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+--- Thread: To Refrain From Embracing (2023) (/showthread.php?tid=2414)
To Refrain From Embracing (2023) - Simon - 12-11-2025
From the backdrop of an impoverished steel-working community in working-class Hamilton, Ontario, in the 1970s, To Refrain From Embracing follows the trials faced by a small family after suicide-attempt results in 33-year-old veteran Ted being checked into the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. His wife Gloria struggles with family finances and growing worries related to the well-being of their 10-year-old son Josh while also re-embracing her Indigenous identity through encounters with a local steelworker and remembrances of her mother. Josh, meanwhile, struggles with his nascent sexuality, lack of acceptance from his peers, and fears about his father's mental health, all while entering into a friendship with a troubled neighbourhood teen.
To Refrain From Embracing is an immersive, naturalistic, and darkly comedic exploration of a family pushed up against personal and societal precepts of class, race, and sexuality.
Review
"An engrossing novel from start to finish." - Hamilton City Magazine
"A smartly indelicate fiction exploring every aspect of a boy's weird trauma... To Refrain From Embracing is a pensive and provocative novel.... Luscombe keeps piquing our curiosity... and he weaves an elaborately detailed world..." - Independent Book Review
"Beautiful. Sad, poignant, and beautiful." - Terry Cooke, Vital Signs
"In To Refrain From Embracing , as in Skins and Shirts , Luscombe shows a masterful feel for the pace and architecture of meaning within interpersonal relationships and within the developing self... The style of Luscombe's novels is strictly naturalistic, broke-ass realism... but also an infectious streak of humour... The characters' situations are rendered with feeling and sympathy but never fluffed up...It makes for a very subtle power in the gathering narrative, all the more powerful for the subtlety." - The Hamilton Spectator