For her debut novel, Marissa Reaume has chosen a stalwart, tried-and-true theme: the blocked writer courting a reluctant muse. Twentysomething Sara Pierce, who lives with her married, germophobic roommate in Windsor, Ontario, despairs of her uninspiring day job writing for a technology website. Yet the stories she’s been submitting to various publications keep getting rejected for lacking creativity, and her planned novel has already been written by Graham Swift.

Struck-through text scattered randomly throughout the novel offers a gimmicky window on Sara’s writing process. Too often, though, the redacted text seems patternless or inconsequential (“Dan’s a man a boy male”). When we run up against paragraphs of this stuff later in the novel, the eyestrain hardly seems worth it.

The author awkwardly struggles to develop a metaphor for Sara’s headspace as being akin to puddles that refuse to form despite weeks of rain. As if that weren’t enough, Reaume throws in some magic realist elements. Sara has a habit of trying to (literally) fix “broken boys,” whose “shards” she used to look for in the hallways of her high school. One of these is her boyfriend, Dan, a slackerish online gaming addict who watches Groundhog Day obsessively and has a skin tag so grotesquely large he starts referring to it in the third person.

These forays into the fantastical afford Reaume a certain leeway, but they don’t give licence for some careless mistakes and sloppy writing. “We took a lot of digital pictures,” recalls Sara of her high school prom, then a page later boasts about aborting the photo shoot by pretending to misplace the “extra roll of film” she was hiding in her purse. Comparing water going down a bathtub drain with “rain sucked down a sewer grate” isn’t enough of an imagistic stretch to justify the analogy.

Reaume also has a tendency to overuse favourite words, two of which are “adorned” and “devoid.” Where are those strike throughs when you really need them?