In Rebecca Bromwich’s intricate debut novel, Not Your Penance, a Canadian indigenous parable about rocks that run frames our understanding of the title character’s struggles with her cascading experiences of loss, absence, failure and mistake. Across multiple time periods Bromwich deftly illustrates Enid’s unsettling by weaving together narratives of motherhood with mythology and courtroom drama. In particular, Enid’s experiences of motherhood (both as a child and as an adult) and her life as a lawyer are depicted as complicated domains where relationships and decisions are intimately moral. Ultimately, Not Your Penance challenges the reader to recognize penance for what it really is—purgatory—and the courage it would take for any of us with checkered pasts to intentionally and with hope choose our own futures, and stop running. "

-Michelle Hughes-Miller Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, University of South Florida

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich's Not My Penance is a tale for our times. The young, female protagonist, Enid, wrestles with her own inner demons, including her prior involvement in a criminal offence and her inability to prevent her mother's downward spiral into mental illness. Along with these challenges, Enid works to transit into adulthood with limited support. Throughout the story, she supports the edgy characters that cross her path - from an absentee father/ journalist crime reporter, to a boyfriend with addictions, to her mentally ill mother, to a husband, Arthur, carrying on a flirtation, to the criminally involved offenders that Enid prosecutes, having grown up to become a lawyer, and, finally, to the young family she is raising with her life partner. The novel is set against the back drop of the striking Alberta landscape. It begins with an Indigenous legend of the big rock, sometimes called the Okotoks Rock. Like the characters in the novel, the rock is split into two. While fractured, the characters function in ways that are often insightful and loving. Like the "scent of cigarettes and despair and dust" that pervades the courtrooms Enid visits, the story feels "real" and inviting.Readers will be delighted by this post coming of age tale, filled with brokenness and small yet inspiring acts of grace.

-Josephine L. Savarese is an Associate Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick and a frequent contributor to Demeter publications.

While the author’s first novel, Not Your Penance, sought peace out of chaos, here Rebecca Bromwich brings us a novel where her characters choose movement, even while rooted in place by the forced stillness of a pandemic. Enid, the titular character, journeys against guidance and toward herself, exposing the depth of the emotional ruins of her life. This is a tale of divorce, of mothering through disruption, and especially of deepening self-awareness. It is also a tale of life, fraught with messiness and constant construction, but with the hope of a vaccine and love.

-Dr. Michelle Hughes Miller, Associate Professor in the USF Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of South Florida