This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.

Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving into experience; life into birth. Circling around their uncertainties are cold, merciless predators, ready to strike at the slightest sign of weakness—the vicious hypocrisy of the Church, the cruel ignorance of the petty bourgeoisie, and the burning lust of the child molester.