A Scarcity of Virgins
A woman's journey from dependence to self-fulfillment.

  It is 1986 and Rita McEachern’s life is about to change—drastically. While many women have embraced the revolutionary women’s lib movement by this time, it has not touched Rita. Eighteen years of being a stay-at-home wife and mother have turned her into a borderline agoraphobic, stuck in an emotionally abusive and loveless marriage (although she doesn’t seem to be aware of it), devoting all her attention to domesticity and her four children. Culturally, she and her husband are wildly diverse, she the daughter of immigrants to Canada from a poverty-stricken Sicilian village, her husband’s Scottish family having established themselves generations earlier. An unexpected confrontation with Valentin, a ruggedly handsome Spanish immigrant from Barcelona, shakes up her life both physically and emotionally, Although twelve years younger than Rita, he is intrigued by her innocence and naivete. Unable to resist his enthusiastic overtures, she falls passionately in love with him, sending her on a spiraling road to destruction, forcing her to make some hard decisions in order to save herself and her children. A Scarcity of Virgins is a period romantic drama which explores the full emotional palette of a woman caught between worlds. It explores the complexity of the mind of a woman caught in obsession and delusion, until events force her to reckon with her own dependence on the men in her life.