In Survival, Margaret Atwood titled her chapter on Quebec literature “Burning Mansions.” She could well have been presaging Gaétan Soucy’s latest novel The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. Cleansing fires that destroy old ancestral houses, Atwood pointed out, occur frequently in Quebec novels and seem to reflect a collective desire to cast off the past in order to build something new.

To judge by the enormous success in Quebec of Soucy’s brief gothic tale, this symbolism still touches the Québécois soul. The book has been a bestseller there for months, received the Grand Prix Public at the Salon du livre de Montréal in November 1999, and was one of three finalists for the prestigious French Prix Renaudot that year.

The story opens with the narrator, a very strange adolescent, describing what happens the morning that the family patriarch is found dead. The ophaned children must deal with the outside world for the first time, and they are forced to try to make sense of what has happened in the family over the previous 15 years. Terrible secrets and horrendous misunderstandings are uncovered. Before the final conflagration more people die, and small animals are killed in grisly ways.

All of this would be depressing and unrelievedly weird were it not recounted by this bright child/adult who loves words and whose use of them is delightfully unusual. Translator Sheila Fischman once again has marvellously captured the texture and humour of the original French. For example, someone who writes things down is a “secretarious,” an epileptic convulsion is a “stoppit” and a coffin is a “grave box.” Birds, flowers, the forest, grass, and music are all described lyrically too. In the end the originality and clarity of the descriptions transform the story from being merely grim into something having the weight and appeal of those bloody fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.