ŷ������

“Poor Deer came to me when I was small, and scared, and alone, and in need of hope, however fragile, that one day I would find a way to make up for what I’d done. Her hooves kick out at my shins. She nips and hurts. She clings and sighs. She demands justice. She never forgives.��

At the age of four, Margaret’s life is forever changed by a tragedy. Not the schoolyard flood, which also happened that day. Something far darker. Was she to blame? Over time, the incident, to her, seems ever more impenetrable. She’s too young to understand the implications, and her mother has decided that Margaret is a “changeling”—and turns away from her daughter with revulsion. Margaret’s Aunt Dolly steps in to give love and support.

But Margaret lives in her own world much of the time. Her guilt has engulfed her, despite not fully apprehending what she did. Rumors and whispers abound in the Maine mill town where she lives, she knows she is blamed for wrongdoing. Overwhelmed and emotionally ill-equipped fto absorb such fierce adult accusations for a girl her age, she invents a cloven-hooved creature she calls “poor deer�� (from misinterpreting an adult saying, “poor dear��). This poor deer insists that Margaret come to terms with her role in the disastrous event, and this creature gives the story a fable-like presence.

As the book opens, Margaret is sixteen, in a hotel room trying to write her confession of what went wrong that day, during a game of “Awake Oh Princess�� with her best friend, Agnes. Poor Deer is the most constant element of her life, an apparition that is the manifestation of her guilt and shame, that can reside in the corner of a room, or even on her shoulder. Beautifully written, the structure is defined with alternating chapters of her start-and-stop attempts to confess, and chapters about her painful childhood. Margaret has even invented an alternate written language that she uses to write her confession.

“I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical and the facts feel like borrowed broken things picked out at random from a jumble of hearsay and old gossip. Once I tried to tell my mother the truth about the day of the schoolyard flood and she slapped me and said: “MARGARET MURPHY, YOU WILL NEVER REPEAT THAT AWFUL LIE AGAIN!�� and I never did.��

What Margaret does with her fabricated tales is create a soothing safe space --she writes false confessions with happy endings. Poor deer continues to be her conscience and admonish her for not telling the truth. She has done this for a dozen years, ripening her imagination. Magic and morality make a fine combination in this brilliant narrative that portrays how penning fiction may ultimately help Margaret grasp reality. Her only other sanctuary is meeting an old man in the woods who teaches her to train messenger pigeons—she's a quick study.

Oshetsky stands out in the remarkable way she writes an adult novel yet fluently captures a child's voice. The prose is delicate and exquisite, heart-breaking and devastating. The narrative was so powerful that I kept probing the basement of my own memories, certain that I’d done a similar action. That’s what I call twinning with a novel!

“Even the tiniest sliver of guilt can grow and fester until it becomes so gargantuan that it turns into a monster.�� Meticulous and devastating, Poor Deer will resonate with me for a long time. Change is possible, redemption within reach. Margaret hopes for a happy ending.