Highways and dancehalls /

The special appeal of this fictional journal of a young stripper on the road in British Columbia is not the easy-to-visualize details of a "dancer's" existence, although they are fascinating. What is most striking here is the very normalcy of the narrator's tone, a facsimile of ordinary life that is at once comforting and shocking. (Perhaps this comes from the fact that Canadian writer Atkinson herself worked as a stripper for some years.) Sarah, a 17-year-old high-school drop-out from a cultured Cambridge, Mass., family, drifts into the stripper's life when her brief job as a busgirl ends disastrously. As "Tabitha," she negotiates the runways, the bars full of hungry men, the dressing rooms where the "dancers" share make-up tips and stories from their shattered lives, and the motel rooms and apartments where grass and coke numb the pain of too much reality. More from inertia than from any real motive, Sarah is bound to boyfriend Lloyd, who sells the drugs he grows and brutalizes her. Not surprisingly, Sarah's errancy can be traced to her parents' violent divorce and to the lingering certainty that she was somehow unworthy of her father, who moved to Israel and writes the kind of chatty letters meant to keep her at a distance. Even more fundamental is a serious intestinal disease that has eaten away at her self-esteem since childhood. Her anguished memories of painful treatment at the hands of callous and brutal doctors provide clues to her troubled psyche. Sarah's life is revealed in kaleidoscopic vignettes, alternating between matter-of-fact descriptions of her jobs and flashbacks to her stays in the hospital. Her peripatetic existence on an endless highway of bleak dance halls takes her across Canada, but her life doesn't alter fundamentally until she achieves a crowning moment of insight. Her story is not so much a teenage tragedy as a Portrait of the Artist as a Very Resilient Young Woman who must descend to the depths to find her footing. (May) FYI: Highways and Dancehalls was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

"Maybe on some cloud up there the patron saint of exotic dancers sits, a curling wand in one hand, a Greyhound schedule in the other. She accepts offerings of tattoos and tears; she blesses you with safe passage." So writes 17-year-old Sarah, now "Tabitha," as she travels through British Columbia as a stripper. Her world is one of G-strings and T-bars, filthy venues, physical exhaustion and drugs, of brief friendships interrupting an otherwise intense loneliness. This debut by Canadian author Atkinson is Sarah's journal, describing in brutally honest detail not only life on the circuit but also her broken family life and childhood surgery that left a disfiguring scar. Atkinson writes with candor and a personal knowledge of life as a stripper, and it is this empathy that elevates the novel from voyeurism to moving testament of how one woman finds inner strength.‘Yvette Weller Olson, City Univ. Lib., Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

What might have been a fascinating story falls short, thanks to its inability to get to the heart and essence of its protagonist, a teenage stripper. First published in Canada and shortlisted for the Governor General's award, Atkinson's debut novel follows two years in the life of Sarah (a.k.a. Tabitha, her stage name) as she criss-crosses western Canada appearing in one seedy dive after another. Sarah, who was raised in a middle-class broken home, dropped out of school to move in with Lloyd. We are never privy as to what events drove her to leave home, nor is it explained why she can't return: We know only that she prefers supporting Lloyd and his scheme to grow marijuana in their apartment. While waiting for the first crop to pay off, however, someone has to bring in some cash, which becomes Sarah's responsibility when the two discover that she can make more in one night stripping than in a week of waitressing. When she returns on the occasional free weekend, Lloyd takes her money to buy more plant lights and starts physically and verbally abusing her. He's eventually thrown in jail, but life doesn't improve for Sarah, who sticks to the circuit. Atkinson, a former stripper herself, paints a revealing portrait of the life: the drugs, the biker boyfriends, the clientele (including those down front, in what the strippers call ``gyno row''), and the loneliness of life on the road. But we never learn much that is essential about the interior Sarah--she remains an enigmatic figure, more of a type than a complex, idiosyncratic human being. Undoubtedly interesting for its glimpse into a seedy, corrupt, rather inaccessible world, but without the depth needed to rise above its sensational subject matter.