Much, but not enough
by Nanette Soucy
@NetSoucy
You've gotta keep your humour, if you're going to keep your wits. When IEDs are exploding all around and you're at the antipodes of home, with the lives of others in your hands, being able to make a crack gets you through the day, and, hopefully, back home, alive.
Captain Jacqueline, a wounded veteran in Alyson Grant's Trench Patterns, is an expert at the healing powers of sardonicism. We meet Patricia Summersett's healing officer shortly upon her return from Afghanistan, in hospital, where she is slowly learning to walk and talk again after the loss of her leg and her men. Jaqueline is at once tough and supremely vulnerable, a situation that both her mother and her visitations take ruthless advantage of. Her vulnerability is poked at by her psychiatrist, who asks corny questions as though he received his degree from the Wikipedia School of Psychology. What her psychiatrist lacks in skill, Summersett more than makes up for in performance.
