Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about metaphors from Canadian writer Patricia Finn….
Patricia Finn is a North Vancouver–based writer, ghostwriter, editor, and consultant whose career has spanned decades. Educated in both Canada and New Zealand, she completed post-graduate work in English and Classics with a focus on Aristotle and Athenian tragedy — an intellectual foundation that gives her storytelling both depth and structural precision.
Over her career, Finn has worked in non-fiction, episodic television, and feature film, contributing to projects at CBC and Television New Zealand. She has worked on adaptations of original material by two of Canada’s celebrated literary voices experience that clearly shaped her own ear for character and moral complexity.
Now, at the age of 71, Finn has made a stunning entrance into literary fiction with her debut novel, The Golden Boy, published by Hachette. The novel centres on Stafford Hopkins, a former high-flying television executive who has retreated with his wife Agnes to a luxury estate in Maui following an involuntary retirement. When he discovers he has been named guardian of four grandchildren belonging to a late childhood friend — children he never knew existed — Stafford must deal with a past he has previously avoided.
I read the book recently and found it to be highly engaging. Finn has a charming, easy-going writing style and an ear for metaphor. Here are my two favourite examples:
- Bobbi was just beginning to lose hope that summer but nobody would see this until later because the loss of hope is a gradual thing, like a water line on a lake that changes from year to year until someone finally notices and says that the lake is high that year or that it isn’t.
- The oxygen that flowed through the umbilical cord from the mother to baby was designed to stop only at the moment of birth when the baby’s lungs would inflate like two tiny parachutes.
