She makes us lentil soup, then slides an ice cube into each of our bowls until it cools. After work, she pads around the townhouse in Chinese slippers and a plaid housecoat. She wears her hair in a tight bun at the top of her head and has a bright face, as if the moon itself walked into the room. I can handle most of it, but I can’t stop staring. There are rules here: no staring, no chewing with my mouth open, no sugar before bed, no wasting food, no talking back. Miranda has a daughter, Lydia-Rose, of about the same age and the biggest section of the book will feature these three as Shannon grows into adolesence. Y does acquire more continuing form on Shannon’s fifth birthday when she is adopted by Miranda (“a cinnamon-colored woman who works as a Molly Maid and was once married to a man named Dell”). Not only that, there is the back story of how Shannon came to be conceived and abandoned, supplying another set of circumstances and characters for another set of vignetteish short stories.

Each one gives author Celona a chance to explore a new set of adults and their circumstances as well as chronicle the development of her heroine - and each reads like a fairly well-done short story. Lily will go through a number of foster homes and names before she turns five. The “abandoned baby” motif is a convenient device for that approach. Y may be (and is) a novel and the central character is always present - but, as is often the case with a first novelist, it is structured to read just as much like a collection of linked short stories. The story of Shannon’s abandonment (actually, the first name she gets in the hospital is Lily and that will change several times before she becomes Shannon) takes up the first 10 pages of Marjorie Celona’s debut novel but, for the reader, it is an accurate harbinger of what is to come. She disappears into the cemetery behind the cathedral.

She doesn’t look back, not even once, and the man watches her turn the corner into Quadra Street, her strides fast and light now that her arms are empty. He sees my mother kiss my cheek - a furtive peck like a frightened bird - then walk quickly down the ramp to the entrance, put me in front of the glass doors, and dart away.

Now, in the parking lot, he is hidden behind the glare from the rising sun in the passenger-side window of his van. In fact, Vaughn, an instructor waiting for the Y to open, observes the whole episode: Purchased from Indigo.caThe bundled-up newborn who will grow up to be Shannon is left by her mother at the front doors of the Y in Victoria, B.C., in the pre-dawn hours when it is certain she will be found.

Annabel kathleen winter summary