The Mousehouse Years: A Memoir

The Mousehouse Years is a graphic memoir set primarily in the slums of Toronto in the early sixties. It tells the turbulent story of a dysfunctional romance, a single mother raising six children and a childhood filled with adversity and adventure. This fascinating tale takes us inside a "large but broken family whose children years later, gather around the cocooned figure of their mother as she lays swaddled in sheets on her deathbed. The drawings are uniquely unpretentious and intuitive, like the drawings of a child. This instinctive pictorial dimension is the eye of the story, giving testament to the past, a past inspired in turns by disappointments or rejoicings, in a world filled with its own share of the ominous and hilarious which filled the author at times with dread, at times with wonderment and incredulity, leaving their ghosts of memory as vivid imprints on her and now on us, haunting and unforgettable. ...This maverick graphic memoir, told with a distinctive, original voice and seen through an unblinking, unrelenting eye, reweaves the past clearly without adulation or censure, judgement or despair, the sun always there at the author's back. - excerpt from the Foreward by Rachel Manley, Governor General award winning author of the memoirs 'Drumblair', 'Slipstream' and 'Horses in Her Hair'