The Blood Girls

During the week before Easter, an 11-year-old girl in a provincial Canadian town begins to bleed from her left hand. The doctor in the small Manitoba community can find no discernible cause, but when blood begins to trickle from her other extremities, the conviction grows that Donna Desjardins is exhibiting the mystical phenomenon of stigmata. Weaving diary entries, interview transcripts, first-person narratives, correspondence and book excerpts into an impressionistic, episodic text, this lyrical first novel focuses on three main characters and their reactions to this phenomenon. Molly Rhutabaga, an elderly local writer, ""a woman who sits at a window, watches"" is the guide for this journey; she directly addresses the ""gentle reader,'' and her mellifluous voice, full of wisdom and understanding of life, is the spiritual balance to the skepticism of Daniel Halpern, a big-city journalist covering the stigmata story, and Virginie Waters, the physician whose empirical beliefs are tested by this intrusion of the bizarre into quotidian life. Apparently, this is the second incidence of bleeding stigmata in this tiny town; 60 years ago, an immigrant woman from Ukraine exhibited the wounds. Soon there is yet another episode in the community, and finally a murder. An overwhelming sadness hovers over the story, with each character suppressing pain of a lost love. Although the plot is in a sense a mystery that Halpern tries to unravel, Cook is more preoccupied with the notion of the complexity of spiritual belief. ""I'm trying to forgive myself for not being able to believe in the impossible,"" Halpern says after his meticulous lists and transcripts provide no solutions. The reader is left in the same ambiguous state, as Cook doesn't seem to arrive at the conclusions her own challenging questions seek. The South African-Canadian author writes gorgeous prose, but its sinuous self-absorption sometimes weighs down the narrative. Though the language here is to be savored, character development tends to be suffocated under its flowery density. Nevertheless, this is a promising debut by a writer passionately devoted to the beauty of the written word. (June)