Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.
Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.
Written with tight lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic novel that reveals Christine's deepening knowledge of the adult world around her and of her own complicated place in that world.
”With her now-complete portrait of the artist as a young girl, McGrath proves why she’s a writer to pay attention to."
~ Jade Colbert, Globe and Mail
"Wendy McGrath's Broke City is a story of class and chaos, inheritance and innocence. Exacting. Excellent."
~ Marcie McCauley, Herizons
"What's clear is McGrath's facility with language, for describing perfectly the sensation when understanding is within one's grasp, close enough to taste on the tongue but somehow not close enough to feel between one's teeth."
~ Yutaka Dirks, Alberta Views