April 16, 2025
She’s a Lamb!, by Meredith Hambrock
Jessamyn St. Germain is bound for greatness, and her confidence is unshakable. Even though the discerning reader will swiftly note the gap between her self-perception and how the world receives her in Meredith Hambrock’s second novel, SHE’S A LAMB! (the title taken from a lyric in THE SOUND OF MUSIC’S “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria,” “She’s a darling! She’s a demon! She’s a lamb!”).
Instead of receiving a role in a regional production of the famous Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, Jessamyn is offered the job of childminder for the show’s youngest actors, an offer she suffers with indignation until it occurs to her that it’s an opportunity in disguise, that surely the director has little faith in the actress playing Maria and needs to keep Jessamyn nearby so she can step into the role when the time arises and finally have her moment in the spotlight.
SHE’S A LAMB! has been compared to the novel MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION for its portrayal of a heroine so stuck up on in her own head that she’s disconnected from the world around her, although I liked Hambrock’s novel so much more for its character’s fierce and ferocious need and desire. There is no such thing as rest or relaxation for Jessamyn, whose singular pursuit of her goals leads her down dangerous paths and is going to end up with a body count.
On one level, SHE’S A LAMB! is a very dark comedy of the absurd in which Jessamyn is willing to do anything to make her dream come true—and get rid of anyone in her path in the meantime. With remarkable restraint, Hambrock leans away any possibility of redemption and focuses her narrative just as narrowly as Jessamyn herself has on her own possibilities. The result is hilarious, ridiculous, creepy and chilling at once.
And chilling most of all for the parts of it that seem most familiar. While Jessamyn never doubts herself, she knows that everybody else around her wonders about their own talent, their own potential, their own destiny. ‘”You don’t know,'” she tells the actress playing Maria, the role she covets, undermining her confidence. ‘”You wish. You hope. But you don’t know. You can’t know. You can never know.”‘
It’s a terrifying message that will ring true for anyone who ever wanted to be anything.
April 7, 2025
Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology, by Susan Holbrook
My first child was born in 2009, which was the year that Susan Holbook published her collection JOY IS SO EXHAUSTING, a book bursting with life and bodily fluids. I felt so seen by her epic poem “Nursery,” twelve pages documenting breastfeeding from side to side: “Left: Now that you’ve started solids, applesauce in your eyebrows, I’ve become a course. Right: Spider on the plastic space mobile, walking the perimeter of the yellow crescent moon. Left: Dollop. Right: Now it’s on Saturn’s rings; if it fell off, it would drop right into my mouth. Left: I take 2%, you take hindmilk. Right: Fingers shrimp their way through the afghan holes. Left: I have hindmilk.”
And now that I am 46, constantly itchy and getting my period every nineteen days, signalling the beginning of my perimenopausal journey, Holbrook has delivered STEAMY: A MENOPAUSE SYMTOMOLOGY, a poetic memoir that’s hilarious and searing at once. The baby from “Nursery” is all grown up now (see Symptom 29, “Dry Eyes,” in which the grown child is dropped off at university, and the poet does not cry. “For most of my life you could count on me to descend into blubbery convulsions at a filmic dog death or an airport farewell or, of course, a real dog death. I would readily cry for sad or happy reasons any old time. Now you can rarely squeeze a sob out of me. Maybe I’ve used up all my tears along with my eggs.”) and the poet is contending with other changes (see Symptom 3, “Cessation of Menses”: “I’m not sure why I never went to the doctor./ Maybe because I was so relieved each time my tsunami ended that I didn’t want to think about it again until three weeks later when I ruined the *other* side of the couch cushion”).
Like the symptoms of menopause themselves, Holbrook’s symptoms can go off on a tangent and sometimes end up being about raccoons or the time she broke her arm at age 11, which I don’t mind in the slightest because, like menopause, this book is full of twists and surprises, and, unlike menopause, it’s also very funny and rich with meaning (see Symptom 33, “Reduced Libido” for former, which is mostly about her grandpa, and Symptom 30, “Panic Disorder,” for the latter, “A year later my heart dances with the daffodils. I found a drug that muffles my panic but not my joy.”).
