Review: How the Blessed Live

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2002

The first sentence in How the Blessed Live stretches out like a cat: "Beyond a winding ribbon of sand, the water of English Bay supports mammoth bellies of cargo ships." The first novel by Susannah M Smith is a carefully crafted book. Her main difficulty, as is the case with possibly all such novels, is to develop character and plot that stand out and aren't buried somewhere under poetic observation. At this, the book succeeds, though it takes ...