Paired together, creativity and sorrow provide the engine for Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s debut, Other Evolutions. After losing her eighteen-year-old son, Oliver, Mrs. Jentsch says, “Love is a powerful inventor, grief even more so.” The university student died in a car accident while driving his fourteen-year-old neighbour, Alma, from Montreal back to their hometown of Ottawa. Alma, who lost her right arm in the crash, narrates each of the non-linear novel’s four parts: “Vanishing,” “Absence,” “Loss,” and “Homecoming.”
Born to a Mexican mother and a Jewish father of German descent, Alma is raised in a dull residential neighbourhood, where she stays into adulthood. Despite the boredom of the capital region, her measured and self-aware opinions about her chaotic family spark an enjoyable page-turner. We first meet her in her twenties. In the opening passage, “Nothing Ever Happens in Ottawa,” she attends a boring wedding. “I always feel too human at parties,” she...
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of the poetry collection Port of Being. She divides her time between Toronto and London, where she’s writing a novel.
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