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.

June 8, 2026

Venom Lake, by Emma White

I’ve been disappointed before by books that look like this one, books that have promised tight storytelling, suspense, the kind of grip that really does, genuinely surprising twists, fresh approaches to old tropes. That cover, that setting, a read as compelling as that cottage lit up by the side of a lake, drawing me in, and I’m thrilled to report that Emma White’s debut Venom Lake lived up to all of my expectations—and then some.

The premise is this—a true crime book club in Toronto made up of four friends embarks on a September retreat to the not-so-cozy-sounding Massasauga Lake, and by the time they’re arriving on the island, we already know that the dynamics of this group are seriously awry. Every woman has something to hide, in addition to a reason to seek revenge, and what White does that’s so interesting is make the unveiling of every layer in the narrative fresh and surprising, all awhile the mystery itself (one of these women is going to die, and another one of them will have been the one to kill her) unfolds in a fashion familiar to anyone partaking in the crime or true crime genres—and it definitely comes in handy that these ladies are connoisseurs.

There is fabulous intertextuality, references to real-life Toronto true-crimes, transcripts from a fictional true crime podcast that ends up covering what happens on the island, and layer after layer revealing the story to be not quite what you thought it was in the most engaging and satisfying way.

In a crew of such bitchy conniving characters, who will actually prove to be the most monstrous of the lot? Emma White keeps the competition twisty and fierce right to her novel’s final sentence.

PS Go read Kate Jenks Landry’s interview with Emma White at https://www.theneedleandtheknife.com/home/2026/5/21/10-questions-for-emma-white

June 8, 2026

Three Things

• I had a library book due on Friday that, according to my library dashboard, had no holds, which means I didn’t prioritize it for reading, expecting to simply renew it. But then when I tried to renew it, there were holds after all, and instead of returning the book to the library as statutes require, I kept it for three more days so I could read it, and I feel so ashamed of myself. And the point of this is for you to give me some absolution, of course, but also to delineate how badly I feel about this while there are actual carjackers walking around (or I guess they’re driving) without much compunction, and how. How? I really was not cut out for the criminal lifestyle.
• I got my hair cut yesterday and sailed down Palmerston Avenue from Harbord to King on my bike to get to the appointment, the most incredible ride, bike lanes all the way. I love riding my bike so much. Even when I have to come back and everything is slightly uphill and I end up panting.
• My daughter received a game called “Wavelength” for her birthday, and I cannot play it. It’s a game of parsing out degrees between extremes, and I think I’ve become allergic to categorization and binary thinking and it’s just all shades of grey, keleidoscopic, and just when anything feels completely settled, I’m re-evaluating again, and maybe nothing is ever really fixed, and maybe I am overthinking “Wavelength.”

June 5, 2026

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

When I first heard about Yesteryear in February from a friend who was reading an early copy, the premise didn’t compel me—a tradwife influencer wakes up in the 19th century and has to actually live the life she pantomimes, nary a washing machine to be seen. Neat idea, bro, but it sounds a bit like Back to the Future III, which had been my least favourite of the trilogy, so no thank you. I’ve already read Laura Ingalls Wilder. And even when the novel had become legitimately buzzy, I still wasn’t bothered—until I discerned that the buzz was so incredibly divisive. Readers were loving this book, and readers were hating this book, and readers were apparently flummoxed by “the twist,” which I managed to learn nothing about, avoiding the discourse entirely.

I didn’t REALLY want to read Yesteryear, however, until I couldn’t get it, the last copy at Blue Heron Books sold right under my nose at Canadian Independent Bookstore Day and for a while after that, it was out of stock everywhere, so when I saw it again, I grabbed a copy at once. (Scarcity! Such a powerful drug.)

Readers, I loved this book. And I kept waiting for that twist everybody was talking about, but it never came, and I realized that some readers must have supposed they were reading a much more straightforward book than this one, a book where problems are resolved and there’s only just a single hinge, but this is a more complicated project, one that might warrant as many pages of explanation as Pa’s whatnot got in By the Shores of Silver Lake. There are layers of meaning here, and it’s not simply a send-up or satire of influencer culture, instead its own fictional creation, a statement on so many things but also remarkable for more than just simply what it’s “about.” It’s a troubling, uncomfortable, uneasy read, but I absolutely mean that as a compliment.

June 4, 2026

Down with art monsters.

‘“The word genius,” I learn from Kasia Van Schaik in Women Among Monuments, “comes from the Latin gignere for ‘beget’ or ‘to give birth or bring forth.”

And the glaring fact of this means that, when Van Schaik notes how the Romantic concept of genius was gendered (women were assumed to be ineligible for genius as “[d]ue to their biology, women, apparently, were fated to lack wit, judgement and skill”) I’m amused instead of outraged, the overcompensation of this clear, the tiny-dick-energy of a jacked-up Ford F-150.

How a woman’s procreative powers might make a man feel small, incidental, not integral, and so we have to shift things so that he’s centred, and we’re peripheral, and we take care not to mention motherhood in a conversation about the writing life. ‘

13 years ago I was almost 42 weeks pregnant. Tomorrow I will be the mother of two teenagers who are truly the most delightful people I’ve ever known. I am the luckiest.

