It’s a good thing Mariah Standhoffer is a survivor because there’s an awful lot for her to endure in Loranne Brown’s first novel The Handless Maiden. As a young girl, Mariah is routinely sodomized by her grandfather. As a teenager, Mariah accidentally shoots her hand off while defending herself against her grandfather, thereby ending her promising career as a classical pianist. Finally, as a woman, she endures a series of hardships including anorexia, attempted suicide, infidelity, a miscarriage, and a murder.

Mariah manages to overcome all this to become a respected composer with a solid marriage, devoted family, and friends. Her life consists of one triumph over adversity after another, which is part of the problem with Brown’s novel. Everything in The Handless Maiden happens at such a high emotional pitch that it’s hard to distinguish between dramatic moments and melodramatic ones. Brown, who sets the story in her own home town of Thunder Bay, chronicles everything, from a high school infatuation to her protagonist’s need to mutilate herself, with the same kind of overwrought intensity.

The “show, don’t tell” rule for fiction is not a hard and fast one, but on almost every page Mariah is telling us how she feels in detail. There is no nuance or subtlety. Nothing is left to the reader’s imagination. The dialogue is particularly irritating as characters make speeches and state precisely what Brown wants them to in the most stilted way.

Mariah makes mountains out of molehills. For example, one of her old boyfriends is demonized, yet nothing in the story explains why he should be. Mariah’s father – a rather nice, ordinary man throughout most of the story – is treated in a similar fashion. It’s as though Brown decided she needed a villain to advance the plot and so picked one at random.

Meanwhile, the story’s real villain – Mariah’s grandfather – is painted in the broadest strokes. Incest and sexual abuse are routine themes these days; it’s not writers dealing with these subjects that I object to, it’s the fact that they all seem to be dealing with them in the same way – to provide an automatic plot twist. If a novelist is going to write about incest, it’s the novelist’s obligation to help the reader understand why and how otherwise ordinary people behave like monsters. Brown never attempts to do that.

Having said all this, there is still something surprisingly compelling about The Handless Maiden. The raw emotion of the story keeps the reader turning the pages, curious about what terrible tragedy is going to be visited upon Brown’s beleaguered heroine next. In its press release, The Handless Maiden is being compared to Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. A more appropriate comparison would be a novel like The Thorn Birds.

Brown’s story is unadulterated melodrama, which is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it may be just the kind of novel that’s been missing from the Canadian publishing scene. I wouldn’t even be surprised if The Handless Maiden became a bestseller. All I ask is, next time, spare me the literary pretensions and work on the dialogue.