Despair and poverty stalk the Lacasse family at every turn- WWII is looming, they are about to be evicted from their rental housing, one of the children has been diagnosed with leukemia, and Azarius can’t stop himself from jumping headlong into schemes that cost them money they don’t have. Florentine lives at home with her mother, Rose-Anna, who is pregnant with her 7 th child, her father, Azarius, who can’t hold down a job, and the rest of her siblings. While working at the diner she meets and falls for the ‘mercurial’ Jean Levesque and in turn Jean’s friend Emmanuel falls for her. She is 19 and working as a waitress at a diner, funneling her income towards her parents’ household expenses and dreaming of a better life. The novel focuses largely on the Lacasse’s eldest child, Florentine. Set in Montreal in the 1940s, Tin Flute follows the Lacasse family, who live in St Henri, a poor French neighbourhood near Montreal’s industrial areas.
The Tin Flute is a French Canadian classic, and the title has lost something in translation- its original French title is Bonheur d’occasion, or ‘Secondhand Happiness’, which is both more poetic and more descriptive.
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