Winner of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour!
Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor's life is strikingly different from a literary heroine's. Named for one of literature's least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth. There she seeks the other half of her young life's own matched pair. Delightfully whimsical, Heidi L.M. Jacobs' Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear explores its namesake's love for the written word, love for the wrong men (and the right one), and her complicated love for her city.
Heidi LM Jacobs' first novel, Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest 2019) won the 2020 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Her other books include 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (with Dale Jacobs, Biblioasis, 2021) and 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars' Barrier-Breaking Year (Biblioasis, 2023). Originally from Edmonton, Heidi has degrees from the University of Alberta and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is a Librarian at the University of Windsor.
Praise for Molly of the Mall
"[A] charming debut..."
Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star
"I loved this novel."
Kerry ClarePickle Me This
"Heidi L.M. Jacobs has created a delightfully whimsical protagonist in Molly. Always informed by the characters from literature she loves, she approaches life in her own unique, and fanciful, way. Such fun to follow the retail nightmares and romantic comedy mishaps of this Austenian heroine of mid-90s Edmonton."
Dina Del Bucchia, author of It's a Big Deal!
"Heidi L.M. Jacobs nails it. Molly of the Mall, /i> relentlessly, hilariously conveys the ennui felt by anyone who has ever read a book and then gone to the mall, just as it captures the malaise and pretension of every undergraduate English course ever. A rollicking literary romance set in the icy moonscape of 1990s Edmonton, Molly is wicked good fun."
Kit Dobson, author of Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada