June 29, 2026
Tilt, by Emma Pattee
I don’t ask for much from a camping trip—just perfect weather, and an absolute banger of a read selected from a bookshop en-route to the campground. This time it was Beach Reads Bookshop in perfectly delightful Port Dover, where Robyn’s pick—Tilt, by Emma Pattee—totally made my weekend.
Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s the totally gripping story of Annie, nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib in Ikea—she’s left it too late, as usual—when an earthquake hits, when THE earthquake hits, the big one that’s long been expected but which no one wants to think about. And the novel is about Annie’s journey through the wreckage of the city as she tries to find her husband, the journey alternating with chapters that tell the story of how Annie got here, her dreams, disappointments and compromises, a life she’d never expected when she was young and fresh and being promised that she could accomplish anything she set her clever mind to.
There was a point around the campfire when I was reading Tilt and I was almost in pieces, and my husband said to our eldest, “If this is hitting her this hard, the book must REALLY be brutal.” Because both of them have had the experience of me foisting books upon them by exclaiming, “Read this. It’s GREAT!” and they come back having finished the book and are totally destroyed, asking, “Why did you do this to me?”
Which brings me to the line in Tilt book where Annie notes that there are two kinds of people: the kind who make lists of all the ways a baby might die, and everybody else. (Annie also notes she and her husband never got around to making an earthquake preparedness kit, which was relatable. I don’t like to ground my anxiety in the physical world, preferring to keep it squarely in my head, which makes me feel safer somehow.) I’m definitely among the former group of people, although I don’t think this is the kind of book that will necessarily destroy you—although what do I know? I’m still sorry to anyone who was upset after I told them to read A Heart that Works, by Rob Delaney. I thought it was gorgeous and funny. Sad, but also true and gorgeous and funny.
What I don’t tend to gravitate toward are books that anyone might compare to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however, and Tilt might be the one exception to that, mostly because Lydia Kiesling called it, “The Road meets Nightbitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and how can you not be intrigued by that kind of mash-up?
I loved this book. I loved Annie’s voice, her compassion, its limits, her humour, her honesty. I love the way the narrative gripped me and didn’t let go. How the novel’s broad scope manages to contain such a massive spectrum of the human experience—the awesomeness of being alive, the terrible and terrific risk of falling in love and wanting, the devastation of realizing just how fragile all this, the very foundations on which we construct our measly existences, and the way we’d do so again and again. What a gift and what a burden it is to be human. How hard we can fight to survive.
June 25, 2026
On Witness and Respair, by Jesmyn Ward
“Come take a ride with me, them Southern boys said, them bluesmen made new. For sure, we answered, we coming, and for a song, a poem, a line, this country and history and the universe rearranged itself, and we were outside of time and space in a different place, crafted and built, paint stroke by poem and prose line by song lyric by music note by shutter click, in another dimension, where we were safe and seen and heard, where our hearts beat wildly and surely with the rhythm, with the rush of the water, with our ancestors at the oars of the boat, their own vessel, cutting through the waters of time, navigating the universes as they would.”
In her latest book, a collection of essays and articles written and published over the last 20 years, Jesmyn Ward resists the simplicity of a single story—about Mississippi, America, Black culture and more—and manages to hold it all, the tragedy and the ecstasy, the devastation and the building, the sadness and the joy, the cruelty and injustice and the overwhelming love.
June 23, 2026
The Glorious Mess
Tomorrow is my birthday. It also marks four years since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, which meant women across America lost their federal right to abortion and reproductive healthcare. Further, it marks 24 years since the birthday when I was pregnant, but did not know it yet, a circumstance that could have derailed my life, but didn’t, because I was able to access the care I wanted and needed, and I was so naive at the time that it never even occurred to me not to take this access for granted, never mind the generations of activists who’d had to fight to make abortion legal in Canada. I had no idea what forces they’d had to push against, but now I do, because I’m a person in the world in 2026, who has seen what happened to abortion rights in America, and those forces today are as loud as they’ve ever been, in America and elsewhere.
At the same time that I know what the stakes are, however, I’ve also stopped yelling about my abortion on the internet all the time…mainly because I’ve learned that yelling on the internet is not very productive. And I’ve learned too that maybe we need to be more careful with our most tender stories, that women aren’t served by using our hearts as troll bait, and that it’s not actually as simple as me explaining what happened to me so that people understand. (I really thought it would be.) I got bored too of saying the same things over and over, repetition draining my words of meaning, turning me into a puppet, a prop, rather than the human creature that I am.
That I’m quieter about my abortion these days doesn’t mean the experience was any less important to me though, that it wasn’t one of the most defining experiences of my life so far, that it wasn’t the foundation for the beautiful existence I’ve built in the years since then, for the experience of motherhood when the time was right and I was ready. As I wrote in an essay in Today’s Parent almost ten years ago, “Abortion is part of the glorious mess, right there with the Instagram teacups, the sunshine on our kitchen table, the My Little Pony toys scattered on the floor.”
My kids have grown out of My Little Pony, but the rest is just the same.
June 22, 2026
Every Lie I Told, by Hilary Davidson
I’m looking forward to helping New York-based Canadian author Hilary Davidson welcome her latest novel into the world this Thursday June 25 at Ben McNally Books here in Toronto at 5pm. I’ll have the pleasure of interviewing Hilary about this latest twisty (and twisted!) thriller, a deep dive into the PR industry and all its depravities. The story begins with PR star Jackie Swift receiving a call from her troubled sister late one night—she’s at Jackie’s former boss’s house and requires Naloxone. But when Jackie arrives at the house, her sister is nowhere to be found, and her boss—a man who’s caused a lot of harm but to whom Jackie owes deliverance from her hardscrabble background—is dead. Who killed him? Where is Jackie’s sister? For once in her professional life, Jackie is not in control of the narrative at all, and needs to confront ruthless choices she’s made in her own past if she has any hope of saving her sister, and herself. This one is an absolutely wild ride.
June 19, 2026
Like a River Divides the Earth, by Dora Dueck
I was intending just to read the first page when I picked up Like a River Divides the Earth last week, looking for a taste of what expect from this book, one of my most anticipated reads of the season, but then I started reading—”I was fourteen before I saw my father’s face. The ruins, I mean, the face behind the mask. Holes instead of a nose. Dark holes in a pink crater of pulled-tight skin running from cheekbone to cheekbone, though the tip had been spared and stood there by itself, pale and hideous, as if too stubborn or stupid to quit when abandoned, Nostrils like tiny arches. And where his left eye should have been, he had a crater too.”—and that was it, really, for the next 56 pages, the first story, “Mask,” which unfolded like a novel, rich and detailed, taking place over decades and continents. Just like the four stories that follow in the collection, it was absolutely exquisite.
Long short stories are not always my jam, but when the writing, plotting and characterization are as rich as Dueck’s, the reading is easy, even when the subject matter is heavy and hard. The stories are various, which means each one feels like a wonderful dive into its own universe, stories with wide scopes, most of them hearkening to and from a pivotal moment in which a lifetime is riven in two, as per the collection’s title.
In “Mask,” it was that moment when the daughter accidentally sees her WW1 veteran father bare-faced, his gruesome injuries on display, and how she never tells her mother what she’s seen, not understanding the dynamics of her parents’ complicated relationship but knowing that saying nothing was safer. In “Blue,” it’s a somewhat (maybe?) innocuous gesture within a Golden Girls’ style house-sharing relationship between four older women that makes the drowning death of one of them even harder to fathom; in “Her Own Self,” a bereaved mother’s feeble act of vengeance haunts her for decades to come; “The Ragatta” is a curiously framed story from the point of view of a grief counsellor whose one visit from a woman lingers in the mind; and finally the title story, one of the two in this collection about Mennonite history (both are set among communities hoping to escape Soviet Russia in 1929/1930), this one about a man betrayed by a love, by his neighbours, and forced to survive the unimaginable who is rankled by notions of history as an abstract distant thing.
Getting lost inside these stories is a transcendent experience. Dora Dueck is a marvel.
June 18, 2026
The Art of Looking Back, and Women Among Monuments
“Sometimes I felt his gaze on me as I rode my bike to work, sat at my desk thinking my way into poems, and later, much later, drank coffee by our woodstove in a beautiful silk robe given to me by a wonderful woman, a robe he never saw. I felt his gaze pinning me to paper like a bright butterfly. For years afterwards, a gaze followed me, whatever I did. “A coy black-haired girl wearing a vermilion red gown, on a green mauve ground with a pale summer green light from a window” (May 22, 1982). I was never her, never had a vermilion gown in pale summer light, and I never knew I could refuse the gaze. Until he was dead and I was too old.” —Theresa Kishkan
Never have there been two better suited literary companions than The Art of Looking Back: A Painter, an Obsession, and Reclaiming the Gaze, by Theresa Kishkan, and Kasia Van Schaik’s Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius, two works of nonfiction almost uncannily in conversation. Kishkan’s memoir is a deep study of her experience as a painter’s subject many years ago, when she was on the cusp of her whole life, and may or may not have had the agency she thought she did. One of the portraits now hangs on the landing in her home, and in this book, Kishkan is in conversation with her younger self, who’d never known that the gaze could be refused. Though perhaps her first notion of this began with a trip to Greece she writes about, to the Acropolis, and the Karyatids, statues of five women that for Kishkan became “profound emblems of strength.”
She writes, “Their bodies were foundational structural, they were not the objects of anyone’s gaze, or if they were or had been, it was immaterial after 2,500 years. Their own eyes were far-seeing. Their clothing loosely fit their strong bodies, one leg taking the burden of the building’s weight, that leg bent forward to demonstrate their strength. From behind I could see the intricate braiding of their long hair, thick and bold, serving to enforce the strength of their necks as they supported the burden of the entablature.”
