Some of Skippy’s Blues

Critical reviews

“Set in a thinly-disguised Thunder Bay, Some of Skippy’s Blues is the story of friendships that form, dissolve, and come together again, but with an inevitably different shape to them. Once something’s broken it can be fixed, but it will never be the same again. Skippy has to learn that, as everyone does, but his emotional education takes its toll on him and those closest to him.
“Friendship is important to him because he’s a lonely, shy kind of kid; the polio epidemic of the mid-fifties left him with a limp that isolates him from others his own age.
“Taylor’s done a wonderful job of recreating a time that seems as far away now as the Pleistocene Age. Her fictional Cambrian Bay in the years on either side of 1960 is beautifully done; she sketches with a light but certain touch the rigidity of working-class standards and absence of influences from outside this area. Her creation of characters who seem plausible even in their quality of difference is something to be applauded.”
– Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal on Some of Skippy’s Blues

“Emotionally, this novel is a triumph of sensitivity, one that proclaims the arrival of a fiction writer who knows how to create character. …Some of Skippy’s Blues tells a human story in clear, evocative language … [This] is a remarkable first novel that should turn up as a contender on more than one award short list.”
– Calgary Herald on Some of Skippy’s Blues