A Boy of Good Breeding

by Miriam Toews

Book Overview

Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award "Tonic for the spirit: a charming, deeply moving, unerringly human story, perfectly shaped and beautifully told." --The Globe and Mail From the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0676977197
• ISBN13: 9780676977196
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Vintage Books Canada
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award

Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award and ably narrated by Ruth McIntosh, A Boy Of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews is an abridged audiobook set in a small Canadian town - a town so small that the Mayor schemes to keep the population at an even 1,500 to win a contest for being the smallest town in the nation. Young mother Knute and her four-year-old daughter have returned to town to escape the havoc of the big city, but when the mayor enlists Knute for his schemes, she must figure out how to keep the town population down when folks keep getting married, having babies, and more. The return of Knute's old boyfriend Max further complicates issues in this charming, down-home folksy story, originally broadcast on CBC radio. 3 CDs, 4 hours.

A Writer of Good Breeding

I was recently in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and someone mentioned Miriam Toews as a good writer from the area. I really enjoyed the characters in this book: the eccentric mayor Hosea Funk, the young mother Knute Corea-McCloud and the wonderful mutt named Bill Quinn. The characters make bad, petty, heroic and hilarious decisions, but the writer is ultimately a friendly narrator who gets us to care and want to keep reading right to the end.

Toews beautifully captures the simple joys of life

I recently read Miriam Toews' "Swing Low", which is a memoir of her father. I picked up Boy of Good Breeding because I loved her writing style, which is casual, simple, and honest. Immediately, the characters grabbed me, and I could not put the book down. The people, who reflect real people - as I discovered as a result of reading the memoir - are beautifully portrayed, and their curious idiosynchracies made me chuckle. It's just a fun book, which is a pleasure to read, that leaves you with a good feeling.

Unusual characters make this an enjoying read

I first heard of Miriam Toews (pronounced Taves) when an excerpt from "A Boy of Good Breeding" was read on CBC Radio One while I was traveling in Canada recently. I was captivated and wound up purchasing the book. The story centers on the zany characters who live in fictional Algren, Manitoba, which at 1,500 people is in the running for Canada's smallest town, and its eccentric mayor is intent on keeping it that way until Canada Day (July 1), for reasons which I won't go into to avoid spoiling your fun. Toews has a gift for making ordinary people and their failings (teenage motherhood, poverty, chronic depression) interesting and sympathetic, without drowning in sentimentality. I was so hooked by this book that I purchased and read "Summer of my Amazing Luck," which won a Manitoba award in 1996. It too was amusing, warm and thoroughly enjoyable