Dotted Lines by Stephanie Cesca

Dotted Lines, by Stephanie Cesca, reviewed by Robin L. Harvey

Stephanie Cesca’s debut novel, Dotted Lines, is a sweet, unpretentious story about how love and patience can redeem a fractured family. Her poignant narrative tells how one good person can, over time, mend the scars from a damaging childhood.

We meet her protagonist, Melanie Forsythe, a precocious seven-year-old at the book’s outset. Melanie lives with her fragile and erratic single mom, a server at a local greasy spoon. When the book begins in 1983 most of Melanie’s world is arduous and bleak. She’s a latch-key kid who is already fending for herself. She spends her days alone or hanging out at the diner where her mother works.

It is her job to meet her mother’s needs. She wakes her up for early morning shifts. She must keep track of if there’s enough take-home leftovers from the diner to keep the family fed. Melanie is suspicious of adults and men. Her male role models have been the revolving door of boyfriends in her damaged mother’s life.

That is until a new man, a regular at her mom’s work who Melanie has nicknamed mister, “Hold the Bacon,” enters the picture. “He had warm and friendly eyes and, though he didn’t say much, he liked to smile a lot,” the child has already observed before her introduction to the man who will become her step-father.

“I looked up and saw him standing there, a tall guy with light brown hair wearing a jean jacket and a Blue Jays cap … I figured he’d be gone in a few weeks like the rest of Mom’s boyfriends.” But Dave stays. And Melanie’s life is forever changed by a man who owed her nothing but gave her everything.

Dave is a regular guy who has two frisky, funny dogs named Dougie and Luke Skywalker. He watches sports and works with airplanes. His standout attribute is his loyalty and sense off responsibility. He starts to walk Melanie to school each day. He helps her achieve childhood milestones like riding a bike. He encourages her to make friends at school. His kindness is the first stability, love and support Melanie has ever experienced.

Then on Mother’s Day, a week before Melanie turns eight, her sister Jesse is born. Their mother falls into a deep, postpartum depression. And the stitches of Melanie’s nascent enriched family life begin to unravel.

Within a few years, Melanie’s mother quits the family, leaving Dave to care for the two young girls. As events from the late 1980s through 2009 unfold, the three family members experience more than their share of setbacks and losses. In time, some of Melanie’s most trusted betray her. Yet Dave, a  simple resourceful man,  remains a loving lynchpin in her often-troubled life.

Cesca is a strong and capable storyteller. Her passion for detail and vivid imagination creates an authentic fictional world. Readers can see her characters in their mind’s eye. They can relate to their pain. Cesca’s characters have enough depth to let readers become attached to them, though Dave may seem a tad too saintly and Jesse a bit the stereotypical selfish foil.

It is in Melanie where Cesca shows off her ample writer’s chops. Her portrait of a woman’s successful journey from fearful, abandoned child to a loving, (if at times spiteful) young woman rings true. Her struggle to live up to the values instilled by her stepdad is believable. Cesca’s prose is clear, unadorned and direct. Her characters offer uncanny insight. 

As in Melanie’s tweenaged take on Dave’s breakup with his girlfriend Rona.

“Rona was the type of person who liked to colour inside the lines. But we were the type of family that only knew how to scribble.” Another touching scene plays out when Melanie creates a family tree for a school assignment.She must draw lines to connect her sparse genealogy and frets at how few real relatives she has.

Then Dave suggests she use dotted lines to illustrate their family’s special connections. “Dave made a dotted line, diagonally linking himself to me,” Melanie says. Dave tells her it “shows that while we’re not biologically related, we’re still a family.” At the launch of her book in early October, Cesca read from the end of Chapter Eleven, the book’s half way mark, when a feisty adolescent Melanie stakes her claim for independence.

“I’m going to have another family,” Melanie rails in a fight with Dave shortly before she leaves home for university. “And this family will be real, not like the pretend version that’s full of shit and good for nothing.” The section reflects the simple and honest dialogue at which the author excels.

However, there are few criticisms for this sweet, folksy-toned novel. A chronology of passing years, set as dated headlines at the start of each chapter organizes the plot. However, this seems contrived for a book of less than four hundred pages, with few settings. And though Melanie is obviously a gifted child, some of her vocabulary and observations at age seven seem out of place. 

For example, when Dave tells her she will get a new home with her own room Melanie relates that his “promise took my imagination to a faraway place” unlikely words for a child that young. Melanie describes their new home as “a rectangular box that looked like a school portable. It was small but adequate, plain but practical.” Again, she uses thoughts and observations that seem too advanced for such a young child.

The book’s core optimism is reflected in these words from Melanie as an adult. “Dave taught me forgiveness. He taught me sacrifice. But above everything, he showed me what the true meaning of family really is.” This message will touch the hearts of many readers. It may also seem too corny for others in our modern, jaded zeitgeist.

But these flaws are minor. Dotted Lines, published by Guernica Editions, is a strong debut novel, proven by the fact that its first print run sold out within days and its second is already underway.

Dotted Lines, by Stephanie Cesca, published by Guernica Editions, 329 pages, $24.95

Robin Harvey (robinharvey@live.com) worked on staff for The Toronto Star for more than 20 years. There she wrote book and theatre reviews. She was a reporter, editor and columnist as well as a News Editor, Assistant City Editor and Public Editor. As Deputy Sunday Editor she was supervisor of the books page. For a time, she ran The Sunday Star short story contest. She's been published in Sun Media, The Toronto Sunday Sun, the Southam news chain and the National Post. Ms. Harvey studied journalism at Metropolitan University, Fine Arts at York University, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.