I wrote about how motherhood made me a writer, and how a person’s creative and uncreative lives can exist in collaboration regardless of whether or not they are parents, and maybe for the better.

Like seriously, lick your own postage stamps, Nabokov.

Down with art monsters.

Read it all at https://kerryreads.substack.com/p/hybrid-creatures-artists-and-mothers.

June 1, 2026

One Day Hard and Clear, by Anne Baldo

Where do I even begin to tell you about how much I love this book?

Perhaps with the email I received three summers ago by editor Stephanie Small telling me about the short story collection, Morse Code for Romantics, by debut author Anne Baldo, a collection whose excellence was so sustained, and which was steeped in nostalgia, hot summers, and had me feeling as delightfully spent at the end as a long day at the beach.

And then with the experience I had the summer after that where I had the opportunity to work with Baldo on her next manuscript, a brutally glorious book that glittered, light reflected from the kind of edges that most people take for granted, don’t even pay attention to, but in an Anne Baldo sentence, they shine.

Then there was last summer, when I didn’t have an Anne Baldo book to read at all, but we don’t have to focus on that part of the story BECAUSE, One Day Hard and Clear is out today. The published version of that book I read two years ago and I’m so thrilled how it’s turned out, how it’s even more wonderful than it was on my first encounter, how that incredible cover sets you up for all the goodness this novel holds inside, it’s sepia tone, the stupid recklessness, female friendship, the posturing, and the heart at its core which is aching, human, and true.

One Day, Hard and Clear is about Sami, who has just finished high school in Windsor and dreams of escaping that world to Paris with her best friend Lucy, whose mother has never quite thought Sami was the right kind of friend for her daughter. And as the distance between them becomes clearer, Lucy moving into a different kind of realm as she pursues her university studies, Sami turns to True, with whom she’d once been a couple, but even after that was over, they’ve never been able to escape each other. Not even after Sami takes up with Bodie, who’s a wildcard, but such a predictable wildcard that he’s never going to really disappoint her, because she knows he only ever will.

Moving through the first decade of the century, the novel tells Sami’s story with extraordinary clarity of vision, her point of view understated but so tremendously defined, the power and beauty of Baldo’s prose underlining all of this. (“I’d stop calling True, I promised myself. Stop being like the sea, lovesick for the moon/ They say the moon, as it now is, was formed in the wreckage of a collision, millions of years ago, all the dust and debris transforming, out of devastation, into something luminous and new.”)

Rife with pop culture references, sympathetic Britney references, LFO playing in the background, characters who are so unbearably realized, reaching for each other but unable to connect—the tension of that. The brilliance of these sentences. The details with which Baldo builds her fictional world, it is all of just so wonderful, and I am so excited for the rest of you to discover it all.

May 29, 2026

This Is Why I Need You, by Alecsandra Kakon

Alecsandra Kakon’s debut novel, This is Why I Need You, begins with the drama dialed up to eleven: besties Zinnia, Fay, Kiara, and Valentina, are on the eve of their annual girls trip together, this time to Barbados, but Valentina has just rejected her boyfriend’s proposal, Kiara’s controlling fiance is flying all the red flags, and Zinnia and Fay have secretly become “more than friends,” even though Zinnia is married with children. None of these are spoilers, all happening at the novel’s outset, and while I had some doubts about a story being so front-loaded, whether such tension could be sustained (and it does get frothy in a few spots), the novel—which follows the women over the course of a life-changing year—was ultimately enjoyable and meaningful, a celebration of complicated friendships and messy lives, love, forgiveness, and chosen family.

May 28, 2026

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, by Nina McConigley

“You have to acknowledge wrongdoing, or it will never heal. Vinny Uncle never acknowledged it. He was just like Lieutenant Marley, doing whatever he liked, regardless of the cost to others. Who was going to rewrite our story? Who was going to say what he did to us was wrong? He wasn’t. So we had to.”

Like its protagonist, the American-Indian Georgie (short for Georgette Ayyar, her sister is Agatha Krishna), How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is a mash-up, a mix, and a mystery—but not quite for the reasons you’d think. Set in the 1980s, and scattered with multiple choice quizzes ala teen magazines (“How do you know if a boy likes you? …Mostly a: Sounds like he must be confused…”), this is a story if sisterhood, a novel about two girls who decide to take justice into their own hands and kill their sexual predator uncle, a monster who lurks in their home.

That home is a ranch house in Wyoming, a curious place to be a girl with brown skin, where a mythology of cowboys and Indians (the other Indians) continue to dominate, and the threads of colonialism seems consistent, universal. And this story, which has something of the screwball comedy about it as much as a murder plot, takes on an unbearable poignancy. This is a slim little book that’s outrageous and contains multitudes.

May 28, 2026

Definitely Thriving is Totally Booked!

I’m so thrilled to be able to share my conversation with Zibby Owens about #DefinitelyThriving on the Totally Booked with Zibby podcast from our live recording at the Whitby Hotel in New York City last month. I don’t meet a lot of people who read more than I do, and so this encounter was both a privilege and a delight. Thank you for having me, Zibby and team, and for making my novel one of your fabulous spring picks. You can listen to Totally Booked wherever you get your podcasts! Direct link at https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/totally-booked-with-zibby/id1366633318?i=1000769789225