In The Perimeter Dog (Libros Libertad), Julie Vandervoort describes how, at sixteen, she persuaded her tired, overworked mother to help her buy a cherry red Kawasaki motorcycle, and when that ended badly, how she got her mother to sign the papers for a student exchange to Argentina where she was “idiotically happy,” gobbling up the language and cavorting (under the careful surveillance of her host family) with members of the sociedad, some of whom turned out to be gangsters, or at least related to gangsters. In another story Vandervoort survives law school—a fog of overwork, anxiety, pressure and petty power trips—by visualizing herself as a massive and impenetrable buffalo; later in the book, she serves as a human rights observer during the Burnt Church fishing crisis. She is given a high-visibility vest and told to remain impartial, but people talk to her and she listens, and then she worries that one of them will get killed in the dispute. In another story she sits in her dying mother’s apartment (with “four emergency pull-cords and ten percent of her things”) and thinks about how time is “like a button accordion, with ends that stretch farther apart than you thought possible, then everything suddenly folding, bunching up”—a description that works well for Vandervoort’s writing. Her stories jump from here to there, and then they loop around and back and make unexpected connections. Readers who pay attention will not be disappointed.
