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Description
Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award
Longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2024
A riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships and the dynamic vitality of Vancouver's former Hogan's Alley neighbourhood.
1930s, Hogan's Alley—a thriving Black and immigrant community located in Vancouver's East End. Junie is a creative, observant child who moves to the alley with her mother, Maddie: a jazz singer with a growing alcohol dependency. Junie quickly makes meaningful relationships with two mentors and a girl her own age, Estelle, whose resilient and entrepreneurial mother is grappling with white scrutiny and the fact that she never really wanted a child.
As Junie finds adulthood, exploring her artistic talents and burgeoning sexuality, her mother sinks further into the bottle while the thriving neighbourhood—once gushing with potential—begins to change. As her world opens, Junie intuits the opposite for the community she loves.
Told through the fascinating lens of a bright woman in an oft-disquieting world, this book is intimate and urgent—not just an unflinching look at the destruction of a vibrant community, but a celebration of the Black lives within.
Contributor Notes
Vancouver-born Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and The Walrus and her work has been widely anthologized. Her poem 'Welwitschia' won the 2020 Contemporary Verse 2's Editor's Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM's 2021 Short Forms contest. Chelene is the founder of her own literary studio, Breathing Space Creative, through which she has launched The Forever Writers Club, whose members are writers focused on creative sustainability. Chelene works as a literary agent with the Transatlantic Agency. She lives in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.
Awards
- Long-listed, CBC Canada Reads
- , ReLit Award for Fiction
- Short-listed, City of Vancouver Book Award
- Short-listed, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction
- Long-listed, Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
Editorial Reviews
“Packed with history and heart, this is one great debut novel.” —Vancouver Sun
“Junie takes readers to the under-documented world of writer Saidiya Hartman’s errant Black women and girls. Their experiments in living freely—as singers, nightclub owners and artists; as mothers and daughters; as members of a small, tight-knit Black community—are tales of “the beauty of black ordinary,” as Hartman writes in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Outside of Hogan’s Alley and the East End, these girls and women are surveilled and threatened, but within it, they can be their flawed and fantastic selves.” —The Globe and Mail
“In Junie, Knight explores the complex emotions existing between mothers and daughters while highlighting a long-lost corner of Canada in the 1930s. She uses a poetic narrative to shed light on each of the four women’s fragile dreams vulnerable to being crushed by the hard world in which they live.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“Fittingly for a coming of age story, Junie’s challenges and growth are Junie’s central concerns. Knight captures her as keenly observant and wonderfully conflicted. She aches with yearning, intuiting — if not yet able to name — places and roles where her adult self will be fulfilled.” —The British Columbia Review
“Junie is a triumphant and breathtakingly beautiful account of a largely neglected novelistic terrain—Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver. It reminded me what is possible when an author of Knight’s magnitude and talent creates a luminous sense of place.” —Canadian Literature
