New Release & Guest Post – The Antique Picker’s Daughter by Melanie Dugan
Synopsis
“The first thing you need to know: They’re not antiques.
The second thing you need to know: I’m not his daughter.”
Abandoned first by her father, and then by her mother, Frankie has been left in the care of her deeply religious grandmother. When her grandmother’s religious convictions tip into delusion, Frankie decides to run away.
Life on the street in Toronto is hard, and with winter coming, it gets tougher. This is when Frankie first meets Francis, a man old enough to be her father. He starts training her in “the game,” as she comes to call it; buying, stealing, and reselling “inventory” at inflated prices. Through winter, spring, and early summer, the two become a team, traveling around small towns and villages in southern Ontario.
As Frankie discovers, life on the road holds dangers she can’t anticipate, and her precarious world tips into disaster when Francis abandons her in an unfamiliar town. Betrayed, alone, and deserted, Frankie realizes she’s in a dangerous situation — will she be able to find her way out on her own?
The Antique Picker’s Daughter explores youth homelessness, human trafficking, and one young woman’s search for safety.
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Guest Post
The Antique Picker’s Daughter and the tangled underbrush of life
The title popped into my head out of nowhere one day. Almost immediately after that, the first two lines of the novel arrived: “The first thing you need to know: they’re not antiques.
The second thing: I’m not his daughter.”
I liked the way Frankie, the narrator, immediately undercut assumptions readers might have about what the story was going to be by alerting the them to the fact that she, Frankie, isn’t what she seems to be, and the situation isn’t what it seems to be, situating the reader right away in her morally ambiguous, off-balance, smoke-and-mirrors world.
Frankie’s situation is precarious. At several junctures along the way, she has to decide whether to continue doing things she has reservations about doing in order to survive.
The reader’s situation is also precarious: they have to decide whether Frankie is someone they are willing to spend time with. Will her story be worth the time they’ll have to invest in it?
In this way, the reader’s experience mirrors Frankie’s: both are embarking on an uncertain journey that may be challenging, with no guarantee of a reward at the end. But to me, that’s a lot like life; every day we find ourselves dealing with things we may not want to have to address, or we may find ourselves in situations where we don’t have all the information we need to make the best decisions to achieve a specific outcome — and that’s simply how it is: we have to manage even though we’re not guaranteed a positive result. Life is like that, and fiction mirrors life, and reading fiction can help us navigate our way through the tangled underbrush of life, help us see past the trees to the forest, and past the forest to the even bigger picture, whatever your bigger picture holds.
About the Author
Melanie Dugan is the author of Sometime Daughter (“A stunning debut,” The Kingston Whig-Standard), Revising Romance (“…heartwarming, amusing, and…downright sexy,” Midwestern Book Review), Dead Beautiful (“Artful and funny,” Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer), Bee Summers (“…a carefully wrought portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life,” Brenda Schmidt, Quill & Quire), and Hard White (“It is a very compelling and beautifully-crafted story…I highly recommend it,” Skeleton Press).
She lived in Boston, Toronto and London, England, before settling in Kingston, Ontario, where she now lives.
She has worked in libraries and bookstores, and was Associate Publisher at Quarry Press in Kingston, and also served as Managing Editor for Poetry Canada, Quarry Magazine and Canadian Fiction Magazine.
In 2009 she was promotions director for the inaugural Kingston WritersFest.
She has studied writing with Leon Rooke, Keath Fraser, Kim Moritsugu, Helen Humphreys and Anita Rau Badami.
Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards including the CBC Literary Award.
