Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster, reviewed: At her untidy best – The Globe and Mail

Feb. 10, 2017

Eden Robinson’s first book, the 1996 short-story collection Traplines, is the CanLit equivalent of a beloved punk band’s untouchable debut. It also demonstrated that Robinson loves a good mess. The book is a ragged, relentlessly dark minor classic full of bored First Nations kids whose lives are marked by fights, bad sex and untrustworthy relatives. Her first two novels, Monkey Beach, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2000, and 2006’s brutal Blood Sports, share DNA and characters with some of the stories in Traplines. They established her not only as one of Canada’s pre-eminent indigenous writers – Robinson is a member of British Columbia’s Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations – but as one who takes an inordinate amount of glee in cramming together traditional narratives with contemporary tales of violence and survival.

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