Family Resemblances

The conflicting pulls of private dreams and family expectations lie at the heart of these two debut novels by young Canadian women.

Beth Levy, the young adult narrator of Sidura Ludwig’s Holding My Breath, begins her story with her own parents’ wedding in Winnipeg in 1947. In the moments after the ceremony, as the couple, Goldie and Saul, enjoy a few moments of privacy, Saul expresses the dream that will henceforth be the guiding vision for this couple’s shared life: a three-storey house that Goldie has already had her eye on, with a covered porch and an eat-in kitchen, and lilac bushes and tomatoes growing in the back yard. As Goldie hears her new husband talk about this house that he promises they will live in one day she feels herself falling in love with him all over again. At that moment, Beth tells us, “My father smelled like everything she thought she wanted in her life—the McAdam Avenue house, four children, a membership to Hadassah.”

It...