Naked under a tattered shower curtain, 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz sits at the back of a bus, confessing her hopes and fantasies as she searches for her little brother, Sonny, who thinks he's a dog. As the horror of her upbringing is exposed, Tracey's stories twist the truth and take us in with games and delusions she uses to escape her despair. In Maureen Medved's The Tracey Fragments (Anansi $17.95) the adolescent in crisis emerges through storms of the mind and a winter blizzard as the heroine scavenges for hope. 0-88784-6122

[BCBW 1998]