"Dower's depiction of postwar family and small-town dysfunction is reminiscent of MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies. Pivotal events in Stony River were [also] inspired by a true crime." --The Globe and Mail
"A taut, compelling portrait of a small town's underbelly. With sinister imagery and crisp, evocative prose, Dower pulls back the cloak of 1950s 'innocence' to expose the ugly secrets that lie in wait, teeth grown sharp in the dark." --Billie Livingston, One Good Hustle
"Think Mad Men but even madder." --Toronto Star
"Dower does an excellent job chronicling the formative years of her central trio in a coming-of-age story that effectively tackles heavy subjects including domestic abuse, mental illness, and rape." --Quill&Quire
It wasn't all poodle skirts and rock 'n' roll--in Stony River, the 1950s was a perilous time to come of age. Absent mothers, controlling fathers, teenage longing and small-town pretense abound, with the threat of violence all around: crazy fathers, dirty boys, strange men in strange cars, one dead girl, one never seen, and another gone missing.
Tricia Dower is a native of New Jersey. Her short fiction has been published in the US, Canada, and Portugal. She won The Malahat Review's 2010 fiction literary award and subTerrain magazine's 2015 Literary Awards for creative nonfiction. Her story collection Silent Girl (Inanna 2008) was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Award and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Stony River was first published in Canada (Penguin, 2012) and shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award.
