Quiet Time by Katherine Alexandra Harvey

In this debut novel, we met Grace, a troubled and sensitive young woman, and are told her story through different timelines. Grace is growing up in rural, coastal Newfoundland with her unreliable, distant, and troubled parents and two siblings. We alter between her tremulous childhood with her parents and her relationship as a young person with the equally tremulous Jack. Their dependency on drugs and each other spirals in and out of good and terrible and ends poorly with the arrival of their stillborn son. This leaves Grace in an even worse place than she was before.

Grace also sees ghosts and is too sensitive to all that is around her. The novel has a touch of mythical and fantastical elements, and you are left wondering if you can trust Grace and everything that she is seeing, what is real and what is not. It is a heavy novel, filled with a traumatic childhood that lends itself to a traumatic young adulthood and a coming of age. Grace struggles with addiction, mental illness, and self-esteem issues. She has been fighting her whole life to be seen and be noticed and to protect her siblings. But you will find yourself cheering for Grace and hoping that she can make it out of her dark hole and find the light. It is a story of redemption, of fighting through the pain and being able to stand on your own two feet.

Quiet Time is Harvey’s debut novel and puts her in the ones to watch column. It is a difficult and disturbing novel but one in which hope can crack through.

Katherine Alexandra Harvey is the executive director of ReLit, and the founder and editor of ReLit Magazine. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Public Folklore from Memorial University. She has been nominated for the Governor General’s History Award, the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award, and the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Fresh Fish Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, Exile Quarterly, Quill and Quire, Riddle Fence, The Newfoundland Quarterly, and more. Quiet Time is Harvey’s first novel.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vagrant Press (Aug. 29 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1774711249
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1774711248