The Globe and Mail is crazy about The Mitochondrial Curiousities of Marcels 1 to 19
Dree, the protagonist of this novel, spends her 15th birthday at a memorial pancake brunch for her father, which takes place in his favourite Edmonton watering hole. Dree's account of getting to the brunch with her mother, who has long been separated from Dree's father, and her sister – one of missed buses and ghastly weather – sets the stage for a novel that seems bleak, to say the least.
The best thing about her earlier birthdays had been the scavenger hunt that her father devised, full of clues that took the hunters to various Edmonton landmarks. This birthday there is no hunt, but Dree is sure that her father has left clues for her, and money that he had said he was putting away for her on a regular basis.
It soon becomes obvious that there are no clues, there is no money. Needing respite, Dree's mother sends her and her sister to stay with their grandmother in Twimbly, site of the Alberta Psychiatric Hospital, the employer of most of the town's residents and, formerly, of Dree's mother and father.
Dree discovers that her father may have been involved in a death that took place at hospital many years previously, and getting to the bottom of this mystery take her on a circuitous and often perplexing journey. Along the way, she crafts small figures out of pairs of socks – the Marcels 1 to 19 of the title.
A barebones account of the novel's narrative line might suggest, for good reason, that The Mitochondrial Curiosities bears all the stigmata of yet another teen-angst novel. Dree, with her piercings and her mostly very bad attitude, is by any account another troubled teen, friendless and just about to fall off a cliff and into streetlife anywhere but Edmonton.
In this debut, though, Jocelyn Brown transcends the genre with a novel of depth and texture, rich with incident and very contemporary dialogue. She takes her readers deep into the complicated psyche of her narrator and heroine (yes, that's the right word), which is, as it turns out, exactly where her readers will want to be, richocheting from one OMG to another, in the thrall of this wonderfully original character's navigation of life without her father.
