Sitting Pretty

Caroline Adderson’s Sitting Practice was released to wide acclaim in Canada back in 2003. The book won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2004 VanCity Book Prize. Though Adderson has seen three books published in Canada since -- 2006’s Pleased to Meet You (Thomas Allen) and two books for children in 2007 -- Very Serious Children (Scholastic) and I, Bruno (Orca) -- Shambhala’s US publication of Sitting Practice in early March should bring Adderson’s work to a wider audience.

When it was first published in 2003, novelist Margaret Gunning reviewed Sitting Practice for January Magazine:

Caroline Adderson's first novel, A History of Forgetting, was a stunner, combining such unlikely elements as the loneliness of a gay hairdresser watching his partner's mind rot from dementia and the bizarre desire of a young woman to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. It shouldn't have worked, but grabbed viscerally due to sheer writerly skill, not to mention the kind of nerve that pushes an author to take emotional risks.

Adderson's sophomore effort, Sitting Practice, is a fine freestanding novel, even if it suffers a bit in comparison to the raw impact of the first one. It's a solidly good book, well worth reading for the consistently fine writing and the quirky humanness of its main characters.

You can find that review in its entirety here.