October 7, 2025
Run Like a Girl, by Catherine McKenna
RUN LIKE A GIRL, the memoir by former MP and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, was an impulse buy. I picked it up at the bookstore because I was curious about who’d published it (it was Sutherland House Publishing) and discovered that it was more of a scrapbook than a typical memoir, like those SOUVENIR OF CANADA books that Douglas Coupland published about 20 years ago, replete with snapshots, clippings, photos of objects (the shoes she wore canvassing, her collection of swim caps, an array of campaign buttons, the cover of U2’s WAR, the first album McKenna ever bought), Nike ads she cut out of magazines and taped on her bedroom wall during the ’90s (which is both cringe AND very relatable), along with short passages of text. I was drawn by the book’s format and also interested in McKenna’s story as a female politician who’d received outsized hate and abuse during her tenure (there are people thought they were being clever by calling her “Climate Barbie”), so I took the book home…where I read her acknowledgements and discovered that the book’s unique format was dreamed up in the company of McKenna’s “swim friend,” Leanne Shapton, whose own books which are collections of objects and images are some of my favourites, her memoir SWIMMING STUDIES in particular. So of course I wanted to read RUN LIKE A GIRL. (If McKenna had called her book SWIM LIKE A GIRL, I would have purchased with more alacrity, but possibly I am a niche audience for that.)
“Run like a girl” was a phrase that McKenna adopted during her campaign for office before the 2015 federal election (after a gruelling nomination process during which others were waiting for a more traditional [male] candidate to drop into her Ottawa Centre riding), which basically meant staying true to herself and her values, and honouring her own particular style in getting things done, a style honed from the outset during her upbringing in gritty Hamilton, ON, and her experience as a competitive swimmer. The swimming remains a through-line for McKenna, even after she becomes a parent, and then an MP—as Environment Minister, she had responsibility for Canada’s national parks, and there are photos and anecdotes from her swimming in pristine places all over the country; she also writes about being part of the parliamentary swim team and having to dive under water to get away from Elizabeth May’s very persistent lobbying.
McKenna’s is an inspiring story of determination and finding her own way—at law school, as a lawyer, as a mother, as a politician. She writes candidly about her frustrations as a part of Justin Trudeau’s government where promises of sunny ways dissolved into a dearth of support and real leadership from above for MPs, where she feels as though she was too optimistic as Environment Minister in envisioning the oil and gas industry collaborating with policy makers to enact meaningful change to meet Canada’s emissions targets. She writes about her decision to leave politics at a moment that was right for her, and also about her current role where she continues to work for climate action through the company she founded, Climate and Nature Solutions.
Inspiring, engaging, hopeful and human, RUN LIKE A GIRL was a fun, colourful, and most compelling read. To anyone who finds traditional political memoir a little dry or who wants to be reminded of the what’s possible for the future of climate, politics, and more, this book will be a winner.
October 2, 2025
Gliff, by Ali Smith
I’m not a horse person, and my Ali Smith mileage varies, so I approached her latest novel, Gliff, most tentatively, plucking it from a library display and not reading it for weeks and weeks (it’s already been renewed twice) before I finally picked it up, the description of its setting in a dystopian future not exactly a draw either. But oh, I really loved it, and read it as a extension of the Seasonal Quartet more than I did her previous novel Companion Piece, which I didn’t love as much as I’d wanted to. Gliff is the story of two siblings in a world that feels torn from contemporary headlines—masked thugs are grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into vans. Vast swaths of society are being determined as UVs, or unverifiables, red circles painted around their homes, which are then bulldozed. And to be unverifiable is to be not quite one thing or another, in all kinds of ways, involving ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and an infinite list of other distinctions. Bri and their sister are holing up in an empty home awaiting the return of their mother, which they both know is actually unlikely to happen. And in the field behind their garden are horses destined for the abattoir, and Bri is glad their sister doesn’t know that “abattoir” means. Words and their meanings (their sparkly meanings, their slippery meanings, their strange and unverifiable meanings) the engine of this novel, along with the horse(power), and also names and re-names, and the power to name oneself, to escape the boxes into which the algorithm would like to squeeze us.
Gliff might have been a heavy and depressing book, but it isn’t. It reads up quickly and breezily, and is infused by a spirit of hope and possibility, even in its darkest moments. It’s a novel about the power of refusal and resistance, about the actual smallness of tyranny. “His opponent is everywhere. His opponent is everything.”
