‘Because I am the girl’

Starry Starry Night 
by Shani Mootoo

Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2025
$24.95 / 9781771669566

Reviewed by Selena Mercuri

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Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night distills a world into the dimensions of a child’s comprehension. While her previous works sprawled across decades and continents, this book contracts to the dimensions of 1960s Trinidad, tracing the education of a girl named Anjula as she learns to decode the performances that constitute family life.

Throughout the novel, Anjula experiences the world as a series of sensory impressions—the sweetness of honey on her tongue, the smell of chicken blood, the saltiness of her skin when she is near the sea—before she can arrange these fragments into coherent meaning. Anjula observes everything but understands only what her limited vocabulary and experience permit, creating a gap between seeing and comprehension that becomes the novel’s generative tension.

The novel’s central wound is one of severed attachment. Anjula spends her early years with her grandparents, Ma and Pa, while her parents live abroad so her father can complete his medical training. These grandparents become her world—the people she calls to in the night, whose rhythms define safety, whose love feels primary and absolute. When she learns that her Mummy and Daddy will be returning soon, she is confused and thinks that “Mummy” and “Daddy” are the names of strangers. When her parents eventually return with two younger siblings Anjula has never met, she wonders how long these strangers will be staying in her house. The rupture that follows—being removed from the only parents she has known and placed with people whose genetic claim means nothing to her emotional reality—becomes the organizing trauma of her childhood.

Years later, Anjula encounters a younger girl, Shylana, whose own parents are considering going abroad. Recognizing her past self, Ajula wishes she could warn her:

Don’t let them leave you here, Shylana. You have to go with them. If you don’t, if you stay here, you will love your Ma and Pa more than anything in the whole world. Then, one day, these strangers who are your parents will return, but you won’t know who they are, and they will take you away from your Ma and Pa. Then your Ma will die, and you’ll be all alone. Even when you’re with your parents, you’ll be all alone. You have to, you must, go with them.

This passage articulates what the novel itself performs: how the logic of adult migration—necessary, economically rational—can produce in children a permanent sense of dislocation, a loneliness that persists even within the restored family unit.

One of Anjula’s earliest revelations concerns her grandfather Pa, whose identity splinters depending on his audience—

“Pa doesn’t sound like my Pa when he is talking to those workers,” she notices. “There is Pa with me, Pa with Ma, Pa with Barlow. Pa with Uncle Sonny, Pa with the Foreman and Mr. Mohammed the accountant who works in the office downstairs, Pa with the fishermen on the beach, and Pa with his friends who play cards with him at nights. So many Pas and they all have different voices and ways of speaking.”

This catalogue of personas exposes the mechanics of colonial respectability with economy. Vancouver-raised Mootoo (Polar Vortex) shows how identity under such conditions becomes strategic—a repertoire of performances calibrated to maintain hierarchies of race, class, and authority. For Anjula, this multiplicity raises a troubling question: if Pa contains multitudes, which version represents the truth? The novel suggests that sincerity itself may be a luxury unavailable to those navigating postcolonial class structures.

Through this child’s observation, Mootoo renders visible the ordinarily invisible work of social positioning. Anjula’s bewilderment—why does Pa sound different with different people?—becomes a more pointed critique than any adult analysis could achieve. The child’s literal-mindedness strips away the naturalizing rhetoric that perpetuates inequality. This dynamic extends beyond class to encompass gender, as Anjula discovers through the games children play— 

“When we play cowboys and Indians, only [the boys] are allowed to have guns,” she reports. “They say I can’t have a gun because I am the girl. They pretend to lasso me, and I am supposed to let them catch me, and then I have to kill myself or they shoot me dead. If I don’t die, they’ll just keep shooting and they’re very noisy. Bang bang bang bang bang.”

Mootoo presents childhood games as rehearsals for adult power relations, where gender determines access to agency and violence alike. The boys’ repetitive shooting takes on the quality of indoctrination through exhaustion. Anjula must either perform her own death or endure symbolic murder until she complies.

When Anjula converts a dollar bill into pennies, believing more coins means greater wealth, Pa responds with frustration: “Later that day, he sat me down with a piece of paper and a pen and tried to explain something about dollars and how many cents there were in a dollar, none of which made any sense to me.” On its surface, the scene depicts a child’s confusion about mathematical equivalence. But Mootoo layers it with implications about authority, knowledge, and the arbitrary nature of value systems. Pa’s anger stems from Anjula’s challenge—however inadvertent—to establish order. Her misunderstanding suggests that the rules governing worth are neither nor self-evident but require enforcement through shame and correction. The moment parallels her earlier confusion about Pa’s shifting voices: both reveal that adult systems depend on consensus rather than inherent truth. Money, like identity, operates through performance and agreement.

Anjula’s emotional education centres on concealment. “Inside you feel the sadness coming, and you try but you can’t stop it, but you mustn’t show this,” she learns. “That’s OK, because that way you don’t make others unhappy, too, or make them angry.” This directive establishes emotional labour as a moral imperative. Anjula must suppress her feelings and reframe that suppression as kindness to others. Mootoo captures how women across generations inherit this ethic, transforming self-erasure into a virtue. The lesson originates primarily with Ma, Anjula’s grandmother, whose own restraint models the behaviours. But its most devastating illustration comes through Anjula’s mother, Mummy, whose ritualized waiting for her husband embodies both hope and humiliation. Anjula observes her evening preparations with a sense of helplessness: 

I want to barge into the room and to get taller than he is, and tell him he should come home in time to eat dinner with us because on afternoons she showers and dresses and puts on her makeup and then she just keeps going out on the veranda, looking over the banister, down the road, coming back in, and then minutes later, going out again.

The repetitive structure—“going out…coming back in…going out again”—mimics the compulsive, futile rhythm of Mummy’s day-to-day life; she is caught in a loop of preparation and disappointment. Anjula’s desire to grow “taller than he is” reveals her nascent understanding that protection requires physical authority she does not yet possess. Domestic neglect becomes atmospheric, something Anjula breathes rather than analyzes.

The title’s invocation of Van Gogh’s painting proves apt. Like the artist’s swirling night sky, Mootoo’s prose contains turbulence within careful composition. The result resembles pointillism: individual impressions that cohere into recognizable forms only when viewed from proper distance. Mootoo’s decision to maintain Anjula’s perspective throughout—never breaking into adult commentary or retrospective wisdom—becomes an ethical choice as much as an aesthetic one. By refusing to explain what the child cannot yet understand, Mootoo forces readers into complicity with her confusion. We recognize patterns Anjula misses, understand implications she cannot name, and feel the gap between our knowledge and her innocence as a form of grief. Like Van Gogh’s painting that transforms night into pattern without dispelling darkness, Starry Starry Night finds form in confusion, creating beauty from what cannot be resolved. 

Selena Mercuri is Reviews Editor at The New Quarterly, a publicist at River Street, and a social media associate at The Rights Factory. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and The Ampersand Review, among others. She received the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Find her on Instagram: @selenamercuriwriter. [Editor’s Note: Selena reviewed Sarah Louise Butler and Diana Stevan for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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