Chanel Sutherland's ​Layaway Child

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(House of Anansi Press, 2026)

“St. Vincent bore me; Canada shelters me now,” Chanel Sutherland writes. Out of this, her debut collection Layaway Child is born: fourteen short stories with scenes from two lands, and reflections and refractions between, presenting a complex understanding of home.

Particularly vivid is the chronicle of life in the Caribbean. Some stories are set there; some women and girls shop in stores that sell both cigarettes and kerosene, and they play games—like capture-the-flag—in shade cast by banana trees. Some characters work or study in Canada and return only in their imaginations or “share news from back home, teeth-sucking and reverting to patois among themselves”; they pull faraway family close in their thoughts and dreams, they cook traditional recipes to scent unfamiliar landscapes, and they repeat phrases and lyrics for comfort while coping with isolation and loneliness.

Some characters are “caught between the pull of two tides, wanting to move closer yet held back.” Some, like two young sisters, literally inhabit a between-space. While travelling to Canada, they colour an image given to them on the plane: unfamiliar animals that exist only in outlines, captured on a white page. Even these two-dimensional figures seem to have knowledge these girls don’t: what it’s like to live in Canada.

“She chose green for the ours, blue for the castor, and yellow for the biche, and I knew she was thinking about the mountain, the sea, and the parakeets below and behind us,” one sister muses. The sense of disorientation is hovering but not yet landing for these characters: “My imagination rushed ahead of me, trying to uncover some secrets of the land ahead of us. This magical land of white people, white snow, and a mom I did not know.”

There is more snow than French in these characters’ experiences of Canada—although Sutherland is based in Montreal—and more whiteness than snow (and a disproportionately large number of blue-eyed people). And for newcomers, the atmosphere is chilling in more than one way, whether they have come to earn money for family remaining home or to create a home in Canada so that others may join them. The white families, who can afford to hire women as domestics, commonly mistreat them whether they are live-in or day workers. Some are openly hostile and abrasive from the outset, some are chronically arrogant and thoughtless, and some remain silent rather than disrupt the status quo and defend the newcomers when others mistreat them.

This is the kind of whiteness that Wendy confronts in “Roots”, when she expresses her feelings about being the only Black girl in her class:  a “small black dot that everyone stares at too long.” But there are concrete elements and images of whiteness, too: from the unmarked white van outside the mall to lettering on a sign, from dress shirts in school uniforms to porch columns, from a holy woman’s cloth to angel wings, from clouds to an abortion clinic’s walls. If Sutherland’s characters are positioned like dots against the backdrop of whiteness in Canada (accentuated by the employers’ and their families’ wealth and privilege), these other symbolic elements seem to shrink that dot yet again.

And Sutherland consistently scrutinizes colour schemes and structures. In “Little Donkey Have Big Ears”, she has a young darker-skinned girl confront an adult who has praised the girl’s lighter-skinned sister’s complexion. The story’s resolution, however, resides in flesh and tissue rather than skin: throughout the collection, there is an abundance of bruises, as well as varied and shifting hues of human embarrassment and shame. This is the foundation where injuries accumulate, those sensations of not being enough and of having been too much, those moments where those who should have loved/protected us have, instead, left us flushed, blood rushing, and our faces blushing.

Sutherland’s motif can also be reverse engineered; when the dot is a drop of blood, it appears larger, not smaller. The smallest detail can loom large. It’s a reversal echoed in the importance of silence as a theme in this collection. In an early story: “I’ve already said too much, let something slip that should have stayed buried.” In a later one: “Silence is how we say the big things. And between us now, there’s a lot of silence.” And, at the end: “We heard her, though, her wails echoing in the night. The memory of her screams silenced us all, like the cry of a hyena warning of death lurking near.” The silence thrums, but out of it emerges an irrepressible sound.

Storytelling is a way of breaking the silence, and a reminder that even the smallest black dot can form part of a letter printed on a page. Sutherland’s collection follows in a rich tradition characterized by Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point (1967), Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996), Rabindranath Maharaj’s The Book of Ifs and Buts (2010), and Olive Senior’s The Pain Tree (2015). And it joins new work like Zalika Reid-Benta’s Frying Plantain (2020), Janice Lynn Mather’s Uncertain Kin (2022), Anne Hawk’s The Pages of the Sea (2024), and Justin Haynes’ Ibis (2025).
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This collection opens with a story that won the CBC Short Story Prize in 2022 and closes with a story that won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2025; Chanel Sutherland’s debut arrives with accolades and acclaim. Layaway Child isn’t all sorrel, pigeon peas, and fried plantain—but they really are quintessential flavours. 

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Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.