Book Details:
Book Title: The Antique Picker's Daughter by Melanie Dugan
Category: Adult Fiction (18+), 250 pages
Genre: general fiction, literary fiction
Publisher: Inanna Publications & Education Inc.
Release date: September 2026
Content Rating: PG-13 + M: because of mature themes (youth homelessness and human trafficking), and physical abuse, some rough language.
Book Title: The Antique Picker's Daughter by Melanie Dugan
Category: Adult Fiction (18+), 250 pages
Genre: general fiction, literary fiction
Publisher: Inanna Publications & Education Inc.
Release date: September 2026
Content Rating: PG-13 + M: because of mature themes (youth homelessness and human trafficking), and physical abuse, some rough language.
Book Description:
“The first thing you need to know: They’re not antiques.
The second thing you need to know: I’m not his daughter.”
Abandoned first by her father, and then by her mother, Frankie has been left in the care of her deeply religious grandmother. When her grandmother’s religious convictions tip into delusion, Frankie decides to run away.
Life on the street in Toronto is hard, and with winter coming, it gets tougher. This is when Frankie first meets Francis, a man old enough to be her father. He starts training her in “the game,” as she comes to call it; buying, stealing, and reselling “inventory” at inflated prices. Through winter, spring, and early summer, the two become a team, traveling around small towns and villages in southern Ontario.
As Frankie discovers, life on the road holds dangers she can’t anticipate, and her precarious world tips into disaster when Francis abandons her in an unfamiliar town. Betrayed, alone, and deserted, Frankie realizes she’s in a dangerous situation — will she be able to find her way out on her own?
The Antique Picker’s Daughter explores youth homelessness, human trafficking, and one young woman’s search for safety.
“The first thing you need to know: They’re not antiques.
The second thing you need to know: I’m not his daughter.”
Abandoned first by her father, and then by her mother, Frankie has been left in the care of her deeply religious grandmother. When her grandmother’s religious convictions tip into delusion, Frankie decides to run away.
Life on the street in Toronto is hard, and with winter coming, it gets tougher. This is when Frankie first meets Francis, a man old enough to be her father. He starts training her in “the game,” as she comes to call it; buying, stealing, and reselling “inventory” at inflated prices. Through winter, spring, and early summer, the two become a team, traveling around small towns and villages in southern Ontario.
As Frankie discovers, life on the road holds dangers she can’t anticipate, and her precarious world tips into disaster when Francis abandons her in an unfamiliar town. Betrayed, alone, and deserted, Frankie realizes she’s in a dangerous situation — will she be able to find her way out on her own?
The Antique Picker’s Daughter explores youth homelessness, human trafficking, and one young woman’s search for safety.
Melanie Dugan is the author of Sometime Daughter (“A stunning debut,” The Kingston Whig-Standard), Revising Romance (“…heartwarming, amusing, and…downright sexy,” Midwestern Book Review), Dead Beautiful (“Artful and funny,” Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer), Bee Summers (“…a carefully wrought portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life,” Brenda Schmidt, Quill & Quire), and Hard White (“It is a very compelling and beautifully-crafted story…I highly recommend it,” Skeleton Press).
She lived in Boston, Toronto and London, England, before settling in Kingston, Ontario, where she now lives.
She has worked in libraries and bookstores, and was Associate Publisher at Quarry Press in Kingston, and also served as Managing Editor for Poetry Canada, Quarry Magazine and Canadian Fiction Magazine.
In 2009 she was promotions director for the inaugural Kingston WritersFest.
She has studied writing with Leon Rooke, Keath Fraser, Kim Moritsugu, Helen Humphreys and Anita Rau Badami.
She has studied writing with Leon Rooke, Keath Fraser, Kim Moritsugu, Helen Humphreys and Anita Rau Badami.
Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards including the CBC Literary Award.
My Review:
This was not what I expected. I thought that there was going to be some sort of mystery and hidden treasure. What I got was a family drama that made me think about how far people will go for the ones they love. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought that the ending was satisfactory. I also enjoyed the look into bait and switch, and the "picker's" world. Frankie was such a strong character that I kind of felt bad for her and how her "dad" used her better his sales. This was a fast, good read. I am giving this copy a 3/5. I was given a copy to review, nevertheless all opinions are my own.
