It was primarily to honor the memory of her grandmother that Marine left the suburbs to settle in Saint-Didace, a small village that seemed to her at first glance “like a ditch in the landscape”. But quickly, surrounded by a few characters as enigmatic as they are typical, she will have to fight against a housing project that would transform the village into a suburb. A struggle that is told in parallel with that experienced by the Didacians some 80 years earlier when they opposed the passage of a railway. In twelve acres, Marie-Hélène Sarrasin offers a two-part story carried by these villagers jostled by the threat of progress. Thanks to authentic and imperfect characters, the author delivers here a sensitive portrait of urban sprawl and its lesions. However, the whole remains predictable and agreed, presented in a convoluted style, embroidered with flat turns that unfortunately clash in this universe with such natural contours.
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