What’s Not Mine

• Author: Nora Decter
• Genre: Contemporary Fiction
• Publication Date: April 1, 2024
• Publisher: ECW Press

Thank you to libro.fm and ECW Press for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am offering my honest opinion voluntarily.

For fans of Miriam Toews, an absorbing, darkly funny story of family, addiction, and survival.

The summer Bria Powers turns 16 is sinister. Waves of insects plague her hometown of Beauchamp, where fentanyl has recently infiltrated the drug stream. Forest fires muddy the normally wide-open skies, and everything smells like a barbecue all the time. It’s also the summer Bria goes from having saved a life to ruining her own.

Since her drug-dealing father disappeared and his girlfriend overdosed, Bria has lived with her aunt Tash and best friend/cousin Ains. By day, Bria and Ains babysit Ains’s younger siblings and sling fast food at Burger Shack. But at night, Bria has her own secret world, sneaking out to see Someboy, an older guy who captivates her sometimes. Other times, he angers-insults-upends her, and that has a certain charm too.

But trouble comes for Beauchamp and for Bria in the form of bears that wander into town, dick pics texted from a mystery number, and a creeping dependence on what Bria should hate most of all.

Steeped in tragicomedy and written in starkly observed prose, What’s Not Mine explores inheritance, addiction, and survival when the odds are against you.

Every so often, you come across a book where the author has this incredible talent and writes this book that just takes up residence in your head because it hits so hard. And with this book, Nora Decter takes her spot among authors who have made a running list in my head, alongside others like Dani Shapiro, Laurie Frankel, and Barbara Kingsolver.

To start with, Decter sets the tone with an ever-increasing set of dangers in town—fentanyl in the streets, insects plaguing the small town, forest fires, bears, and a creepy guy sending anonymous dick pics to Bria. But to Bria Powers, she’s got problems closer to home that are eclipsing the bigger issues facing her small town. Her mother, struggling with a drug addiction, left the family with no explanation. Bria’s father is a drug dealer who is incarcerated, and his girlfriend Stephanie has been taking care of Bria, until Stephanie overdoses and Bria is the one who revives her and saves her life.

But that one good deed throws Bria’s entire life into a downward spiral. She moves into her aunt Tash’s house, where she lives with Tash; Tash’s borderline creepy, freeloading boyfriend; her cousin Ains, who is about the same age as Bria, and her best friend; and Tash’s two younger children, Emma and Doug. During the long summer days, Bria and Ains babysit the little ones and visit the town pool, and then the girls work at a local fast food place in the evenings. The nights are devoted to getting high or drunk, and spending time with Someboy, an older man who isn’t exactly a positive influence.

There’s so much to unpack in this book, and I almost don’t even know where to start. So I guess I’m just going to start with the most obvious point. While this is very much a coming of age story, and almost reads like a YA book since things are told through the POV of Bria alone, it is not a YA book. It touches on so many important topics—substance use and addiction, family dynamics and intergenerational trauma, sexual harassment, and how difficult it is to be a teenager nowadays. 

It feels like everyone in Bria’s life fails her in some way or another. Part of this lies at Bria’s feet, as well—the simple fact that she is 15 plays a role, since that isn’t exactly the easiest age to deal with, but she also pushes the people close to her away. As someone who has worked with addiction both professionally and had it hit close to home personally, I thought that Decter did a fantastic job of portraying a teenager slowly sliding into addiction. She nails it with the thought process and the insidious way that addiction slowly takes over, almost without the person realizing until it is too late. Yet at times, Bria is astonishingly insightful.

The story was so well done, with wonderfully rendered characters who felt realistic. As the story gets more involved, the events in the town seem to get more sinister, almost as if the events in the town are reflecting events in Bria’s life. I found it easy to empathize with Bria (although if I had to deal with her in person, I’d probably be saying something different), since I know how addiction hijacks the thoughts and behaviors, teenagers don’t have fully developed consequential thinking, and that she was raised in a dysfunctional setting. It’s easy for us to assume that Bria should automatically hate drugs, yet she’s also genetically predisposed towards addiction from both parents, and her upbringing hasn’t exactly taught her healthy coping skills. Instead, she quickly resorts to taking pills to deal with stressors, and trying to escape, except all of this contributes to the pattern of unhealthy thoughts and behaviors that she’s amassing. My only complaint about the story was that the ending felt a little too rushed and neatly wrapped up for such a messy, meandering story. But other than that, this is a fantastic book, and it leaves me wondering what exactly is going on in Canada that all the books coming out are so good lately? I think they’re on to something up there!

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