And often her outspokenness demonstrates a wisdom beyond her years.

"Unless you're a super-brain or gorgeous, you're going to end up in some bottom feeder job at some corporation that's going to restructure every time you take a crap," she says. "If you make it through the first cuts, you might as well chain yourself to your cubicle because they're going to want your soul."

Throughout the novel, Lemon gives us her unique take on historical figures such as Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Joseph Stalin and Marie Antoinette. She also comments on books like Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Anna Karenina.

The novel falters somewhat in its portrayal of two of the supporting characters. We don't learn enough about Vaughan, the house guest of Lemon's stepmother. As for the six-year-old cancer patient, her dialogue seems a tad too sophisticated.

To her credit, Strube resists sugar-coating the novel. It's an engrossing window into the mind of a bright but troubled teen.

Bev Sandell Greenberg is a Winnipeg writer and high school teacher.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 14, 2009 H7

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