It's still possible that you haven't heard of Susan Juby, the fast-moving, literary chameleon. Since her emergence in 2002, the Nanaimo-based Juby has mastered a time-traveling style of writing in which she channels her younger self.

First, her three Young Adult novels about a girl growing up in Smithers became the basis of a TV show, Alice, I Think. That trilogy was followed by two widely acclaimed Young Adult novels, Getting the Girl and Another Kind of Cowboy.

Then she switched genres for a memoir about overcoming teenage alcoholism, Nice Recovery, recently included in the Top 100 of 2010 by the Globe & Mail. As a succinct recollection of times gone very, very blurry, Nice Recovery was praiseworthy, but I grunted through the last fifty pages.

Nice Recovery, as a whole, was PG-13. I wanted more dirt and less calm revelation. I felt slighted until I realized that the most important thing about the memoir was to cross the genre boundary and make the recollections of a very adult matter available and readable to young people who need the benefit of someone else's hindsight.

Now Juby is nicely cracking the adult fiction market with The Woefield Poultry Collective, published in the U.S. as Home to Woefield. A rather inauspicious-looking cover told me that I would laugh out loud, which is generally an indication that I likely won't. In this case, I was wrong. I did laugh out loud.

Woefield is a multi-perspective novel about a young urbanite name Prudence who inherits her uncle's decrepit Vancouver Island farm.

Peripheral characters are sparkling with life and serve as a reminder of Juby's wonderful and elastic imagination. We meet Sara, a precocious young girl with a group of clucking show chickens, and Seth, an alcoholic and selectively agoraphobic celebrity blogger. Earl, the grizzled farm foreman teeters on the edge of cliché with his heart of gold.

The age ranges that are used for these characters season this funny and contemporary tale. I, for one, am pleased to see Susan Juby's departure (at least temporarily) from Young Adult fiction. Juby's writing is too strong to be hindered by content and language restrictions imposed by the Young Adult genre. In Woefield, Susan Juby's mature talents have come home to roost.

W.P. Kinsella once wrote, "I had just about given up on humour in Canadian literature, when, as I was wending my way through the sometimes good, sometimes bad, but generally humourless nominees for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, all of a sudden I started laughing out loud, and calling to my wife, saying 'Listen to this! Listen to this!' The book that excited me was Alice, I Think by Susan Juby.";

In whichever genre she chooses, Susan Juby is still laugh-out-loud funny. 978-1554687442

Lindsay Williams is a bookseller on Galiano Island.

[BCBW 2011]