Sarah Canary

Is this novel science fiction? Or is it fantasy, or a straight historical fiction? It could be any, depending on how you choose to read the famously enigmatic ending of the novel. But however you read it, it is a beautiful and fascinating work.A white woman walks into a camp of Chinese workers in the Pacific Northwest in the 1870s. She doesn't speak, maybe she can't speak, but she does utter birdlike sounds that leads the Chinese labourers to christen her Sarah Canary. One of the Chinese tries to take care of her, which leads the two on an odyssey among the outcasts of American society at the time, encountering blacks, the insane, feminists and artists among others. At the end, Sarah is transformed into something indescribably and disappears. Was she an alien? Was she a figment of the imagination?Silent to the end, however, Sarah's journey shines an extraordinary light into murky corners of American history, and gives a voice to those who were usually voiceless. Sarah Canary is an emotionally powerful work, beautifully crafted, delicious to read, that makes us question our own notions of genre. It is undoubtedly science fiction, unless you decide otherwise.