April 3, 2025
How to Survive a Bear Attack, by Claire Cameron
I never read Claire Cameron’s 2014 novel The Bear. My kids were 5 and 1 when the book came out, and at the time (and even now) I felt far too tender to contend with a story in which parents are killed in a bear attack and their small children are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Not unrelated to the arrival of my children OR my aversion to reading the story was also an anxiety that had settled into my consciousness like a fug and years later would knock me totally flat. (It’s curious to read my first novel and see it there, when my protagonist takes in the big old trees in her neighbourhood, and how vulnerable she is to dangerous objects falling from the sky, how vulnerable even her home is, and that safety is an act of faith more than it’s ever a fact). But that same anxiety, which I’m learning to live with and understand better, was absolutely why I very much wanted to read Cameron’s latest book, the memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack. Because it’s a book about anxiety and fear, and living with them both, and the fact that maybe we’ll even be strong enough when we have to step up to fight, but we can’t plan these things, and the danger is never quite where we imagine it will be.
Cameron’s father died of skin cancer when she was nine-years-old, and in the years after, she found her way back to herself, and through the weight of her grief, by immersion in the great outdoors. She became an avid canoeist, wilderness trekker, rock climber, tree planter, finding solace in nature and wildness, and also power in her own strength and abilities to succeed at the challenges the wilderness threw up at her, including run-ins with bears. She even fancied that she’d know what to do if the unlikely event of a bear attack occurred. Such attacks were rare, but Cameron she was interested in stories of these outliers, like the Canadian couple killed in Algonquin Park in 1991. Understanding what happened to them became an insurance of sorts, because if she could just figure out what they’d done wrong and do it differently, then she would be fine. It was also gateway to her literary breakout, with her second novel’s great success.
But when the danger finally arrived, it came from a place that Cameron had never seen coming. At 45, she was diagnosed with skin cancer, and learned she had a rare genetic mutation making her especially susceptible. She was advised by her doctor that her optimal UV exposure was precisely none. Facing her own mortality brought her back to her memories of her father, a professor of Old English, and the stories he’d taught and shared with her of monsters and dragon slaying. She calls on his courage and strength to help get her through her diagnosis, and many surgeries, and also begins to consider anew the story of the couple killed in Algonquin Park all those years ago. What had she missed from the story the first time? What other lessons might there be? How was she to find her home in nature again when parts of her life she’d always taken for granted—paddling in the sunshine on a lake that reflects the light like a mirror, for instance—had suddenly become perilous. And what of the bear itself? Where, exactly, was the heart of this story?
I tore through this memoir in a day, absorbed by every thread in this multifaceted narrative. The bear stuff BLEW MY MIND and Cameron’s own journey is gorgeously and emotionally wrought, and I came away with just the kind of perspective I’d been hoping to get. “Being alive is one big risk and it will end in death, but the bridge between those two things is love.”
March 4, 2025
One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad
“It is very important to do the right thing, eventually,” writes Omar El Akkad near the end of his new book, One Day Everybody Will Always Have Been Against This, a book which, if/when I post an image of its cover on social media, will make some people angry and disappointed with me. “Eventually” the word on which El Akkad’s sentence hinges, tying back to his title, which comes from a tweet he posted on October 25, 2023, three weeks into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
Two weeks before that, I’d reposted an Instagram story about an Israeli rocket hitting the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, and then took it down after doubt was cast about the rocket’s origins. It is very important to do the right thing right now, I thought, to be cautious and responsible, verifying facts, not to spread misinformation. I took down the post. (In a January 3, 2025 release from the United Nations, after Israel’s December 27 attach on the last functioning hospital on North Gaza, a medical worker reports that “that wearing scrubs and white coats is like wearing a target on their backs.” At that date, the WHO had verified 654 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza.)
At a certain point, I pretty much stopped reposting stories about Gaza. Which is not silence, or violence. It is very important to do the right thing, so I must tell you that I continued to write about it in my own words, on my blog and in social media posts, but I was wary of the reposts, of just what I was doing with that project. Who was I talking to? Was it the people in my own community who are stranding up for Palestinian freedom, needing them to know that I too was on the right side? Was it those in my circles who put up Israeli flags on their accounts on October 7, wishing I could follow up and ask them how they felt about that? Or those people I love who fly no flags at all but whose relationship to Israel is ambivalent, complicated?
There really are some parts of this story which are allowed to be complicated. And one of these is two sides insisting on their moral clarity. Sharpie debates scrawled on utility poles around my neighbourhood and all over the garbage can at the subway entrance. Dueling sound systems turned up to full blast. Members of my community being drawn into a right-wing media-sphere full of outright lies and fear-mongering. Rifts in the Canadian literary community that have hurt many quiet people deeply, whether I think those feelings justified or not. And yes, the endless focus (locally at least) on people’s feelings while bodies are being blown apart, the trouble of feelings being the focal point we keep returning to. That some lives get to be mourned and others collateral damage. So much noise.
