Read This
By Andre Bovee-Begun
Dora Borealis
By Daccia Bloomfield
ECW Press, 228 pp.
As a quiet eight-year-old more or less ignored by his creativeclass parents, Flip strikes up a rapport with the ghostly Belle, who may or may not be part of his wild imagination. Almost 20 years later, Flip's life is falling apart while his relationship with his disembodied girlfriend remains intact. Daccia Bloomfield's debut novel is a coming-of-age story possessed by Belle's vengeful (or at least clingy) spirit. Deadset on keeping Flip's childlike devotion, Belle tries to fend off everything that threatens to pull him away from her, including his long-abandoned novel, his friends, you (Bloomfield casts you in the story as Flip's confidante), and the cute girl he just met who has him seriously thinking it's time to start acting like an adult.
Dora Borealis tells a memorable story about giving up (or not) on the fierce, arbitrary dreams of childhood. It's enlivened by Bloomfield's manic originality in fleshing out the world of Toronto's network of starving artists. The early years that set the stage for the novel's main action, however, are unexpectedly bland. Mixtapes are sacraments, girls fantasize about falling in love, and friendship amounts to riding bikes together. It could be, but isn't, lifelike. Dora Borealis is a good read, but if Flip's boyhood were more emotionally believable, it would make for a poetic novel about the cost of never growing up in the city.
