---
title: "Citiscape: The Magical Realism Novel Asking Readers to See the People Cities Forget"
description: Beverly Schloendorf's debut weaves Death, a ghost-turned-guardian and a homeless girl into eighteen interconnected tales about urban invisibility.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-04-14T10:14:03.405Z
updated: 2026-06-29T08:43:57.061Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/citiscape-the-magical-realism-novel-asking-readers-to-see-the-people-cities-forget
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/citiscape-featured.jpg
categories: Fiction
content_type: Book Review
region: Canada
publication: Rich Books
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Beverly Schloendorf
    description: Canadian debut novelist based in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Author of Citiscape, a collection of eighteen interconnected urban tales published 2025 by Hampton Publishers.
    jobTitle: Author
    sameAs:
      - https://www.amazon.com/Citiscape-Beverly-Schloendorf/dp/1965835198
---

### Book: Citiscape
*A novel*
By Beverly Schloendorf

In Citiscape, the pavement breathes and the margins of the city pulse with invisible power. Told through interwoven vignettes, the novel maps an urban landscape that is both physical and psychological. A disillusioned ex-cop haunted by the systems he once upheld. An aging priest turning a dying church into something more. A homeless person fighting to survive. Their lives, stories and ghosts intersect in a metropolis that mirrors them, beautiful, broken and indifferent. Citiscape is not a place. It is a question hanging in the smog: who owns the city, and who merely survives it?

[Amazon (Paperback)](https://www.amazon.com/Citiscape-Beverly-Schloendorf/dp/1965835198)

The first time Death speaks in *Citiscape*, he is crying. He has just taken a newborn in a hospital bassinet, and he hates what the book calls the baby run. He stomps down the corridor, wondering why everyone assumes he feels nothing, and then he sits on the steps of a church until an old priest notices him and offers a kind word. It is the opening move of a debut novel that spends the next two hundred pages quietly insisting that attention is a moral act.

*Citiscape*, the first book from Beverly Schloendorf, is a magical realism novel built from eighteen interconnected tales set in the same unnamed city. A reaper with a personal code of ethics. A murdered eight-year-old who refuses to cross over and reinvents herself as a revenge-driven guardian. A homeless teenager named Kip who sleeps in cardboard boxes and a donated coat with another person's name on the back. A multi-faith priest who turns an ailing Catholic church into a House of Enlightenment. A recovering meth addict who runs AA meetings in the basement. A cop who drinks too much because he cannot forget the little girl in the bloody nightgown. They all orbit each other without always knowing it, and the book's quiet thesis is that this is how cities actually work.

## A writer who wants you uncomfortable

Schloendorf is not interested in tidy uplift. Asked why she wrote the book, she is direct. "The book was written to create thought and reaction, to draw people out of complacency and look around them. To see the people that are often forgotten and ignored." Her closing instruction to readers is just as plain. Look up. Look around. See, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Offer a helping hand, or even a sandwich, when you can. Be kind always.

That instruction is the spine of the novel. The baby Death carries, the girl the cops cannot save in time, the old woman kicked to death for her purse, the young mother cradling a doll in a spotless apartment because her real daughter is long gone: these are not set pieces. They are the people the book keeps asking you to notice.

## Magical realism as a way of seeing

The [magical realism](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/whimsical-horror-evolves-as-literary-publishing-s-most-captivating-new-genre) here is functional rather than decorative. Death is a working man on a shift rota. Melody, the murdered child, grows herself up into a teenager in a red-and-black duster coat because her favourite comic book heroes wore costumes. The boundary between the living and whatever sits alongside them is porous, and characters occasionally nudge each other across it. None of it reads as whimsy. The supernatural machinery exists so Schloendorf can write about grief, addiction, homelessness and faith without the flatness of straight reportage.

