Whitetail Shooting Gallery

'Whitetail Shooting Gallery', a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie. Cousins Jennifer and Jason live close together as small kids, exploring their rural home. They live in adjacent, sometimes overlapping, households. But one act of family violence begets another, and the cousins drift apart. By adolescence, the two are estranged. Jennifer grows closer to her bestfriend, Donna, an evangelical minister's daughter who rebels against her family by immersing her- self in a world of vectors, fractals, perfect math, and porn. Jason's world is hockey. Donna likes his street-hockey bruises. Jason's also interested in Gordon, a semi-recluse ex-teacher who lives on the periphery of town and con- structs art installations from leather, tamarack, animal skulls, and other found items. Horses, bears, kissing cousins, and other human animals conspire in a series of conflicts that result in accidental gunfire and scarring-both physical and emotional-that take many years to heal. "The teen world in 'Whitetail Shooting Gallery' will make you squirm. It's dark and gritty, but it's also pretty funny. ... In 'Whitetail Shooting Gallery', Lapointe gives us an animalistic view of the teen world. This is not small-town rural life as idyllic or pastoral. Lapointe's world reflects the turmoil, raging emotions and hormones brewing inside adolescents ... Her writing isstrong, sharp and visceral. Lapointe finds the beauty and, equally importantly, the humour in this ugly, carnal world ... Lapointe's vivid, powerful voice and her beautifully savage view of rural prairie life." - Winnipeg Free Press