[In the favorable review below, Kroller relates the plot of Le Premier quartier de la lune.]

Le Premier quartier de la lune concludes Tremblay's five-volume "Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal," a monumental achievement which sustains the imagination and historical sweep initiated by La Grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte from beginning to end. The cover of Le Premier Quartier is adorned by a child's drawing of a cat, smiling craftily like the Cheshire Cat. The similarity with Lewis Carroll's feline is not accidental; Marcel, who reassures himself of his friend's elusive presence by drawing his portrait over and over, suddenly finds his works riddled with holes. Together with Duplessis, the Fates are about to disappear and leave the apparently abandoned house which has been Marcel's refuge for many years. Marcel himself has evolved from the enchanting four-year-old in La Grosse Femme to a sweaty adolescent unfit for school and tormented by the other children. He is also given to epileptic seizures, an illness which his family shamefully tries to conceal from the neighbours. At the same time, he partakes of a world of fantasy and dream which remains largely closed to his cousin, "l'enfant de la grosse femme"—Michel Tremblay himself. A star student, "l'enfant" still senses his limitations, and the day covered by this book, June 20, 1952, painfully reveals some of them as he writes his end-of-year examinations. As in the previous books, Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Anges in particular, school is above all the place where the power of language is taught, but also often abused. As her son agonizes over his French test, "la grosse femme" graduates from reading to television, an invention she considers capable of breaking through the reader's and radio-listener's solitude, particularly extreme in her sister-in-law Albertine, "renfermée, buckée, bougonne." Here, Tremblay may locate the origins of his own fascination with television as a potentially effective popular art form: recent statistics have confirmed that popular serials are the top-ranking shows in Québec, compared to sports broadcasts in English Canada. This day in 1952 may also be Tremblay's awakening to the importance of joual as he watches his classmates yawn at their teacher's assurance that "le français … c'était une langue passionnante dont il fallait être fier, que les règles, compliquées au début, se simplifaient au fur et à mesure qu'on les comprenait …" This book is a chronicle of despair then, as Marcel and "l'enfant" relinquish their childhood dreams, and Marcel attempts to mark his grief with an apocalyptic burning of the Fates' abandoned house. At the same time, this day marks a beginning, "le premier quartier de la lune," and the book concludes with a brilliant evocation of the images of flight which permeate the "Chroniques" as a whole, whether it be the "chasse-galérie" in La Grosse Femme or the little hanging angel in Thérèse et Pierrette: "Au creux du croissant de lune, un petit garçon était étendu, bras dernière la tête, jambe croisées; il semblait rêver; au bout, suspendu dans le vide par le col de sa chemise qui risquait de déchirer à tout moment, était accroché un adolescent qui se débattait."