Once More With Feeling [Paperback]

After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Maxs singular desire  to make his wife happy  leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his familys life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.

Set over the course of a single year,Once More With Feelingtells the story of this city that is bisected by railway lines and rivers, and connected by boulevards and back alleys, through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up the community are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit  this place of memory and amnesia, longing and belonging.

Featuring a cast of eclectic characters,Once More With Feelingis about a community, about a family, and about the way time makes fond fools of us all. Award-winning author M?ira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.

From Pizza Chicken Dentist

Down at the Mission folks were idling on the sidewalk, smoking and waiting for the metal shutters at the kitchen counter to clatter up so that lunch could finally be served. Folks, was what Miss Leonard called the men spinning on their worn-down rubber heels in the weak iodine sunlight of early spring. Miss Leonard volunteered all her free time to the Mission and consequently had a proprietary attitude. She called everyone folks: the old timers sipping coffee and playing checkers in the dining room, the born-agains who came for breakfast and stayed for Christ, the teenage boys with their wire hanger shoulder blades angling through theil³(