Annabel was a fascinating read. The prose was so languid, smooth and sedate that you enter into the thoughts and feelings of many characters with ease. Kathleen Winter’s writing style is impressive in its quiet intensity, and it took an interesting story of a boy-girl coming of age and moved it beyond the mundane to the extraordinary. Now, the topic was fascinating in itself, because I haven’t read about hermaphrodites before and the struggles Wayne underwent to find out who he really wanted to be were touching and at times sad. As the central character, Wayne was enough to fill a novel, but I loved that we also entered into the stories of the people around him: his mother, his father, his childhood friend, and his teacher. These secondary characters reinforced the loneliness and isolation of the Labrador life into which Wayne was born and created a more complex story, well worth reading.
More about Annabel from the publisher.