> "Look up. Look around. See, even if it makes you uncomfortable."
> — Beverly Schloendorf, author of Citiscape

The interconnected stories format gives her room to move. One tale sits inside a reaper's head, the next inside a young woman clawing her way out of a doorway, the next inside an Indian shopkeeper worried about his son. Each tale reads as a short story in its own right. Together they build the geography of a single neighbourhood, the way Olive Kitteridge or A Visit from the Goon Squad build theirs. The House of Enlightenment, a crumbling brick church repaired in barter by Hindu electricians and Wiccan carpenters and Taoist woodworkers, becomes the gravitational centre. It is the place Kip is finally fed a bowl of warm soup without a sermon attached.

## Kip, and the part that will stay with you

Of all the tales, the one that lands hardest is Kip's. Schloendorf writes her from the inside: the paperclips holding the coat closed, the arithmetic of a half-loaf of bread eaten from the middle outward to avoid the mouldy edges, the small dog who arrives in the night and shares the body heat. It is an unglamorous, precise piece of writing about what it takes to survive a cold snap on the street, and it refuses sentimentality right up to the moment a woman on the steps of the House offers her a second cup of soup and does not ask for anything in return.

The book's interest in homelessness is not abstract. Later tales follow Kip, renamed Chelsea, as she rebuilds a life with a job and an apartment, then show her attacked walking home one evening, then show her slowly coming back to herself with the help of a therapist and a man who refuses to hurry her. It is one of the few literary novels in recent memory that treats recovery as a process with relapses rather than a narrative arc. Readers who come to *Citiscape* looking for books about homelessness that take the subject seriously will find it here.

## A debut that reads like a life

Schloendorf's author biography, in her own words, is brief. She lived life as it came to her and made choices, some good and some not so good. That plainness is in the prose. The sentences are unshowy. The dialogue is written the way people actually speak, complete with the "yeah, I guess" and the swearing. The humour, and there is more of it than the premise suggests, comes from Death complaining about his workload and Melody calling him Big Guy because she does not know his real name.

The book was published in 2025 by Hampton Publishers and registered for copyright in May of the same year. It is a [first novel](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/cindy-divine-shafter-bailey-coming-of-age-novel), and it reads like one in the best sense: unpolished in a few places, but written by someone who clearly needed to write it rather than someone who decided they should.

## Who it is for

If you read literary fiction for the language, you will find some sentences that work hard and a few that do not. If you read for character, *Citiscape* gives you a reaper who weeps, a teenager who lives in a box, a priest who keeps a statue of Vishnu next to the altar, and a woman who loses a daughter twice. If you read because you want a novel to change how you walk down a street, Schloendorf has written one for you.

Her ask is simple and it is the one the book earns. Look up. Look around. See, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Offer a helping hand, or even a sandwich, when you can. Be kind always.

**About Beverly Schloendorf**
Author

Canadian debut novelist based in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Author of Citiscape, a collection of eighteen interconnected urban tales published 2025 by Hampton Publishers.

## FAQ

**Q: What is Citiscape about?**
Citiscape is a magical realism novel by Beverly Schloendorf made up of eighteen interconnected tales set in a single unnamed city. Its recurring characters include a personified Death, a murdered child who becomes a guardian angel, a homeless teenager called Kip, and a multi-faith priest who runs a community centre called the House of Enlightenment. The book's central theme is urban invisibility and the moral weight of paying attention to the people cities tend to forget.

**Q: What makes a novel magical realism?**
Magical realism is a style in which supernatural or impossible elements sit inside an otherwise realistic setting and are treated as ordinary. In Citiscape, Death works shifts like a labourer and a ghost-girl grows herself up into a teenager, but the world around them is a recognisable modern city with hospitals, back alleys and AA meetings. The magic is a way of getting closer to real human experience, not an escape from it.

**Q: What are interconnected short stories called?**
A novel made of linked but self-contained stories is usually called a short story cycle or a composite novel. Famous examples include Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Citiscape fits this form: each of its eighteen tales stands alone, but together they build a single neighbourhood and a shared cast.

**Q: Where can I buy Citiscape?**
Citiscape is published by Hampton Publishers. Readers can ask for it through their usual bookseller or look it up by title and author to find the edition available in their region.