But in his new book, El Akkad, who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar and Canada, and was awarded the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel What Strange Paradise, cuts through all of it to create something most essential, to show the hypocrisy at the core of Western Liberalism as the world does nothing while tens of thousands of Gazans are brutalized, murdered. He writes, “There exists no remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital [in Toronto] deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.”
This is not only a failure toward the people of Gaza, it’s a failure to ourselves, to the moral foundation we purport to stand on. El Akkad writes, “Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and someone managed to make it close.”
I don’t think this is a book to be debated, to be countered in the back-and-forth manner of the garbage can sharpie debates (which, I will tell you, have failed to yet add an original element to the conversation or change anybody’s mind). This is a deeply thoughtful and considered book that needs to be understood more than it needs to be agreed with or dismissed altogether. It’s the story of El Akkad’s falling out of the love with Empire, with the Western project that so enticed him as a young person growing up in the Middle East where freedom was curtailed and corruption reigned, a promise of something better, but which has again and again failed to live up to that promise.
He is done with it. He writes, “Everywhere there is a great rage simmering, boiling over, and everything feels like an argument. But there are no arguments to be had anymore.”
February 5, 2025
It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished, by Kate Gies
Before her second surgery at age five (there would be 14 surgeries in total), Kate Gies had learned to somersault, somersaulting becoming her preferred mode of transport at home: “Bend, tuck head to chest, pull forward, and roll! Like a wheel!” But after the surgery—during which a plastic ear was inserted under grafted skin; Gies was born without a right ear and this replacement would be cosmetic only—she would experience pain from motion as simple as moving her head to one side in her sleep, so there would be no more somersaults. The plastic ear wouldn’t take either, and doctors’ further attempts to deliver on promises of building her ear would be far from straightforward, until finally—at age 14—Gies put a stop to all of it, deciding she preferred living in her body as it was, rather than trying to have two ears, rather than trying to be what she calls, “The Kate I’m Supposed to Be.”
Although that is not the end of the story, the trajectory not so simple, not least of all because Gies is hearing impaired (she has no hearing where she has no ear [obviously!], and her hearing on the other side was compromised following a punctured eardrum from one of many surgeries gone wrong), but spends the next 20 years not considering her disability and the need for accommodation. Instead, “[m]y problem had always been perceived as the physical deformity of the missing ear. Its form was the problem, not its function: what I looked like, not the ease with which I took in an navigated the world.”
The catalyst for Gies’ memoir, IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL TO BE FINISHED, is the discovery of a lesion on her right earlobe, the earlobe constructed from tissue from her stomach during those childhood surgeries, the ear that she never thinks about, doesn’t touch, disassociated from this part of her body, and still traumatized from the brutal medical procedures she’d suffered during the years doctors spent trying to make her complete. The memoir documents her movement toward finally the facing the reality of her body and of her history full, a journey told in vignettes and fragments from the past.
The fragmented structure of the memoir is emotionally helpful for the reader, because reading it is such a visceral and wrenching experience, and the story in pieces makes that easier. It’s also how memory works, flashes and splinters, and Gies’s memoir is a fascinating exercise in reconstructing history too, the writing including excerpts from her medical records and also feedback from Gies’s mother upon hearing what she’d written, offering corrections and extra insight, her own pivotal point of view. (Gies recalls her mother being extra cheerful before her surgeries at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto; her mother tells her how once Gies had been delivered to surgery, she’d have to find a place to cry.)
In addition to Gies herself, who appears to have been born with her somersaulting spirit fully formed, her mother emerges as the hero of this book, standing up for her daughter within a system that offered them very little agency, setting the kind of example that likely empowered Gies to eventually declare herself finished with surgeries—a decision her mother never questioned. Their back-and-forths are one of the most moving parts of this book, her mother’s honest self-criticism, Gies’ generosity in imagining herself into her mother’s perspective in the most stunning and powerful fashion. (I think it was because I was able to relate so strongly to both characters that I found reading this book so incredibly moving, in a way that was sometimes painful, but also a gorgeous testament to what writing can do.)
In telling the story of her own experience in an ableist and misogynist medical system, Gies illuminates broader truths about what it means to have a body, to live with difference, and learn to finally feel at home within one’s skin. I loved this book so much.
