Junie

“Knight’s Junie takes readers to the under-documented world of writer Saidiya Hartman’s errant Black women and girls. Their experiments in living freely – as singers, nightclub owners and artists; as mothers and daughters; as members of a small, tight-knit Black community – are tales of “the beauty of black ordinary,” as Hartman writes in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Outside of Hogan’s Alley and the East End, these girls and women are surveilled and threatened, but within it, they can be their flawed and fantastic selves.” —The Globe and Mail “Packed with history and heart, this is one great debut novel.” —Vancouver Sun “Fittingly for a coming of age story, Junie’s challenges and growth are Junie’s central concerns. Knight captures her as keenly observant and wonderfully conflicted. She aches with yearning, intuiting — if not yet able to name — places and roles where her adult self will be fulfilled.” —The British Columbia Review “In Junie, Knight explores the complex emotions existing between mothers and daughters while highlighting a long-lost corner of Canada in the 1930s. She uses a poetic narrative to shed light on each of the four women’s fragile dreams vulnerable to being crushed by the hard world in which they live.” —Winnipeg Free Press “Junie is a triumphant and breathtakingly beautiful account of a largely neglected novelistic terrain—Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver. It reminded me what is possible when an author of Knight’s magnitude and talent creates a luminous sense of place.” —Canadian Literature