Pandora - hardcover

Pandora is the trailblazing pre-quel to Sylvia Fraser’s internationally acclaimed My Father’s House: a Memoir of Incest and Healing.

It is the sexually loaded psychological bestseller that helped the author become aware that she had a multiple personality, resulting from her father’s sexual abuse of her. For fans of “My Father’s House;” for those who have suffered amnesia as the result of trauma; for therapists and others interested in the power of the unconscious, Pandora is must reading.

A new and original AUTHOR’S NOTE decodes the sexual secrets, hidden even from the author, in the text.

Pandora is the classic story of a feisty young girl growing up in a working-class home played out against the distant yet ever-pervasive drama of World War II. Unlike most novels featuring children, Pandora is not an innocent observer of the foibles of the adults around her. Whether at home, on the street, at school, she is a full participant in the struggle for love, success, recognition, status, survival in a high-stakes society in which the decision over who gets to play skipping or who has the most colored pencils is as intense as any deal brokered in any boardroom. Here is a mirror - sometimes distorted, sometimes all too true - of the conflicts in the adult world, with the rows of seats in a classroom standing in for the houses on a street. Especially engaging is Pandora’s sly awareness, often acted out with ironic humor, of the exercise of power, its attractions and its pitfalls.
PRAISE FOR PANDORA
“I have read this book twice. It is about to circulate among some friends, and when it returns I want to read it again” - Victoria Daily Colonist
“Just as J.D. Salinger was acclaimed for his then unique portrayal of adolescence, so should Fraser be lauded for her professional rendition of childhood” - Alberta Red Deer Advocate
“It is a beautiful piece of writing and a brilliant portrait of almost any small girl. . . luminous” - Gainesville Florida Sun
" . . . a stunner. . .innovative in its technique, precise to one-thousandth of a gesture in its characterization. . . Irrefutably humorous" - Saturday Night
“A modern reworking of the Pandora myth. . . a domestic Lord of the Flies in a small-town setting ” - David Staines, Harvard University
“Major talent indeed! Exceptional insight plus a wholly refreshing style “ - Montreal Star
“As rich and complex as anything I have read. . . . It is everything we knew - the brazen exclusion of the playground, the agony of valentine distribution” - Pittsburgh Press
“Pandora is the sort of novel that makes you hold your breath while you’re reading if: It doesn’t seem possible that it’s going to keep on being as good as it has been so far. . .You watch the writer doing harder and harder tricks . . .and hope she doesn’t slip. She doesn’t - Winnipeg Free Press
“The best novel about children to come along since Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. . . enchanting” - Books in Canada
“Sylvia Fraser has broken new ground, and done it with the panache and expertise of a high professional order. Here is the truth of what happens to all of us in childhood, beautifully told, unflinchingly honest” - Farley Mowat, author
“This is a novel about much more than childhood for it touches upon the whole human dilemma” - Margaret Laurence, author
“Pandora can stand beside British and American masterworks portraying life from the child’s perspective” - City and Country
“Writing like quicksilver, and in the present tense, the author lights up Pandora from all angles. . . The author doesn’t ask you to look back on your own childhood, but it’s impossible not to” -Victoria Daily Times
“Her prose has a fine prismatic quality and her descriptive power are such that I could almost smell the shavings in the classroom pencil sharpener” - Toronto Globe and Mail