ALISSA McARTHUR

Quarry by Catherine Graham

Discovering your parents’ flaws and fallibility is an uncomfortable part of growing up. The narrator of Catherine Graham’s novel Quarry, Caitlin Maharg, is a young woman facing painful loss and distressing discoveries about her parents as she takes tentative steps into adulthood. As she matures, Caitlin finds there are no easy answers, that “[a]ll of life is a bend of the truth, the curve in the question mark.” An accomplished poet, Graham makes her fiction debut with the luminous Quarry, a delicate coming-of-age story with an engaging protagonist. Caitlin is an only child, a teenager living with her parents in southern Ontario. When Caitlin’s mother falls ill, her combative grandmother moves in to care for her and the family’s idyll begins to fall away. The titular quarry is an open-pit mine, filled with water, beside the Mahargs’ house. Caitlin’s parents buy the house hoping that the serene locale will help her mother heal. As the family heads toward tragedy, Graham spins beautiful prose out of the mystical presence of the quarry. Exploring with her cousin Cindy, Caitlin touches the quarry’s ancient fossils and ponders the “lost lives of the little.” Graham’s lyrical writing shines through in such passages, spinning beautiful contemplative images out of simple moments. “We Brailled the language of stone,” Caitlin narrates, hinting at her later attempts to decipher her parents’ stories and process her losses. Just as the limestone quarry is “layered with the weight of dead animals,” the Maharg family’s secrets have piled up over the years. The novel opens with Caitlin diving into the quarry with Cindy. Their carefree summer play is darkened when Cindy points out their house has no photos of Caitlin’s parents’ wedding. Caitlin instinctively knows not to question this absence too deeply, but the mystery sur-

rounding the Mahargs’ marriage shapes her isolated upbringing at the quarry. As Caitlin grows and begins keeping secrets of her own, she is forced to reckon with her parents’ choices and try to understand them as flawed people. Graham sensitively manages Caitlin’s relatable teenage growing pains, from body issues to awkward romances, while allowing her to gradually process the unfolding family revelations. The pace is only rushed at the very end when Graham ties up some loose ends too quickly, but as Caitlin finds some answers, more questions suitably arise. Graham’s own parents died when she was around Caitlin’s age, and she has spoken about how writing helped her cope with her grief. With Quarry, she has mined her personal experience of loss to produce a strong debut novel—mysterious, rich, and full of quiet insights about family dynamics.