![]() “Grandma is hard of hearing and Mom is hard of listening,” she writes, “so I have to yell all day long.” Where Swiv’s voice is urgent, young and curious, Elvira’s is full of memory, anger and mourning Her father is gone, her mother pregnant, and Swiv must now protect her unborn sibling from these loud, bawdy, messy mothers who gab about sex and nakedness and drop pasta and pills everywhere and can’t even rinse the sink after gargling oregano oil. She’s stuck in a tiny Toronto home with her embarrassing mother and grandmother. Her grandmother keeps a scrapbook of the fights in her life, and now Swiv is suspended from school for the same thing. Swiv is nine and comes from a family of fighting women. ![]() ![]() Her eighth novel, Fight Night, is an ode to grandmotherly defiance, embodied by a kind of ancestor that I, too, know well: a mouthy immigrant, an old-world fighter, a fiery human contradiction. Toews’s primary theme is the battles of women in a world of cruel men, and intergenerational misfires as mothers try to protect and warn their daughters. ![]()
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