Teaching Pigs to Sing

From AwardAnnals

Rita wants to pop her six-year-old son Max in a baggie with a Ziploc top—so she can preserve his innocence and trust, so she won’t have to watch him lose faith in the world. Everywhere she looks, she sees chaos. She fears she can never provide Max with the security he craves. His absentee father, a surgeon, seems to have disappeared somewhere into a war zone. All she can offer is love and loyalty, but will it be enough? Rita, who does battle with the mice in her cupboard and the fibroids in her belly, is living on the edge of urban normalcy in a disintegrating family: a mother suffering from a debilitating illness; a sister whose failing marriage is sliding into the sordid domesticity of body hair disgust; a brother enamoured of a God omnipresent in his schizoid mind; and a father wrapped in lottery fever. Suddenly, an incident upsets the fragile balance between hope and fear in Rita’s life, setting in motion events that bring her to the brink of despair. Teaching Pigs to Sing creates a recognizable world of urban decay—of hospital waiting rooms, donut shops, vandalized cars, stolen goods, scary parks. But in this precarious world, made even more tentative by the inability of men and women to love one another, Strube, with wit and compassion, can still find resilience and glimmers of hope.