Maybe it’s because Colette has told me her dream that I feel like telling her mine. “I want to be a historian,” I tell her. “And the first thing I want to study is the real story of Saint Anne. I’m researching it now.”
Colette kicks at her blanket so that one of her feet pokes out. “What do you mean by real story?” she wants to know.
“Not just the goody-goody stuff. How perfect she was, what a good daughter, what a good person and all that. I want to know how she felt when she was in a terrible mood, when she had mean thoughts, when she questioned everything—even God. And I want to know about her bad dreams.”
Colette sighs from behind her magazine. “I’d read it,” she says, “and not just because we’re sisters.”
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Pat Norris for reading the first draft of this book; to Vincent DiMarco for his careful reading of the second draft and for his insights and useful suggestions; and to Elisabeth Klerks for responding to medical questions while we were both hanging out laundry.
Thanks also to Dr. Thanh Nguyen and to Anita Simondi for answering more medical questions; to Monique Lamarche and the welcome team at the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Basilica; and to my dad, Maximilien Polak, for his careful reading of this book and for responding from his heart. Thanks to Katherine Walsh for her clever suggestion, and to Ryan Sheehan for helping me understand how miracles work. Thanks to Elaine Kalman Naves for her professional and personal support, and to Viva Singer for letting me talk another story out. Thanks to the many people I met on my visits to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré for sharing their town with me. Thanks to the Canada Council of the Arts for their support and for believing in this project. More thanks to the team at Orca, and especially to my editor, Sarah Harvey, for giving me the push I needed on this story. And, as always, thanks to my husband Mike Shenker and my daughter Alicia. I love you both.
Miracleville is Monique Polak’s twelfth novel for young adults. Her historical novel, What World is Left, won the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Monique teaches English and Humanities at Marianapolis College in Montreal and works as a freelance journalist. She lives in Montreal with her husband, a newspaperman. She believes in miracles.
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