Fifteen-year-old Emma is a child apart, not only from the other kids at school and in her community, but from her family as well. She looks and feels different, something every single teen can relate to, but Emma has better reason than most. The exploration of that reason is at the heart of The Watcher, Margaret Buffie’s sixth novel.
Emma lives on a farm in Manitoba with her bee-keeping mom, her environmental artist dad, and her increasingly sickly little sister. The family is clearly loving, but distracted. Over the course of the summer, Emma is overtaken by free-floating dread. This feeling accelerates when Emma takes on a summer job as a companion to a wildly eccentric character named Poppy. She is quickly indoctrinated into an elaborate, addictive boardgame called Fidchell. Trouble begins in earnest as our heroine slips in and out of different game worlds, while tracking a spectacular assortment of threatening characters.
Emma is a familiar Buffie heroine, a child psychologically at risk, seeking her place in things and finding it through the aid of the fantastical. The sub-themes of alienation and belonging are underscored by Emma’s entrapment in what her mother describes as the “Borderland,” that sometimes dangerous space in between childhood and adulthood. Buffie, winner of the Vicky Metcalf Award, depicts the game world in a vivid and almost painterly fashion. She weaves such a sophisticated fantasy that it isn’t entirely clear which characters we should be rooting for. Although this could prove disquieting for some, Emma’s powerful need to watch over her family is an overridingly compelling premise from beginning to end.