The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (French: La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes) is a novel by Canadian novelist Gaétan Soucy.

It was one of the novels chosen for inclusion in the French version of Canada Reads, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2004, where it was championed by actor, film director, screenwriter, and musician Micheline Lanctôt.

One day the father kills himself by hanging and his sons decide one of them needs to go to the nearby village to get a coffin.

While in the village it is revealed that one of the sons is actually a female, although she has no concept of that (she has no idea of sexuality and thinks she was castrated when she was very young and that is why she doesn't have testicles).

Her brother begins building a shooting post from two letters on the property and dons himself king with a dead raccoon cap.

The narrator explains that she believes they have been there forever and her father used to attend to them and spend time with them but then stopped and she has been feeding and tending to them ever since.

She makes it further obvious the Fair Punishment is her twin and the decomposed body in the glass case is her mother, although she does not understand it.

When the twins were four years old, the Fair Punishment had a habit of playing with matches that resulted in a fire which killed their mother.

A film adaptation by Simon Lavoie, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, was released in 2017,[1][2] and garnered seven nominations at the Canadian Screen Awards.