Not Your Penance

by Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

Overview

One quiet October morning, in a suburban neighbourhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, after awakening from a recurring nightmare, 41-year-old stay-at-home mom and social media aficionado Enid Kimble receives two messages—one a disquieting phone call about her mother, and the other a newspaper clipping in a plain envelope in her mailbox—that start to unravel her carefully woven-together world. These two startling messages force Enid to grapple with her past and future in new ways. In a story that weaves together crime, legal drama, romance, adolescence, and motherhood, Enid Kimble struggles to come to terms with her past and makes life-altering decisions about her future. This tense, layered novel debut by lawyer and legal scholar Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich, with the gifted and troubled character of Enid at its centre, spins an intriguing story about motherhood, love, law, coming to terms with the complexities of our pasts, and claiming our futures. In doing so, the author offers invigorating and original engagements with law, mythology, feminism, and motherhood that will resonate with legal professionals, academics, and the general public alike. Poignant and funny, the story weaves together scrupulously accurate legal narrative and compelling personal drama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772582864
Publisher:	Demeter Press
Publication date:	07/25/2020
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Born and raised in Alberta, Canada, Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich is an Ontario lawyer and legal scholar. Called to the Bar in 2003, she has  had a varied legal career. After receiving her PhD in 2015, she accepted a full time faculty position at Carleton University, where she taught and researched full time for four years. She is now on the leadership team of a large, international firm, tasked with advancing diversity and inclusion across their offices. Rebecca resides in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband and family. This is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher