This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay's Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author's own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions. Three schoolgirls, "Th r se 'n' Pierrette" and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving...