The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

Shortlisted for the 2012 Giller Prize, The Imposter Bride was one of the hot books at my Book Club's Christmas Exchange this past December. It made it's way around the room at lightening speed, and eventually went home with someone else (I can't find my meeting notes right now! and no, I don't keep notes...no worries!!!)

I bought this one and enjoyed it quite a bit. I have been spending a lot of time at the hockey arenas lately with 3 kids playing winter hockey, I am invariably at an arena at least 3 times a week. When tournament season hits, it's awful--the expectation is for the players to arrive an hour early, and then play for an hour. Rather than squander the time away, I like to find a quiet spot and bang off a few chapters when possible.

The Imposter Bride kept me company this week, as my daughter Abigail was playing in the Leaside March Madness Tournament. Their team didn't fair very well, but I made good progress with my book!

Here's a quick summary provided by Book Browse:

"An unforgettable novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of WWII, whose sudden disappearance ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew. 
The Imposter Bride blends gorgeous storytelling and generation-spanning intrigue in the story of Lily Azerov. A young, enigmatic woman, Lily arrives in post-WWII Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to Sol Kramer. But, upon seeing her at the train station, Sol turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep - and doomed - love. But it is immediately clear that Lily is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters when she disappears, leaving a new husband and a baby daughter with only a diary, a large uncut diamond - and a need to find the truth. 
Who is Lily and what happened to the young woman whose identity she stole? Why has she left and where did she go? It's up to the daughter Lily abandoned to find the answers to these questions, as she searches for the mother she may never find or truly know." 

(I actually take issue with the term "mail-order bride" as stated in the above review.  It's an awful, pejorative term that really doesn't have any place in describing the influx of immigration to Canada of young adults who are left without family after WW2.)  

From the author's own website, here's a much better summary:

"In all my writing I explore the slipperiness of morality and identity in the face of extreme loss and threat, though the settings and circumstances change with each novel. The Imposter Bride is set in the postwar Jewish community of Montreal, the setting of my own childhood. Here, too, one of the igniting sparks was an event in my family history: My paternal grandmother immigrated to Canada for the purposes of marriage, only to be rejected by her prospective bridegroom at the moment of her arrival in Montreal. The young woman who arrives in Montreal at the beginning of The Imposter Bride faces the same crushing rejection that greeted my grandmother at the start of her new life in Canada, but her circumstances are entirely different. The arrival I depict in that opening scene is drawn from my mother’s descriptions of greeting relatives who came to Montreal in the late forties, having survived the Second World War in eastern Europe. The Montreal that I describe grew out my own experiences and memories of a community where loss and dislocation lay at the core of so many people’s lives."  http://www.nancyrichler.com/bio.html

Here's a brief interview with the author about her latest work:  

I enjoyed this story. It was mysterious, and engaging. The author draws clear characters and describes several distinct perspectives during the course of several years. I was fascinated to explore the issue of child abandonment and the fall out created by such unnatural actions. I truly saw the depth of Lily's despair and grief, and Richler does an excellent job of painting the picture of a young woman who is struggling with PTSD. There was no such label for shell shocked civilians in the late 1940's but there was an entire generation and their families were left to pick up the pieces.

This story also examines the effect on the daughter who is left to grow up without a mother. Ruthie is a resilient child who questions why Lily simply walked out of the apartment and never returned. She internalizes a great deal of guilt about not having a mother and imagines the negative reactions of others. 

It was a well written novel and I would recommend it as a good read. I will read her first novel Throwaway Angels because I believe that the media may have passed over it as a result of the sexual orientation of the protagonist....I'll let you know what I think!