Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler

Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way.

On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around.

That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre altogether.

So you can enjoy it on both levels; a well-told series of historical adventures, and a clever subversion of genre expectations. Whichever way you take it, there’s a running thread throughout the book exploring racism, sexism, and colonialism.

Quite the debut novel!