Reviews

Fake ID

Kris Rothstein

Mariko Tamaki’s Fake ID (Women’s Press) is a collection of short stories about a young woman who moves to Toronto after finishing university in Montreal. “The Tea Pary Chronicles” peeks into a role-playing community of goths and misfits who dress up and pretend to be wizards in the woods. Our heroine has a Japanese heritage, but she grew up thinking of herself as Laura from Little House on the Prairie. As others begin to define her as “Asian,” she explores stereotypes and assumptions, and in one section she analyzes the influential Canadian documentary about teen girls, Talk 16. The context of the stories is unselfconsciously Canadian: “Tale of Two Cities,” for example, contrasts life in Montreal and life in Toronto through differences in vocabulary, creativity and bagels.

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