In the linked stories of Kasia Jaronczyk's Lemons, the lives of Basia and her family are seen through a kaleidoscopic lens that follows them over twenty years from communist Poland, to their new home in Canada, then back to Poland, to make sense of everything that has happened in the interim. A young girl struggles with her awakening sexuality in an environment where corporal punishment and male dominance are the norm, and every man, even a close relative, can be a sexual threat; where absolute obedience is demanded as a sign of love; while on the playground she struggles to find her place a hierarchy of mean, tough, but charismatic girls. Her mother's return creates new conflicts as she fights over inheritance, offers harmful advice to friends, and accuses her daughter-in-law of a crime. Over time, the experiences of Basia and her mother Magda shift and refract the perspectives through which we view how younger and older women, and their relationships, are shaped by cultural and material changes in their lives.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a cell biologist by training. She has published poems and short stories in Carousel, Room, The Prairie Journal, Carousel, Nashwaak Review, and in Postscripts to Darkness (an anthology of dark & horror fiction). Her stories have won first place at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival Fiction Contest in 2010 and second place in the GritLit festival in 2014. Her work was longlisted for the CBC Radio Literary Award 2010 and shortlisted for the Bristol Prize 2016. She is the co-editor of an anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories that will be published in 2017 by Guernica Editions.

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