Russian Dolls: Stories from the Breathing Castle

Kinsella’s (Butterfly Winter) final book, published shortly after his death in late 2016, is a strange beast that struggles, and fails, to find an identity. It contains a novel and a collection, and is split between numbered chapters and separate titled short stories. The overarching narrative follows Wylie, a struggling short story writer and self-professed unreliable narrator, who lives in a shared home in East Vancouver with his lover, Christie, a dishonest cynic who constantly refers to herself in the third person. Wylie is immediately smitten with Christie, and he repeatedly calls her his muse, something she isn’t interested in being. She’s detached, hiding from who she really is—or more accurately, who she was. On its own, theirs would be an intriguing if slight narrative; however, many of their chapters conclude with Christie asking Wylie to tell her about a specific event or person, acting as forced bridges into a series of short stories supposedly written by Wylie and very loosely relating to their tale. Neither of the book’s two halves ever comes together satisfactorily: Wylie and Christie’s tale is too fractured by the insertion of the many stories, and the stories themselves, while written well enough, are largely uninteresting and distract from the connecting story line. Agent: Carolyn Swayze, Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency. (Dec.)