Yes, I am being purposefully witty: February’s book of the month is February, but also because the softcover version just hit stores.

As I read February, I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was, for the first time, reading the work of a fully evolved writer. In terms of bare-bones writing, in terms of sentence-level writing, and how well an author crafts a sentence to capture a moment in words: There is no one else in the country who can touch Lisa Moore’s elegant rendering of language. Lisa made her mark with Open, and Alligator got all the attention it deserved. But with February, she’s peaked. She’s distinticve, and what she does with language is nothing less than dazzling, and then there is her uncanny ability to inhabit every pore and sinew of her endearingly human characters, and project their stories up off the pages in the most meaningful ways, with her tender, visceral diction. What she does with language is pure art. Pure innovation. With all the right words and nuances, moments and memories are fleshed out and almost x-rayed, until the reader is made to experience her protagonist’s very core and consciousness. Through her rendering of the main character, Helen O’mara, I have felt the irrevocable and deflating loss of a spouse. Lucid is the word I am after, her scenes dance right off the pages and all over your heart. Especially when you have the chance to hear her read her own work. 

If my words aren’t enough, the backcover is graced by the following endorsement from the legendary Richard Ford:  ”Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what’s important in life.” 

February is the story of Helen O’mara, a woman widowed and left to raise her children alone after she losses her beloved Cal the night of the Ocean Ranger disaster, Valentine’s Day, 1982. In no way does Moore exploit, sentimentalize, or overuse that real-life tragedy. Instead, with a truly shocking and core-penetrating skill, she shows us the effect of that loss on Helen. How and why, years later, her mind still trickles back to that ill-fated February. Structurally, February unfolds in a non-chronological order. Helen’s memories, her daily routines of present day life, her watching her grandchildren or helping her son cope with the reality of an estranged, impregnated fling are all happening at once. Moore’s non-linear narrative structure not only makes the book a more engaging read, it also captures how life really works, the reverberations of our past echoing in the present, often at random. Her memories come at random to pierce through the mundane chores of every day life. This is an important work, and perhaps the apex of CanLit, if not simply a shining example of what is meant by creative writing: sentences that evoke emotions in their reader; words strung together with an artful, calculated precision so that a reader feels what they’re reading.

 February earned its way onto numerous “best of 2009″ lists, most notably the  Quill & Quire’s and Globe and Mail’s.