Blind Night by Cordelia Strube, Thomas Allen, 309 pages, $32.95

A mea culpa. A few months ago, I wrote an essay for another newspaper about the lack of rouse and rabble in the sheaf of spring books. It appears the premise of my article was somewhat askew. Was it wrong of me to yearn for, let's say, a funny, former drug addict who finds herself stuck in a low-rent motel, surrounded by fringe-dwelling urban creatures?

No.

My mistake was to seek succor in the CanLit hip-oisie. Instead, I should have been looking for a 40-something mom named Cordelia Strube. My only excuse for not noticing Blind Night sooner is its off-putting cover (I know, never judge, blah blah), which to my cynical eye advertised a tale of inner torment. I imagined reading such passages as: "My evaporated tears. Useless moisture. In the distance, a moose warbled."

Instead, Blind Night is a bright, bold slalom, thanks to an adrenalized, man-hating single mother named McKenna, who refers to anyone with a Y chromosome as newtbrain or bugbrain or no-brain. And for good reason. The men in her life are guilty of everything. Her father is a petty unparent, her ex-boyfriend (the father of McKenna's child) an unreliable schemer and nympho, her brother a truant from society and her Greek boss Kristos oozes ooze and ouzo.

But men are not the only source of misery in McKenna's life. Within the first few pages, her house burns down and the resultant stressors cause her to become colour blind. As disasters both personal and physical accumulate, McKenna asks aloud for vengeance. But when it eventually arrives, McKenna realizes her life is little improved:

"I have this idea that there are forces in your life that fuel you, negative and positive, that keep you in balance. When one of them loses strength you're thrown off. Like my hatred for my father, it was a power source I could count on. Now he's this helpless creature and I'm having trouble standing."

Moments like these resonate because Strube is forced to powerdrill through the barnacled exterior of her protagonist before McKenna's messy emotional core can be revealed. Most of the time, McKenna is a stand-up in search of a mic stand, cracking wise about everything: "The firemen really soaked the place. I kept expecting them to start stripping," she observes of the fire that devoured her house. "If your house has to incinerate, the least you deserve is a show."

But burn off the layer of funny that McKenna uses to insulate herself from everyone that disappoints her and you find a vulnerable woman whose 8-year-old daughter provides her with a focal point and reason to continue the fight:

"She's asleep, hugging her tiger, and I want to be that stuffed animal. In her arms I'd be safe. I have a feeling she doesn't feel safe in my arms anymore. I have a feeling she doesn't feel safe anywhere now that her home is charred ground and her mother's losing bolts."

Much of the novel is spent bouncing between the hairdresser shop where McKenna ministers to ugly, wealthy women and a lakeshore motel where mother and daughter wait for their house to be rebuilt. McKenna's humour and the colourful characters in her orbit serve as the salt and starch that make the pages turn themselves. But it's the emotional heft and her skill with language that makes this more than a beach read, a novel in which the "cafeteria smells of food that's been wrapped in plastic for ten years" and a doctor wears "the kind of delicate specs you know cost five hundred bucks."

Still, there is one small stumble in this book. Her name is Logan, McKenna's daughter. Logan shares narration duties, often successfully: "McKenna turns on the tap, the pan hisses. She turns off the tap and leans against the counter like a boxer against the ropes about to get back in the ring."

But as the novel progresses, an otherwise believable character accumulates a wisdom that outstrips even another 8-year-old, Mensa member Lisa Simpson: "It seems to Logan there's no question that Homo sapiens are accelerating their own destruction. If they wanted to do something about it they could, but they'd have to stop shopping and watching other people have sex."

Overlook the ventriloquism act and you're left with a book that offers you a weary wisdom that still manages to take you somewhere you don't expect. "Everybody's got a story nobody wants to hear," claims McKenna, partway through the novel. We're listening, McKenna.