December 5, 2024
The Mighty Red, by Louise Erdrich
I loved THE MIGHTY RED so much, one of those books I managed squeeze in before the calendar year is out, and I’m so glad I did, because it’s easily one of the most wonderful novels I’ve read in 2024. Like the river of its title—which originates in Minnesota and North Dakota, and flows north through Manitoba (where I’ve visited it in Winnipeg!), ultimately to Hudson’s Bay—this novel holds vast amounts of geological time, and history, and sediment, and strangeness, and ghosts, and kindness, and cruelty, and it flows and flows and flows. It begins with Crystal Frechette, who works the nightshift hauling sugarbeets and listening to talk radio, worrying about her daughter, Kismet, and perhaps she should be, because Kismet (who’s just finished high school) has found herself within the sights of Gary Geist, high school jock who’s still not over a recent local terrible tragedy that nobody ever talks about. Even though Kismet is sleeping with nerdy Hugo, Gary proves to be somehow irresistible and the two are married, which feels as wrong to Kismet as it should, but everything has been wrong for her family since her father absconded with the church renovation fund and her mother realized she’s on the verge of losing her house to a very dodgy mortgage. Light, quirky and breezy in places, The Mighty Red is also weighted with substance at the very same time, a story of the land, and the connections to it by Crystal and Kismet, who are Indigenous (Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), Gary’s mother whose family’s farm was lost a generation ago, farmers who are working on an industrial scale and seeing their soil being ruined by Round-Up, other farmers trying natural methods of controlling pests and organic farming, the whole story feeling a little bit Barbara Kingsolver, and I mean that in the best possible way. This is a story about love, and family, and books and reading, and gardens and weeding, and the 2008 economic crisis, which is also the story of how we got to 2024, and it’s really about everything, like the river at its heart. Awesome and eternal.
November 13, 2024
What She Said, by Elizabeth Renzetti
I can’t find an archived copy anywhere, but I swear I listened to Gloria Steinem about ten years ago in conversation with a supposedly feminist male radio host who would very soon after be exposed as a sexual predator, and what she was telling him was that when she’d first learned about patriarchy and sexual inequality decades earlier, she’d decided that there was nothing more urgent than letting other people, the people with power, know about it. Because once they knew, she thought, surely they would want to change things, to make the world more fair for women and girls. But then eventually, she explains, she realized that it wasn’t that these people didn’t know, it was that they didn’t care, and that whole lives, careers, industries, cultural identities were actually tied up in patriarchal systems and structures which were so much more deeply entrenched than she’d ever understood, and ten years ago I thought I knew what Gloria Steinem was talking about, but I had actually had no idea. The feminist backlash roller coaster ever since then is the very worst ride I’ve ever been on.
It’s a mindfuck that my excellent friend Elizabeth Renzetti has been documenting throughout her journalism career, including with her first essay collection, SHREWED. And now her follow-up, WHAT SHE SAID, six years later, finds readers at a moment, post pussy-hat, that is somehow even worse, in which we keep being told not to believe the evidence before our very eyes—that Kamala Harris was “unqualified,” for instance. That abortion bans are about anything more than controlling women’s bodies. That our men and boys are hurting, and we need to be thinking about their feelings, instead of having a societal conversation about the reasons for domestic violence rates being sky high.
It makes no sense, but the gift of WHAT SHE SAID is that Renzetti connects the dots enough that it almost does, and the reader can breathe a sigh of relief: it’s not just you, and it’s not just me, it’s the patriarchy (and it’s all around the world). Renzetti writes about sexual harassment and the reasons women don’t report; about gender inequality in the caring professions, which mean our most vulnerable suffer; about the disparities in women’s health, and how the politics of oppression are inextricably linked to the politics of reproduction; about who tells the stories in Hollywood; about the fraught relationship so many women have with money (and their entitlement to earn it); about whether women have a sell-by date; why it’s so hard for women leaders to be elected in politics; about the incredible abuse hurled at women in journalism; about the links between domestic abuse and terrorism; and about how the world is not designed for us (and the bros who are charged with engineering the future don’t see any problem with this status quo. And then finally (SPOILER ALERT), in her epilogue, Renzetti comes out as a Swiftie: “She bestrides the world like a tall, multi-instrumental, cat loving colossus… She is Taylor Swift, and there’s no one like her.” (If you’re a Toronto Star subscriber, you can read this beautiful, empowering essay online right now. I actually cut out the two page spread from Saturday’s paper, and I’m going to save it forever…)
She is Elizabeth Renzetti, and there is no one like her either, as brilliant (I promise you) as she is funny (and she is so very funny—that this book of brutal things can be filled with lines that made me LOL is really something). Medium height, but a cat lover too, and when this world enough to make your head start spinning, her book will help you realize that you’re not crazy and messed up, it’s just that the world is, but we are not alone in it.