September 29, 2025
Starry Starry Night, by Shani Mootoo
There is nothing precious or cloying about the child’s perspective at the centre of Shani Mootoo’s latest novel, Starry Starry Night, the story of a young girl emerging into consciousness in 1960s’ Trinidad. No, instead Anju’s point of view is considered as seriously as Anju herself considers the world around her, the narrative following her attempts to understand it between the ages of four and 12, which are pivotal years in her own life, but also for her country as it breaks away from the United Kingdom, becoming independent in 1962.
When we first meet Anju, she’s comfortable and indulged in the care of her Ma and Pa, her world carefully ordered, though she’s not always safe—there are male neighbours and relatives who are dangerous, though she can’t exactly articulate why. Early on, there are gaps between Anju’s grasp of her reality and what’s really going on, things that Anju can’t see or that she doesn’t want to see, for example that woman called “Mummy” whom she speaks to on the phone, who later appears with someone who is apparently Anju’s father, both of them just back from Ireland, with a little brother and sister in tow.
Starry Starry Night is a stunning example of what “show don’t tell” can do, the narrative so steeped in Anju’s perspective that the reader feels her experiences viscerally, in particular the first great trauma of her life when she’s taken from the grandmother who raised her and forced to resume her life in a household to which she never feels she belongs, and that feeling of being a misfit only intensifies as Anju grows older and finds herself resisting the gender norms inflicted on her. We also feel her confusion as she struggles to make sense of things that don’t actually make sense, such as Trindad’s racial hierarchy, the tensions in her parents’ marriage, and her mother’s feelings for her, which move between hot and cold.
I’ve never understood the point of autofiction (which I’ve always suspected is merely a device for blame-dodging) as much as I understand it with this book, which includes photographs from Mootoo’s own childhood, as well as items from her biography. One of the novel’s epigraphs is taken from Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story: “…The girl in the picture is not me, but neither is she a fictional creation. There is no one else in the world I know in such vast and inexhaustible detail.” Here, such vast and inexhaustible detail serve to bring a long-gone world back to life.
PS If you liked this book, you should check out another story of 1960s’ Caribbean childhood, The Pages of the Sea, by Anne Hawk, who I interviewed for BOOKSPO last fall.
September 22, 2025
Bad Indians Book Club, by Patty Krawec
The moment of hideous social backlash which we’re all enduring right now is evidence of how furiously and violently some people cling to white supremacy and the colonial systems upon which this country and so many others were built, which only underlines the subversiveness of a book like Patty Krawec’s Bad Indians Book Club, a book that centres writers whose stories usually are told on the margins. It is a book that was born of a question, and then conversations that turned into a podcast, and as a result, the narrative is rich with connections—between writers, between readers, between books themselves—as Krawec maps a year of reading. “Rather than allowing us to stand on what we think is the stable ground of a singular expert, reading many books draws us into the mashkiig—the swamp—where the ideas in one book layer with the ideas in another.” She goes on to write, “Even if the centre of influence is one that we have come to respect and admire, the borderlands—or places where the influence of that centre extends and then layers with others—brings us to new ways of thinking and to possibly the creation of new centres.”
Krawac, who is an Anishnaabe/Ukrainian writer belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation who grew up in southern Ontario, writes about connecting with her Native family and ancestry in the 1990s, these connections informed by her ideas about Good Indians and Bad Indians, as understood by Hollywood films: “Good Indians: those who rescue white heroes so that they can in turn be saved. And…Bad Indians..: those who refuse to be rescued or to be saved themselves.” And over time, she can to be drawn to the Bad Indians who, she writes, “…offered me a vision of new worlds being born—worlds rooted in differences that bring balance and life , not differences that play out in hierarchies and power.” The first rule of Bad Indians Book Club, according to Krawec? “Always carry a book.”
And thus begins a journey into the wonders of reading, the questions books raise, and the connections we can make between stories—and between each other. Krawec refers to books by Indigenous, Black, and Jewish writers, and those by writers of other usually marginalized communities to construct a network of overlapping concerns and understanding, stories that inform each other, with characters like Nanaboozhoo and Ananzi. She refers to the books and writers from her podcast, and the panellists that presented those works, and supplements these with books that have occurred to her since the original conversations (including works as recent as Leanne Betasamoske Simpson’s Theory of Water, which just came out this spring, and which helped inspire her idea of writing from the mashkiig). As with the stories Krawec writes about, her narrative is more cyclical than linear, more layered than straightforward, as she organizes her Bad Indians reading list into themes—books about beginnings, about history, memoir, nonfiction, horror books, and speculative fiction.
