Kootenay girl goes wild

If you are born in Cranbrook, BC, home to a dark little mall, a strip of fast food restaurants, and a parcel of speedboat-owning boys whose fathers have made too much money in logging and mining, you are statistically more likely to become an NHL player than you are to win a Governor General’s Literary Award.

Kate Pullinger has beaten the odds. So of course I had to read her book. Which is delightfully exotic and entirely un-Cranbrook-like. Not even a hint of icy, windswept plateau in her descriptions of Luxor, Egypt.

The Mistress of Nothing is about an amazingly devoted lady’s maid from Escher (sounds like the English equivalent of Cranbrook) who follows her TB-ridden employer to Egypt, and… well, all sorts of adventures ensue.

This was another of those books that left me scanning the author’s bio and the critics’ quotes and anything else I could read to prolongue the experience, and I learned that the story is based on real-life events. Shocking and delicious! I LOVE true stories!

Kate Pullinger, on behalf of those of us from the Kootenays who aspire to non-NHL greatness, thank you.

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