Stunt

I've always felt a kinship to Claudia Dey, both of us being right-brained alumni of the same lawyer- and engineer-producing high school. The florid style of her plays and her Globe and Mail advice column has a timeless, nearly ethereal quality. Stunt, her first novel, brings to mind the poetry of Gwendolyn Mac-Ewen (the subject of Dey's play The Gwendolyn Poems) or prose of British author Jeanette Winterson, with its mythological allusions and shape-shifting characters.

Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old and alarmingly precocious, lives in a down-at-heel neighbourhood in Toronto. 'Stunt' is the secret nickname her father has given her, since she is fearless and loves to thrill him with her reckless, improvised acrobatics.

In this novel's quirky world, all the characters have colourful names: Eugenia's ghoulish and exquisitely beautiful sister is named Immaculata. Their narcissistic mother—an exotic dancer turned B-movie actress—is called Mink. And their father's name is Sheb Wooly Ledoux.

Stunt, a debut novel from Toronto playwright and Globe and Mail columnist Claudia Dey, is a surprising book on two counts.

Popular Toronto website, Shedoesthecity.com recently reviewed Claudia Dey's Stunt:

Dey lights up

Zoe Whittall

Reading Stunt is like arriving at a buffet where every dish on the table is unusual, made with oddly paired ingredients, but tastes delicious. For days afterwards you can't stop thinking about it, and plain food lacks a certain thrill.

Acclaimed Canadian playwright Claudia Dey's first novel is a celebration of the bizarre and a triumph of literary invention.