I bought this book for the cover -- I’ve learned that I love anything that’s given  a @HouseofAnansi ‘A List’ reprint. So between that and the captivating synopsis, I knew I needed to read this book.

The book is written in a poetic, train-of-thought style and mostly is from the perspective of Annie, a contemporary woman who, after seeing reference in an archive to a woman known only as “Mrs. Richards”, sets about to discover the rest of her history. Who was Mrs. Richards? What was her first name? Where did she come from? Where did she end up? While doing research to uncover the answers to these questions, Annie learns more about herself, her own past, and what she wants out of her life.

It was only last year that a local paper did a profile on Barbara Ann Robertson, a founding president of the Nelson Library Association. The article noted that “always referred to only as Mrs. J. Roderick Robertson, her given names were only recently discovered.” This blew me away. That Mr. Robertson could take all the credit for his wife building my local library a hundred years ago, and have the woman behind it obscured. How many other women faced the same fate? Or worse -- not remembered at all? It was with this in mind I devoured Ana Historic. 

The book plays with history, fiction, and memoir. The lines between the actual history Annie is uncovering, reflections of her relationship with her mother, her husband, and her children, and the fiction she crafts for Mrs. Richards to fill in the blanks are blurred, switching in the middle of some paragraphs, entwining Annie and Ana Richards, and their fates.

Having just read “Women and other Monsters” by @j_zimms, a book of essays asking women to embrace their monstrousness, I loved the cosmic coincidence that in this book there was also a lot of comparisons between women and monsters, “there is a monster, there is something monstrous here, but its not you.”

This was a beautiful work of Canadian feminist ficion. It is a short read, but a beautiful, engaging one, and will be one of my favourites of the year.