What’s Not Mine

As her 16th birthday approaches, Bria finds herself overwhelmed. Drugs play a major role in her small Manitoba town: her mother is addicted to them and left when Bria was four; her father is in jail for drug-dealing; his girlfriend overdosed on fentanyl. Bria finds it difficult to resist drugs’ allure as well, and, adding to her spiral, she is receiving pornographic images from an anonymous sender via cellphone. While staying with her aunt, Bria babysits her cousins, works at the Burger Shack, and sneaks out of the apartment to have an affair with a much older, disreputable man. Filtering events through Bria’s voice, Decter’s (How Far We Go and How Fast) adult debut illustrates the reality of living with drugs as the main source of recreation and economic viability. Occasionally vocabulary such as “verisimilitude” slips into the story, which seems out of character in the first-person narration of a girl who’s not interested in school, but Decter shines most when she describes the heat, smoke, bears, and insect-laden trees of a Manitoba summer.