King

Last fall, I heard Tanya Chapman read from King at the Vancouver Public Library. It was the beginning of her book tour, and she seemed pretty happy about the whole thing. In fact, one of the things I remember most about the reading is her infectious smile -- that, and the richness of her voice. She charmed us all while she brought us into a world of trailer parks, without stooping to the level of the more-famous Trailer Park Boys.

Hazel is a drifter. Where she came from is unclear. Where she's headed is ambiguous. But as the narrator of this quiet meditative book, Hazel quickly becomes the anchor of the small trailer-park community that she stumbles into.

Hoping to escape her past life, Hazel finds herself living in the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park with King, a tough guy with a deep affection for beer, temper tantrums, guitars and motorcycles.

King

Tanya Chapman

Coach House: Toronto, 2006

This is a strange and endearing book. The protagonist, who calls herself Hazel, is a girl from an upper-middle class family who has moved to a trailer park and shacked up with King, the eponymous mixed-up rock-star-cum-layabout she's fallen in love with.

King is a novel all about Hazel. She's a girl who never felt comfortable in her old conventional life of high school and parents. Her rebellion used to mean sex and drinking and lies but then she found the road, and one day she just kept driving. She ended up in a small town, living in a trailer park and falling in love with a bad boy named King. Hazel's voice, sweet and true, drives the book, meandering, wondering, gathering momentum and sighing with each betrayal.

King is a novel filled with a writer's rhythms. The dialogue is like that you would overhear in a bar where the beer smells like rust. With sentences that ramble on in your head and the characters' minds, Chapman can even make whole chapters out of a few words such as "King's home."

Orphan Love and King are two gritty novels lost in the backwoods of Canada's willingly down and out ...

Trailer Park Girl

Review by Catherine Nutter

Tanya Chapman's debut novel, King (Coach House Books, 224 pp., $21.95), is a coming of age story as gritty as diamond dust. Chapman's hard-drinking characters are wildflowers, gracing the liminal space between trailer park and open road.

FICTION