Trista, the 15-year-old protagonist of Cathleen With’s debut novel, is a psychically damaged native girl from a small town in the Northwest Territories. Currently incarcerated in a youth facility awaiting trial, she keeps her newborn daughter, Faith, with her, as the child has been deemed too young and fragile to be taken from her mother. Trista spends her days trying to come to terms with the harrowing events leading up to her incarceration. Her reminiscences illustrate the rampant social ills of the region.

Adopting a stream-of-consciousness style told from Trista’s point of view, With restricts herself to the lexicon of an undereducated teenager. The narrative is further complicated by the mental contortions Trista undergoes to avoid acknowledging the extent and ramifications of the abuse, loss, and violence in her past. The reader’s experience of the narrative is determined by Trista’s meandering consciousness; descriptions of events are interrupted by memory and fantasy: “it happens like that, this slow unwinding … like some spring leaves unfurling.”

This is a clever narrative choice: it creates factual and temporal confusion, evoking both sympathy for, and frustration with, Trista’s mental state. With uses the facility’s staff – who try to elicit reactions from Trista, and attempt to get her to reveal further details of her personal history and her crime – to keep the reader grounded. However, the staff members also serve as an unnecessary conduit for exposition. Trista will often quote one of the workers explaining her psychological condition (“she says I am ‘dissociating’ or living in my head”), when the reader could easily surmise as much from Trista’s own  meandering thoughts.

With balances Trista’s instability and crudeness of speech with a lyric sensibility. “Times when it was near Break Up on the Mackenzie, you could bend down and feel the snow singing to you.… I can hear its thrum and lull like whispers inside water’s waves.” The extremes of the Arctic environment reflect Trista’s thoughts and feelings, providing her with a metaphor to help her understand the events in her life. Her memories surface like “rocks and driftwood … ice cold chunks hard and jagged.” The heightened language and the influence of native mythology are incorporated seamlessly into the narration, and deepen the novel without undermining the plausibility of Trista’s voice.

Less subtle is the symbolism surrounding baby Faith, who is a literal manifestation of the collision between Trista’s fantasy life and reality. Trista has been subject to every kind of abuse imaginable: sexual, substance, emotional, neglect – all entrenched in the damaging and insular community in which she lives. Faith is made to suffer as heavily as Trista – fetal alcohol syndrome, premature birth, retardation, deafness, impending foster care – yet remains the locus of Trista’s deeply irrational, desperate hope to manufacture a fairy-tale-perfect family. The circumstances of Faith’s intensely symbolic birth strain belief; they are necessary for the novel’s climax, but are clearly a narrative convenience. Faith’s name also provides the novel’s title with its rather obvious double meaning.

The sheer volume of tragedy in Trista’s life verges on movie-of-the-week territory.  The only relatively bright spots involve the Snow Nanuks, elder native women who maintain the cultural traditions of the  community.

Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison contains a familiar set of stereotypes –the backward, messed-up small town full of hard-drinking native people; the old women as the last bastion of native wisdom and connection to nature; the abused teen mother. The characters are fully realized individuals, but they nevertheless operate within the boundaries of these broad types. With makes a point of underlining the fact that while not everyone in the community adheres to a particular set of characteristics – not every man is a child-molesting, gambling alcoholic – those that don’t are clearly exceptions to the rule.

Nevertheless, the depth of feeling that With evokes, and her confident use of Trista’s voice, excuse, if not justify, the excess of tragedy and occasional narrative laziness. The novel is at times unbearably painful, not just because With immerses the reader in Trista’s misfortune, but also because she envisions utterly horrifying abuses of which Trista is only one of many victims. Trista’s story is melodramatic and her circumstances are hackneyed, but the emotional force of this novel is undeniable.