Silent Girl Speaks

Local author Tricia Dower releases a compelling collection

Silent Girl, a collection of short fiction by Victoria’s Tricia Dower, is a strong first book that bares the darker nature of human reasoning and fallibility.

The eight stories, lightly inspired by works of Shakespeare, range widely, but all follow females struggling to navigate their lives. At times comic and often tragic, Dower’s work pushes her protagonists to choose between themselves and society; love and power; family and humanity.

Silent Girl traverses age and place as it introduces readers to a university student in Kyrgyzstan, a prepubescent girl in New Orleans and an Albertan farmer’s widow. What stretches between them is a fighting desire that pits them against tradition, politics and race.

Dower’s style is straightforward with few literary frills and is twisted slightly to fit each piece. Her tales start simply and expand page by page into complex fables. Silent Girl is worth reading because of its scope and its well-arched characters, who continually surprise both the reader and each other.

Highlights include “Nobody; I Myself,” a post-Vietnam take on Othello, and “Deep Dark Waves,” a twisted look at domestic violence. Dower also provides some unusual insight into an author’s mind and muse in “Backstage;” where she explains her inspirations for the stories in Silent Girl and their connections to Shakespeare’s plays.

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Silent Girl
by Tricia Dower
Inanna Publications,175 pages, $22.95