The Girl in Saskatoon

By Sharon Butala format: hardcover publication: March 2008 ISBN: 9780002007207

Price $27.95 Quantity This item is in stock and usually ships within 24 hours.

In 1961, a country singer named Johnny Cash chose a beautiful young woman named Alexandra Wiwcharuk to be his “Girl in Saskatoon” and sang to her in front of a hometown crowd. A few months later she would be found brutally murdered on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. As Sharon Butala notes, “An entire city came to a stop.” Her high school friend Alex had dreamed of becoming a glamorous stewardess; she had been crowned a beauty queen in local pageants; she was about to graduate as a nurse. Her brutal killing became a touchstone moment for Saskatoon residents: years later, people could still remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news. Why was Alex’s murder so haunting? And why did Sharon Butala return some 40 years later to reconstruct Alex’s life and search for answers?

Some said they never forgot because the victim was so lovely and innocent; others said it because the killing was so brutal (although her skull was fractured, Alex died of asphyxiation from being buried alive); still others maintained the death never left them because the killer was never found. Butala faces down the graphic horror of these events to create a stunning and lyrical portrait of a world where life appeared so much simpler, when young country girls such as Alex came to the city and dreamed their dreams of love and marriage, when life seemed filled with endless potential. The Girl in Saskatoon is, at once, an in-depth investigation of an unsolved murder, a nostalgic coming-of-age story, an intimate quest for roots, and a meditation on the nature of good and evil and the true meaning of a life. Written in Butala’s spare but eloquent style and set against the prairie landscape that inspires all her work, this unforgettable story will appeal to fans of her bestselling book The Perfection of the Morning, as well as to true-crime readers.

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