Pandora

Pandora is the story of a feisty little girl growing up in a working-class home, played against the distant yet pervasive drama of World War II. At home, on the street and at school, Pandora is a full participant in the struggle for love, success, recognition, status, survival in a kids’ society where who gets to play skipping or who has the most colored pencils is as high-stakes as any deal brokered in a boardroom. Here is a mirror - sometimes distorted, sometimes all too true - of conflicts in the adult world, with classroom seats standing for houses on a street. Especially engaging is Pandora’s sly awareness, acted out with ironic humor, of the exercise of power, its attractions and its pitfalls. Pandora is the first novel of Sylvia Fraser, who a decade later recalled deeply buried memories of having been sexually abused by her father. Though Fraser wrote Pandora with no conscious knowledge of her abuse, she later came to see many clues lurking under its fictional surface. Pandora can be read as a prequel to Fraser’s non-fiction bestselling trailblazer, My Father’s House: a Memoir of Incest and of Healing, credited as one of the first books to break the taboo on sexual abuse. In an Author’s Note, Fraser decodes Pandora’s sexual secrets, once hidden even from herself.

“I have read Pandora twice. It is about to circulate among friends, and when it returns I want to read it again” - Victoria Daily Colonist

“Just as J.D. Salinger was acclaimed for his unique portrayal of adolescence, so should Fraser be lauded for her rendition of childhood” - Alberta Red Deer Advocate

“A beautiful piece of writing and a brilliant portrait of almost any small girl” - Gainesville Florida Sun

" A stunner. Innovative in its technique, precise to one-thousandth of a gesture in its characterization. Irrefutably humorous" - Saturday Night

“A modern reworking of the Pandora myth. . . a domestic Lord of the Flies in a small-town setting” - David Staines, Harvard University

“As rich and complex as anything I have read. It is everything we knew - the brazen exclusion of the playground, the agony of valentine distribution” - Pittsburgh Press

“‘Pandora makes you hold your breath. It doesn’t seem possible that it’s going to keep on being as good as it has been so far. You watch the writer doing harder and harder tricks, and hope she doesn’t slip. She doesn’t” - Winnipeg Free Press

“The best novel about children to come along since Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye” - Books in Canada

“Here is the truth of what happens to all of us in childhood, beautifully told, unflinchingly honest” - author Farley Mowat

“Pandora is about much more than childhood for it touches upon the whole human dilemma” - author Margaret Laurence

“Pandora can stand beside British and American masterworks portraying life from a child’s perspective” - City and Country

“Writing like quicksilver, the author lights up Pandora from all angles. Fraser doesn’t ask you to look back on your own childhood but it’s impossible not to” - Victoria Daily Times

“Her prose has a fine prismatic quality and her descriptive power are such that I could almost smell the shavings in the classroom pencil sharpener” - Toronto Globe and Mail

“My teenage son and daughter both love it too. So much of Pandora stays in the mind to be pulled out and examined again and again” - Journal of Canadian Fiction