FICTION

The perceptions of others create the enigmatic figure at the centre of Cedar Bowers’s debut 

BY JOSÉ TEODORO

Ced r Bowers

CEDAR BOWERS: MICHAEL CHRISTIE

Astra

Cedar Bowers

McClelland & Stewart

AT ONCE a character study and a group portrait, Cedar Bowers’s debut novel takes its name from its heroine, Astra Winter Sorrow Brine, born and raised on Celestial Farm, a British Columbian agricultural commune. With a paucity of tools to help her, she navigates the various urban, socially encrypted milieux in which she spends her often peripatetic adulthood. The structural conceit that animates Astr has us follow its heroine from birth to mid-life through the close third-person perspectives of a different character in each chapter. This approach mirrors Celestial Farm’s polemical emphasis on the collective, while enhancing Astra’s particular magnetism and elusiveness. It also allows Bowers to move through a wide variety of sensibilities with curiosity and generosity of spirit.