The Nap-Away Motel by Nadja Lubiw-Hazard

Tiffany, Suleiman, and Ori are absorbed in their own troubles, barely aware of each other, until Tiffany finds a litter of kittens under the oak tree. He has left only a trail of cryptic notes about wolves and wild things. But now Carter has run away from his twin. Ori and Carter share the same grey eyes and the same life story: moving among foster homes, sticking together, trying to make sense of the world. Ori is searching for their twin brother, Carter, and has mistakenly gotten off the bus in Scarborough rather than Toronto. Lubiw-Hazard’s story begins when Ori arrives at the Nap-Away. “She is frozen forever as a five-year-old.” So Suleiman spends his days in front of his room, feeding pizza crusts to the pigeons.Īnd in Room 11 is seventeen-year-old Ori-Orion when they are a boy and Orianthi when they are a girl. Tragedy of the worst kind has befallen his family and Suleiman can’t expunge his anger toward his wife or his grief for his daughter Amina: “Her journey cannot be followed any longer,” he says to himself. He is “in exile” from his own house, just a short drive away. But her mother, Shelley, says only, “I’m too strung-out for this baby.” So Tiffany spends her days behind the motel, beside the oak tree, either avoiding or having been pushed from her room by Shelley’s boyfriends.

She is taking a break from kindergarten her school won’t let her back until the lice is gone from her hair. And for the length of Lubiw-Hazard’s beautiful tale, the Nap-Away is home to three wildly different, struggling characters. In front is an open space where pigeons alight. Behind the Nap-Away is a huge oak tree and butterflies. The Nap-Away in Nadja Lubiw-Hazard’s debut novel ( Palimpsest, 2019) is somewhere in Scarborough. Because it’s the residents who, for the length of their stay, define the motel and create its story. The facade is nondescript except for one or two curious features.

For a night or a week or a longer time, at some point and for some reason, we all have found refuge in a small motel on the edge of a city.

The Nap-Away Motel by Nadja Lubiw-Hazard