Abe Stone

Bit Dept: Abe and Hannah are the parents of the narrator, Bit. A sensitive and quiet child, Bit is intensely and convincingly aware of adult subtext. He watches as the successive winters of cold, hunger and discomfort weigh on his mother; he notices how his father gives everything to a community that is not always appreciative, according to Globe and Mail. In the first two sections of Arcadia, however, when Bit is five and then 14, Groff handles this problem with elegance and skill. She makes Bit ordinary, neither overly intelligent nor cutely confused about the larger world, and shrewdly gives him unlike most of the other children of the commune a stable family inside the inherent instability of Arcadia and but when Handy goes off on tour for several months, Abe Stone decides that the refurbishment project is precisely what the group needs to surprise and prove something to Handy, and to keep the group from disintegrating without its central force. Contemporary literary novels with child narrators are frequently irritating, since the child must either be precociously capable of expressing to an adult audience how it feels to be a child, or must be precocious in describing its misunderstandings of the adult world. In short, the puppet strings are always visible. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.