From Canada to Cuba, with Love

Missy Whynaught

A review of Missy Whynaught by Elizabeth Ball

Published on October 29, 2026

Elizabeth Ball’s debut novel Missy Whynaught is a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of a young girl’s search for love and connection. The protagonist and narrator, Missy, is a New Brunswicker left to her own devices by Pup, her absentee but irresistibly charismatic father, and her gruff single mother. The coming-of-age novel is structured around vignette-like chapters depicting various moments throughout Missy’s childhood, fledgling adolescence, and early adulthood. Several of the chapters were first published as short stories; notably, the novel’s opening, “Dog Song,” was longlisted for the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize. From laugh-out-loud depictions of her failed friendships and relationships to haunting scenes of violence, the throughline in all the chapters is Missy’s attempt to mitigate her overwhelming sense of loneliness. Ball’s prose skillfully balances the novel’s dark themes with an irreverent sense of humour.

Missy Whynaught
Elizabeth Ball

Baraka Books
$24.95
paperback
260pp
9781771864350

Missy Whynaught is, on the one hand, a Maritime novel set primarily between “Poverty Hill” (known today as Renforth), and Saint John, New Brunswick. But Cuba plays an important role, as well. The opening chapter begins with a flashforward to Pup’s death in Cuba. This event serves as the frame narrative; in other words, it is the outer story that sets the stage for the rest of the novel. Readers learn that, after spending years travelling as an oil rigger, Pup eventually abandoned Missy’s family and chose to live as an “expat” in Cuba. The Caribbean island-nation becomes fundamental to the plot’s unfolding, and an important vector from which to examine the mythical place Cuba has occupied in the Canadian imagination.

This mythologization is on full display in the section of the novel when the eighteen-year-old Missy visits her father in his new home, which he treats as his own personal playground. Typifying this kind of Canadian expat, he boasts to Missy that, in Cuba, he “live[s] like a friggin’ king for a few bucks a day!” By this point, Pup has an infant son with a Cuban sex worker less than half his age, but he has been cast out by her family for being an addict. Despite this, Pup is determined to give Missy the full “expat” experience by encouraging her to hire a sex worker and “have a fling of [her] own.” Ever impressionable, Missy doesn’t understand why she would suddenly have access to privilege she has never had before, but she is excited to find out what this newfound privilege brings her. In episodes such as these, Ball unabashedly exposes the uneven power relations at play between Canadians and Cubans as Missy realizes that there is more precarity in paradise than her father lets on.

Characterization is another of the novel’s notable strengths. Driven by a deep hunger for affection and utterly unable to spot red flags, Missy repeatedly finds herself in situations where she is being exploited. While she is frustratingly insecure, and at times oblivious, she is unquestionably endearing. Meanwhile, Pup is reckless and unstable, yet no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, those around him cannot help but be drawn to his magnetism. Despite the novel’s brevity, readers are introduced to over a dozen characters beyond the core cast. While in other novels this might be overwhelming, in Ball’s hands, it is what makes Missy Whynaught such a compelling read. The personalities and quirks of characters with comical names, such as Dirk the Jerk, Feet Guy, and Big Red, are so fully realized that each character – no matter how minor – is memorable.

Missy Whynaught is an impressive debut that will enthrall readers with its insightful look at whiteness, class, and privilege in the Maritimes, and the complex relationship between Canada and the Caribbean.mRb

Krystale Tremblay-Moll is a Dominican/Canadian writer and literary scholar based in Montreal. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and an MA in English from Concordia University.