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Claudia, an expansive novel by Saskatchewan’s Britt Holmström, spans generations and continents. With the lightest of literary hands, Holmström manages to explore the currents of violence that shape women’s lives, and she does it without a hint of didacticism.

Each and every word rings true, elucidating the detailed and textured experiences of a seemingly ordinary woman.

We follow Claudia from young girl to matriarch as she traces the formative events of her life in Sweden, Canada, Spain and Latvia. Decades are spent fulfilling her role as a doctor’s wife who is devoted to children, dinner parties and lunch with other ladies.

As she says of herself, “God knows there is not much to me; I need every bit, no matter how bourgeois, how cosseted, how removed….” And yet the simplicity of Claudia’s voice, her honesty and her evolving self-awareness add up to a rich, often profound journey—one that in Holmström’s hands reveals resonant and unsettling truths.

Cosmetic surgery leaves Claudia blessed—or cursed—with a heightened sense of smell, enabling her to “sniff out the difference between false and genuine sincerity.” Try as she might, her efforts to retreat into ease, beauty and traditional notions of successful womanhood are thwarted by her own visceral intelligence.

More significantly, her life is underscored by intersections with violence against women, and it is these senseless acts that drive the trajectory of her story. In this way, what seems like a quiet novel is in fact devastating in its capacity to understate all-too-often unspoken realities. The contrast between a well-ordered existence and the pervasiveness of gendered hatred enables the character Claudia and the eponymous novel to sneak up on you and get under your skin.

Claudia tells us: “There are days when I want to holler for justice, but I know better than to expect the impossible.” But the moving and unexpected ending to this powerful novel is transformative, a satisfying and profound resting place after a darn good read.

Shawna Dempsey is a Winnipeg-based performance artist and curator.

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Don’t expect a collection of neutral-toned, het- norm Prairie coming-of-age stories here. Chandra Mayor’s All the Pretty Girls is decorated with dirty carpets, dusty stairwells, empty whiskey bottles and shitty diapers. And don’t be fooled by the cover. These stories will not fulfill any retro fantasies for full-figured young women frolicking unaccountably in the waves wearing sturdy-yet-sexy undergarments. These are the stories of young women who buy their underwear at the Salvation Army thrift shop and feed their children food-bank cereal, women who have bad relationships with men and, often, questionable ones with women.

I want to say that these stories are about survival, but that seems trite. These 10 first- person narratives pull the sheets off the windows to reveal the lives of women who are trying to make a go of it, but are not quite equipped to do more than scrape by. Mayor doesn’t gussy up these stories to make it easy for the reader. Her language is generally sparse, the dialogue naturalist and sometimes bleak.

In its simplicity, this language renders some perfect sentences, like the following from “Parquet”: “None of us had ever been hit with a belt, and the thought of it struck terror deep into our tiny sticky hearts.” The poetry in Mayor’s language is found in shrapnel words that stay lodged under your skin long after you’ve finished the book.

Mayor frequently resists the typical narrative arc of the short story in order to reflect on moments, feelings and interactions, rather than getting from A to B in plot points. Several stories read like vignettes— sometimes, they don’t go anywhere; they stop at the pictures Mayor wants you to see, and she makes you look hard at them. Her characters share the unrelenting quotidian details of trying to make do on not enough, and often it’s everything but pretty. It’s these characters who share quiet moments of connection and happiness that keep you turning the pages, hoping with them for something better around the corner.

Mayor finds some hope in relationships between women, although she is careful not to idealize these friendships and romances. Being a homo doesn’t save you from the train wreck of life here. In fact, perhaps the greatest strength of All the Pretty Girls is that, like its characters, readers don’t have an easy way out.

T.L. Cowan was a pretty girl but suspects that her looks are fading. When not staring into the mirror, she works on her Ph.D. dissertation and writes smutty stories for performance.