October 18, 2024
The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter
I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, a Covid-era novel by Regina Porter, a book that came to my attention via Maris Kreizman’s wonderful substack. A novel whose first section begins with an encyclopedia definition of “door”: “barrier of wood, stone, metal, glass, paper, leaves, or a combination of materials, installed to swing, fold, slide, or roll in order to close an opening to a room or building,” the novel’s following two sections beginning with similar definitions of “doorframe” and “threshold.” And Porter’s doorway/opening to the novel itself, (which is to say, her book’s first paragraph): “Mr. Harper takes sex in doorways. Halts new lovers at the threshold of his front door. Left hand on shoulder. Right hand on hip. He searches the ninth-floor hallway for furtive eyes before pressing the whole of himself in the tender nook of his lover’s ass.” I mean, what now?
Nothing is what it seems in THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, set in March 2020 as the world has shut down, neither Mr. Harper himself, who is Theo, presumed suspicious when his young pregnant (white) wife Darla (a bassoonist) disappears on a hike near their cottage in upstate New York, nor the teen in the Cardi B t-shirt who seems to be loitering in Theo’s Park Slope building, nor Darla herself with her secret skills in hotwiring vehicles, or her father, who perished on 9/11. Porter is also an award-winning playwright, and the novel’s playful heteroglossia has those skills on display, resulting in a dynamic and shapeshifting text, full of tricks but never cheap ones, missing white lady/GONE GIRL tropes turned inside out and on their noses, and it’s all so interesting. The narrative moving swiftly through that strange and harrowing season (the teen in the Cardi B shirt’s mother is hospitalized with Covid; she comes off her ventilator; she goes back on her ventilator…) to late spring, late May, the teen boy’s phone blowing up, Minneaopolis, another threshold. “Did you see it?” No resolution. A story without end, but that is also what makes the novel particularly satisfying.
October 16, 2024
Keep, by Jenny Haysom
I’ve been reading all over the place lately, out of necessity, sometimes seven books at at time, bits and pieces, and so it was quite delightful to fall into a novel for the first time in a long time, to read the whole thing in a day. I loved KEEP, by Jenny Haysom, a novel following her award-winning debut poetry collection DIVIDING THE WAYSIDE. KEEP is the story of two real estate stagers charged with packing up the life of Harriet, an elderly poet with dementia, who become entangled in the mess of her life. Although their own lives are not so tidy either—Jacob, in his early 20s, has just been dumped by the boyfriend he moved to Ottawa to be with, having tried and failed to conjure domestic bliss for them; Eleanor, 20-some years older, is dissatisfied with her own domestic arrangement, the small home she shares with her husband and three children altogether too confining, everybody relying on her labour to make it work, and she’s exhausting. KEEP is a novel about building home, about keeping house, about what life does to everybody’s best intentions, and the distance between the faces we present to the world and the realities we’re actually facing. The braided narrative is so well balanced, each character a vivid and engaging presence in the novel, and it’s interesting (and refreshing!) to encounter a book presenting three different generations together and the genuine connections between them.
October 7, 2024
The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing
“How strange time is. The same patterns keep recurring, a helical sequence of war and sickness, from out of which emerged the same green-veined dream.”
For a book that’s about her own backyard, Olivia Laing’s THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE takes her reader everywhere and back through time as she tells the story of her restoration of an 18th century walled garden begun when she and her partner move to Suffolk in 2020, a year that becomes “that year.” As she moves through her own plague seasons, she draws connections to gardens in the minds of Milton (PARADISE LOST) and rural poet John Clare, changes and trends in English landscaping ( a word that, she tells us, began with art and paintings), of how the mid-Atlantic slave-trade was the foundation of so much wealth that shaped the English landscape (I am also reading Tanya Talaga’s THE KNOWING, from which I learn that those very same investors were reaping the rewards of the North American fur trades that would decimate the continent’s Indigenous peoples), and how gardens have also been at the forefront of movements committed to imagining better ways of organizing society, which seems especially pressing to consider in the sweltering summer of 2022 as parts of the UK burned and watering her garden, Laing thought, seemed like an irresponsible indulgence. And how new life took root in the brutal bomb sites of London after the Blitz, so many of these sites turned into parks, and she casts her mind too back to Mark Rumary, the famed UK garden designer who’d once owned her home (and lived with his partner back when, a neighbour tells her, “it wasn’t good to be gay”) and whose vision is everywhere in the garden still, Laing reflecting on her own childhood growing up with a gay parent in the 1980s, and what the garden must have meant to both of them as place of freedom and belonging. And there’s so much more than that, every single page bringing fascinating rewards and gorgeous insight, doses of hard reality coupled with vision and hope. The garden is never simply this or that, instead the garden is a place for both, and, and for the remarkable persistence of living things (gardeners among them).
