Review: Other Evolutions, by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Other Evolutions
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia
264 pages
Release: October 7, 2025
ISBN 9781770417267
Publisher: ECW Press

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia is an Ottawa author who is an O. Henry Award winner, and was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, as well as being shortlisted for an Ottawa Book Award. Other Evolutions is her debut novel.

But first, the marketing blurb:

Alma Alt, the sheltered youngest daughter of an interfaith, interracial Jewish-Mexican couple, rarely ventures far from her home on a wealthy tree-lined street in Ottawa, where nothing ever happens. The one time she did, striking out to visit her older sister, Marnie, in Montreal, things ended in disaster as she found out that beautiful, blonde Marnie had been lying about their family’s background, trying to pass herself off as white. The fallout from that betrayal leads to a devastating accident, one that claims Alma’s arm and someone’s life.

Alma is now stuck in a holding pattern, unable to move past her grief. But Alma’s life is turned upside down by an encounter just steps from home with an impossible person: the boy she watched die.

Other Evolutions is a literary debut with a dark twist that reveals the uncanny in the mundane, seeing us through the worst parts of our lives toward the weird and wonderful things right in our own backyard.

As I’ve found with many novels published by ECW Press, there is a noticeable lack of editorial oversight at any level, and a preponderance of whining writing bemoaning a troubled youth and upbringing. It’s come to the point of bias, for me, because when I now see a novel for review from ECW, I reluctantly accept and growl throughout reading. More’s the pity, given the few truly excellent authors they publish such as Vanessa E. Penney and Premee Mohamed.

Unfortunately, Other Evolutions follows that culture cultivated by ECW.

What starts out as a somewhat interesting literary novel set in Ottawa’s Glebe, with somewhat competent writing, becomes a relentless, self-indulgent pity-party on the part of the main character, Alma Alt. She has an ongoing jealousy of her older sister, to the point of obsession; to be fair, Alma’s sister is portrayed as fairly arrogant in her intellectual and physical superiority.

(spoiler alert) Agreed, Alma suffers a devastating car accident in which she loses an arm and a friend who had been driving her home from Montreal to Ottawa after she’d run away. She’d run away because her mother allegedly disdains her. It’s all rather adolescent angst, even after she loses her arm. It’s hard to find any empathy with a character who insists on taking on the role of victim when there has been no victimization.

Throughout two-thirds of the novel, this is the entire plot arc. Where the speculative fiction comes into any of that is baffling. Then, almost as though Garcia realizes she’s under contract to write a speculative fiction novel, she pulls out the Frankenstein trope, puts a very minor twist on it when her dead friend is resurrected by his mother who is a hoarder, and now all of a sudden a bio-tech engineering genius.

It all ends predictably, with the monster/friend being set free into the wilds of northern Canada, into the ice and snow.

Unfortunately, for me, the entire story is one great yawn. There is nothing new here. The writing is competent, but not brilliant. The plot is borrowed. However, if you do find whining, self-indulgent mashup novels to your taste, knock yourself out.