Cody Caetano

Cody Caetano spins a tale much like other Ojibway storytellers. Rich in metaphor, plot, and some very serious comedy, he keeps the reader attending to the writing.

In his debut memoir, Cody Caetano – the son of a Portuguese-Azorean immigrant father and mother who didn’t learn of her Anishnaabe heritage as a Sixties Scoop kid until she became a mother herself – describes, in idiosyncratic slang of his own making, a tumultuous childhood where lack of stability was the only constant.

For long stretches, young Cody and his two older siblings live parent-less in a decrepit house at the side of a highway in southcentral Ontario, euphemistically dubbed “Happyland,” where they distract themselves with video games while pipes burst, mould grows on walls and the burdock in the yard outside slowly encroaches. To help them squeak by, his sister, Kris, drops out of high school to take a job at the nearby casino.

And yet Half-Bads in White Regalia isn’t a gloomy wallow. Writing in dispassionate, hyperbole-free prose, Caetano seems more like a documentarian, recording few apologies, but, remarkably, abundant love and acceptance.

This event is presented in partnership with the Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library