In Women Among Monuments, Van Schaik questions why such monumental women are so rare, and why when we do encounter them, they’re as symbols of virtues rather than representative of actual historical people, object instead of subject. Her memoir is a record of a variety of experiences, among them Van Schaik as a young womn, devoting herself to studying the work of great artists, replicating their artworks. “As I sketched…I wondered what effect replicating all these paintings by men had on my brain. How was it shaping the way in which I women? I hadn’t learned about the male gaze yet, though I had experiences it, both as an obhject of it, but also inwardly, within my own mechanics of looking… All around me I could sense an ambient desire and disgust for women’s bodies. At this point, it was more a feeling of unease and the study of perspective in art seemed to be compounding this self-interrogation. But even without the vocabulary, I was starting to question where I, or anyone like me, fitted in the history of looking.”
And both of these books are a continuation of such questioning, meditative, inspiring, generative, generous and powerful.
June 11, 2026
Cherry Beach, by Don Gillmore
“The city streets were like the forest in the ravine. There was a stillness and order to the untrained eye, but beneath that stillness was a furious cycle of growth and death and decay. People walked by containing guilt and fear and dreams of revenge. They carried debt and perversion and health scares and the sins of their fathers and the doubts of their children. Worlds sashayed by, unglimpsed. If we could see into the soul of everyone in the subway car with us, we wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
I loved this novel by Don Gillmore, set during a hot Toronto summer where things only get hotter after two teenage girls are found murdered in a St. James Town highrise. Cherry Beach is a story of the life of a city, and notions of justice, and who gets to decide, and police corruption, real estate (everything is about real estate) and a system that seems riddled with rot, right to the core. It’s also about alienation, loneliness, and longing, Gillmore’s Detective Jamieson Abel’s complicated humanity so deftly and subtly crafted.
June 10, 2026
On Suffering Sheila
Selections from one-star Goodreads reviews of Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great:
- The kids really wanted another Fudge book, so I picked this one up because it was listed as the next book in the Fudge “series.” Waste of time – Fudge is not in this book at all, and Sheila is not a main character I could root for.
- One thing I normally like about books is that the main character has an arc…they grow and change throughout the book. Sheila is as rude and annoying at the end as she is at the beginning.
- Listen, I understand kids come in all shapes and sizes, and some are a little messier and more complicated than others, that doesn’t necessarily make them bad protagonists. But when they’re so utterly unlikeable, and there’s no redemption at the end of the book? No thanks.
- Everything about this book annoyed me. I could not find one character that was redeeming–except for maybe the dog, Jennifer.
- The main character is an insufferable liar, know-it-all and lacks self-awareness…
- What a horribly selfish girl. At no stage did I find her redeemable or even likeable.
- I was really hoping she would have some kind of character arc by the end of the book, but she didn’t… Don’t let your kids read this one.
- I was hoping her behavior would be confronted as the story went along, but was disappointed. My children did not like the book either.
- Her attitude was terrible throughout the book and no repentance for the rudeness she portrayed her family. Not a good example of how I want my children to be reacting to the world around them.
- This was hard to get through. Sheila was a spoiled brat.
- We didn’t finish this one. Sheila is insufferable.
- stupid
As creator of a fleet of supposedly unlikeable female characters, I found these reviews clarifying, thinking about what readers demand of protagonists (main characters we can root for), and they also made me realize that this is Judy Blume’s bravest novel, even more than Forever, about a character who is undeniably flawed (we are all Sheila Tubman) and who never changes, and also can you IMAGINE the audacity of being somebody who’d give ACTUAL JUDY BLUME a one-star review?
June 9, 2026
Happy Pub Day to THE LOST SEASON
“When I picked up Fowles’ The Lost Season: A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded by Women, I’d understood the title to be a reference to those seven years, to the seven years it had (surprise!) taken Fowles to publish a book after becoming a mother, this book. And while “The Lost Season” does indeed refer to those years, the title means something different from what I’d anticipated, which had been the loss as a creative loss, time squandered that the artist will never recover, an account of the books that didn’t get written while she was busy changing diapers.
No, instead “The Lost Season” is a season of being lost, rather than a season of losing—save for the way Fowles had also lost herself, with everything that had previously anchored her identity and understanding of the world upended by the arrival of her daughter (not to mention years of struggling with infertility before that).
Which is not nothing, obviously—this kind of loss is terrifying and devastating—but there’s also nothing fallow about it, and the point of the book is that the creative seeds sown during those seven years, during that lost season, would turn out to be bountiful. And this is such a more interesting narrative than those affirming the standard line about motherhood and writing being incompatible, hybridity impossible, that every baby you have equals one less book.
Fowles pushes back on all this, her memoir opening with a powerful reclamation of not just mothers writing at all, but mothers writing about motherhood, and why such writing matters, never mind “the voices of literary men, or the anxious voice inside me that asks to be to be small and hidden, to pretend it doesn’t matter.”
She writes: My daughter is in every moment—every small, quiet, intimate thing. She is all the pieces of me, public and private, lost and found, broken and healed. And she is certainly in the writing. In every word.
*
Congratulations to Stacey May Fowles on the release of your memoir, and thank you for the inspiration that led to my “Hybrid Creatures” essay on Substack. This book is so good.
