Readers opening She's a Lamb!, the novel that has
just earned B.C. writer Meridith Hambrock the award established in the revered
humorist’s honour (the 2026 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour), might
not immediately think of the word “kindly.”
In the opening chapters, narrator and aspiring musical
theatre performer Jessamyn St. Germain surveys the world around her with a
ferocity that would make even the sharpest satirist wince. Fellow auditioners
are “wannabes” and “aging women” whose careers constitute cautionary tales,
complete with “makeup caked over discount Botox.” A co-worker is “a troll.”
Theatre patrons are “rubes.” A stagehand possesses an “orthopedic” body. An
earlier director was a “bitter old cruise ship musical assistant” and “obviously
a talentless hack.” Passersby on the street are cultural dullards incapable of
naming an opera. Her rival for the role of Maria in a Vancouver production of The
Sound of Music is “the king bitch herself,” whose social media followers
are “drooling, sugar-soaked Midwestern teenagers.”
Jessamyn, meanwhile, sees herself as committed, serious,
talented and “a deeply attractive blonde woman.”
The stage is set for a novel fuelled by next-level snark,
extravagant self-regard and delusion, all executed with remarkable comic
precision. There is more than a little Carol Burnett channeling Norma Desmond
in Hambrock's portrait of a performer convinced that stardom is her right.
The result is consistently funny.
And – increasingly - unnerving.
The acidic observations that initially delight gradually
evolve into something darker. Jessamyn's private assessments become violent
fantasies. Her magical thinking intensifies. The novel edges toward
psychological suspense. Still, the book
holds on to its comic energy.
Hambrock, who grew up in Ontario, studied creative writing
and developed screenwriting skill at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and
has worked extensively in television as a story editor and writer. In this and other work, she has had a particular
fascination with what she calls “messy women” — female characters struggling to
repair lives that are, or always have been, in shambles. That interest animated
her earlier novel Other People's Secrets and reaches a new level here.
As Hambrock herself has said, she loves story, character arcs and momentum.
This is clear in She's a Lamb! Her background in writing for small
screens is also evident. The novel moves with the pace and engine of better television
dramas: scenes arrive quickly, images linger, and inducements to ask, “What
happens next?” fall on every page. The book's visual imagination, from
children's rehearsals to backstage humiliations to the haunting final images, gives
it an almost cinematic quality.
Yet beneath the dark comedy lies something surprisingly
traditional.
She's a Lamb! is, among other things, a story that
celebrates community.
That may sound odd for a book whose protagonist spends so
much time disparaging everyone around her. But the theatre world Hambrock
creates is itself a small town — an ecosystem governed by rituals, hierarchies,
gossip, rivalries, shared disappointments and dreams. In this way, the awkward
traditions and eccentric inhabitants of this artistic community echo, in
contemporary form, the interconnected, “kindly” world of Leacock's Sunshine
Sketches of a Little Town.
In this regard, scholarly studies suggest that Leacock's
notion of “kindly” may be better understood not simply as gentleness but as
kinship: humour directed toward one's own kin or kind. The people of Mariposa,
like the theatre workers of Hambrock's Vancouver, are flawed, self-important, and
sometimes ridiculous. But they are also recognizably human.
Many previous Leacock winners have also poked at the
boundaries of what constitutes humorous writing. In Trevor Cole's 2011 winner Practical Jean,
the protagonist's musings on mortality lead her to murder her friends, and Earle
Birney's wartime classic Turvey, often veers toward the crude and
absurd. Birney, notably, founded UBC's celebrated creative writing program,
where Hambrock later earned both BFA and MFA degrees. Hambrock thus joins a
distinguished lineage of UBC-connected humourists that includes Eric Nicol, a
three-time Leacock winner, Canadian literary icon Pierre Berton, and others.
Last year's Leacock Medal winner, Natalie Sue's I Hope
This Finds You Well, also featured a protagonist whose inner life was
defined by corrosive judgments of others. But Sue's novel ultimately arrives at
reconciliation and mutual understanding.
Not so much with She's a Lamb!
The narrator Jessamyn never achieves the self-awareness
readers might hope for. There is no neat redemption arc. No conventional happy
ending. Yet Hambrock accomplishes something arguably more difficult. Through
Jessamyn's words and actions, readers come to understand her. We see the
wounded ambition, loneliness, insecurity and desperation beneath the
narcissism. We also come to recognize the broader communities she inhabits:
struggling artists juggling second jobs, performers shaped by the
reverberations of #MeToo, people managing fragile mental health, and a
contemporary Vancouver of social media, vlogging, helicopter parenting and
precarious creative careers.
The humour emerges primarily through incongruity that
classic source of laughter. This shows in the gulf between Jessamyn's dark
thoughts and her syrupy public interactions; between her exalted view of
herself and the reality others perceive; between the grand narrative she has
constructed about her destiny and the far messier truth. Hambrock populates
this world with memorable supporting characters: a voice-coach-cum-therapist, a
stalker-turned-boyfriend, a bartender with Broadway experience, and Samantha,
Jessamyn's rival, whose apparent success masks vulnerabilities not unlike
Jessamyn's own.
Character, indeed, may be Hambrock's greatest artistic strength.
Her people often have more than a few dimensions. They can surprise. They
change or seem to change. Most importantly, they feel both quirky and real.
That presumption that humour must always be kindly or gentle
was even challenged by Leacock himself. Arcadian Adventures with the Idle
Rich, a darker bookend companion to Sunshine Sketches, offered
biting social satire aimed at privilege, vanity and self-deception. Yet Leacock
retained a fragment of sympathy for his targets, recognizing that their fantasies
often blinded them to richer possibilities.
So too does Hambrock.
Jessamyn St. Germain is frequently appalling. She is often
delusional. At times she’s frightening. But by the novel's end, readers
understand both her suffering and the damaged community that produced her.
That understanding – flowing from compassion but without
excusing, cutting satire with cruelty mitigated by backstory - may be the
deepest connection between She's a Lamb! and the model Stephen Leacock established.
So, in giving Meridith Hambrock the award, the 2026 Leacock
Medal judges have recognized a novel that honours that tradition while boldly and
creatively updating it for our anxious, performative, hyper-social, and
psychologically fraught times.