Thankfully, the intensity of “Return of the Trickster” does cool somewhat as the novel progresses most readers would burn out otherwise. If you haven’t read “Trickster Drift,” though, you should do so immediately - not because you have to, but for pure enjoyment.

If it’s been a while since you read “Trickster Drift,” Robinson threads enough backstory through the narrative to remind you of the salient details and bring you back up to speed in relatively short order. If you’re confused, at this point, don’t worry. See what I mean about not being able to catch your breath? Of course, it’s not that simple, as Jared discovers when he begins vomiting up his organs, which seem desperate to escape him altogether (his liver, for example, sprouts arms and legs and scurries away).Īll of this, by the way, happens in the first ten pages of the book. It’s a complicated situation, and involves “dragging a pack of coy wolves and an ogress to another universe, and then being eaten and resurrected” repeatedly by his aunt until he was able to escape, but, short form, Jared is back and his aunt is trapped.

Jared, son of Wee’git, and the only one of the trickster’s 535 children to become a trickster himself, has narrowly escaped death at the hands of the ogress Jwasins, Wee’git’s sister - a.k.a., Jared’s Aunt Georgina. While many of his family members - including his born-again father - assume Jared’s sudden reappearance in his hometown, several days after disappearing in Vancouver hundreds of miles away, is a case of him falling off the wagon after a year of sobriety, those who know of his magical lineage fear something more is at play. Jared was found by a crew of moving men “in the basement of his mother’s newly sold house … wholly nude, beaten up, and babbling nonsense.” Opening mere moments after the final events of “Trickster Drift,” the third novel of the Trickster trilogy begins with reformed teenage drug dealer, now community college student Jared, the protagonist of the trilogy (and of the late, much-lamented CBC series adaptation “Trickster”) hooked up to an IV drip in Kitimat General Hospital. Eden Robinson doesn’t allow much space for readers to catch their breath at the beginning of her highly-anticipated new novel “Return of the Trickster.”

Eden robinson trickster