Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot

By Nicole Markotic

In boomtown Western Canada, a quirky young woman grows up amid a family dynamic that leaves her feeling misunderstood and left out. She's a child of immigrants from war-torn Germany and Croatia, parents who cling to vestiges of a traumatic past that never seem real enough for their daughter. To leave her stifling family behind and to forge a "new normal," she earnestly tries to fit in with her best friend Vera and family, and subsequently―crazily―an even more rigid life of Mormonism.

Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot is a narrative of longing for self-creation, but also for self-destruction, restlessly twisting and turning through triangular friendships, teenage delinquents, Nazi killing hospitals for the disabled, the inane ex-boyfriend, a dying father's sudden conversion to parenting, and fantastic tales of the Mormon Angel Moroni on estrogen. One's own story, so she discovers as she invents it, is both an escape from, and a coming to terms with, the scrapbook that is life.

The language in this novel is sensuous, inventive, down-to-earth, poetic. Here, the Canadian novel―in the tradition of Robert Kroetsch, Joan Barfoot, Lisa Moore, and now Nicole Markotić―continues to develop personal histories that plummet readers into the world of storytelling.