Interview:
Q:The Antique Picker’s Daughtertouches on youth homelessness — did you set out to write a novel about the subject?
A: No, I did not. I was following the narrator Frankie’s story, and it turned out her story included youth homelessness. I haven’t been homeless myself, but friends have, and relatives have, so when the story took that direction, I knew people I could ask about it.
Q:If you didn’t set out to write about that subject, how did the book get started?
A: I was in the middle of doing something one day when the title just popped into my head. Then I heard the first two lines of the novel: “The first thing you need to know: They’re not antiques.
The second thing: I’m not his daughter.”
And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on here, so I followed where Frankie, the narrator, led.
I had just published my fourth novel, Bee Summers, which was narrated by an eleven-year-old girl, so I guess it was a time when I was exploring the worlds of girls and young women (Frankie is 15).
Q: Youth homelessness could be a depressing subject.
A: It’s a tough one, for sure, but Frankie is resilient, she doesn’t fall prey to feeling sorry for herself, she’s smart and observant, and figures out ways to survive.
Q: Are there any surprising things you want to let us know about the novel?
A: For one thing, I thought I had made up the whole — let’s call it — “picker” profession. Honestly. I had never heard of pickers until the title of the novel popped into my brain that day. After I’d finished writing the book and it had been accepted for publication, I was visiting a friend, a retired librarian I had worked with who had been hit by a car and was recovering. I dropped in, we chatted, she asked what I was up to. I told her I had a novel coming out about a young teenager travelling with an older man, buying — or otherwise acquiring — small items that he later sold at a big mark-up. She told me her husband (who is a wonderful writer) had done that. He was upstairs working; she called him down, and he described how he had learned enough about antiques that he could walk into a thrift store, recognize an item selling for $5.00 that he knew he could sell for five times as much. He’d buy the item and take it to the right person, who would pay him $25 for it, knowing they’d be able to sell it on for a tidy profit. I laughed and said I thought I’d made the whole thing up, and he shook his head and said no, it was a real line of work with a long history.
Another thing, although there’s a lot of discussion about homelessness these days, there’s very little talk about youth homelessness specifically,because kids who are homeless or underhoused are often couch surfing, or living at a friend’s house, or squatting — they try to stay off the streets because the streets can be really dangerous, so youth homelessness is an almost invisible problem.
Q: How did you research the book?
A: I started writing the novel in 2014, and it went through three distinct versions. I worked with an editor who tells me the truth, and who I trust implicitly. After she read the first version, shereturned it to me with a note saying (very gently), “This doesn’t really work.” I went back and re-wrote the whole thing. She indicated the second version was better, but not as good as she was sure I could make it. I re-wrote the novel a third time, and this time she said she felt it was successful. At that point, I knew had the story. Then I had to go back and check facts, talk to the people I knew who had been homeless to see if I’d gotten the details right, the textures right. They had experienced homelessness at very different times and in very different places, so their responses didn’t always track the same, but there were enough points of similarityfor me to draw a realistic picture of a young person dealing with homelessness in a large urban centre in North America.
Q: The book is set in southern Ontario. Can you talk about that?
A: I was born in the States and grew up in New England. Then my family moved to Canada, to Toronto. The thing is, Americans and Canadians — except for francophones, most of whom live in Quebec — look and sound almost exactly alike (yes, Canadians dosay, “eh,” it’s true), but where the model In the U.S. is the melting pot and newcomers are encouraged to assimilate, in Canada, there’s the cultural mosaic: newcomers often maintain the culture of where they came from. It makes for a sort of patchwork quilt effect that’s really interesting. I hope I’ve been able to capturesome of that in the book.
Q: Do you write on a computer?
A: I write the first draft in longhand using a fountain pen (the smoothest way to write, less friction, so less tiring), on a lined pad of paper, leaving every other line blank. As I write, I edit on the blank lines. Then I key in what I’ve written. When you see your handwriting converted to text on a screen, things change: you notice holes in your narrative, you see repetitions, or things that are out of order, so you make those corrections. After I’ve keyed in the text, I print it off, and, again, seeing what you’ve written in a different format can highlight issues that you then work on. I proceed like that all the way through. By the time I finish writing a book, the first pages have been edited probably thousands of times.
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