National Network for Equitable Library Service

This startlingly original collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Metcalf-Rooke Award. Set in locales and time periods as varied as nineteenth century England, contemporary Spain, and postwar Alberta, these five stories and two novellas introduce us to characters whose obsessions occupy the borderlands between fantasy and reality. In the title story, the half-black grand-daughter of slaves becomes an exotic dancer in New York during the First World War -- and also develops a passion for goldfish. "Agnes and the Fox" features an elderly British woman in Vancouver, her imaginary companion and the young Pakistani housekeeper who faces challenges of her own. In "Graves of the Heroes," a Canadian woman in Spain searching for the grave of her great-uncle, a Civil War veteran, makes an unexpected and disturbing discovery. This collection does not offer up the usual fare of domestic settings and small infidelities typical of so much of Canadian short fiction. Rather, these stories explore wider vistas and subjects and the alchemical currents of time and place and character. In Robertson's hands story and narrative are not secondary elements and are developed in a beautifully crafted and often lyrical prose. The Goldfish Dancer more than fulfills the high expectations created by Patricia Robertson's first collection, City of Orphans, nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.