How do we imagine a world that de-centres whiteness and colonialism? With kindness, humour, thoughtfulness, and curiosity (as well as acknowledgement that nobody will ever get it right all the time), Krawec shows the way, her citations an example of gratitude and generosity. I loved the way she cites writers’ racial and cultural identities when she refers them (because these things are central to people’s experience) all the while underlining how these identities can also be points of connection as we learn from and listen to each other instead of rigid lines of division.
As you might expect from a text that’s inspired by mashkiig, Bad Indians Book Club can be a dense read, thick with ideas and meaning, and it doesn’t read up quick, but you won’t want it to. It’s a book to be savoured and experienced, returned to again to let it change you, and for those of us with a bookish bent, reading it is a rich and wondrous pleasure.
September 15, 2025
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss
This is not a review. I’m still piecing together my experience of reading RIPENESS, the latest novel by Sarah Moss (out now in Canada), whose work I fell in love with through her three short novels, GHOST WALL, SUMMERWATER, and THE FELL. Her most release is the memoir MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF, about her childhood and more recent experiences with anorexia. And now RIPENESS, a novel-sized novel, but which rips apart convention regarding structure. The very first sentence is, “Yes, Edith says.” Quotation marks done away with, long long paragraphs, dialogue within those paragraphs, the novel comprising two sections whose relationship is hard to discern, except that they are both about Edith, one (in third person) set in the present where Edith is around 70, divorced, living a comfortable life in Ireland, and the other (first person) about Edith’s experience in the 1960s on the cusp of adulthood travelling to a villa in Italy to spend time with her older sister, a ballerina, who is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy.
How do these two sections knit together? The answers to that question are not straightforward, but they’re interesting, even if I’m not sure what they are yet. How does the story of her sister’s child connect to Edith’s friend’s discovery in the present that her mother had once given up a child long ago, a son who was raised in America and who is returning to Ireland, a place to which he feels he belongs? A place to which Edith, who is Edith, will never belong. Edith an exile who is the child of an exile, her mother a Jew who was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust when she was sent to the British midlands just in time. How does all this connect to the Ukrainian refugees who’ve made their homes in Ireland, and the less familiar-seeming refugees from other places whom Edith’s neighbours resent and wave placards against?
There is all this and so much more, so much ripeness—the fruits on the trees in Italy, the very pregnant Lydia, Edith at the beginning of her experience just before she goes to study at Oxford. There is no sex for young Edith, but plenty for Edith in the present day (she utters the first line in the midst of it). A study of maternal ambivalence, of bodies, of citizenship, of youth, and age, and fathoming unfathomable things. RIPENESS is a novel about saying YES, and also saying no, sometimes. About life, and consequences, and I need to read it again in order to fully understand it, but the point is that I want to.
September 5, 2025
Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler
When I reviewed Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful debut novel The Wild Heavens—about a quest to prove the existence of the Sasquatch—in 2020, I wrote, “it’s less about the finding than the searching, about the wonder instead of answers, about the stories we tell about the mysteries both of ourselves and of the world.” Her new novel, Rufous and Calliope, seems like a different kind of story on the surface, not a mythical creature in sight, but it similarly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, fancy and reality, and is wholly under the spell of its vivid natural setting deep in the rugged British Columbia interior.
The novel begins with Rufous, in his forties, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder. His hold on the present is tenuous, and he’s had to give up driving, leave his job as a cartographer, and the novel finds him on an epic quest across the landscape to return to the treehouse where he and older his siblings made a home for themselves for a season when he was five years old, after the death of their grandmother. And as Rufous walks, the narrative moves back those enchanted days when he and his siblings were ever skirting the authorities who would have brought them into the child welfare system, but he felt cared for, and everything was infused with a magical sense of freedom. But the season came to an end through circumstances that are not delineated until the end of the story, Rufuous’s siblings leaving him the care of a lesbian couple in a small town who run a cafe, and he grows up loved and cared for, but the loss of his siblings wears heavy on his soul and is as conspicuous as the missing little finger on his hand.
What was the cataclysmic event that tore the family apartment? Whatever happened to Rufuous’s twin sister, Calliope? And what’s really going on with Rufous in the present as he makes his way along the route back to the treehouse? Is he actually going to find his siblings there, or is this just another of his delusions and hallucinations, manifestations of the crumbling in his mind? His decline mirrored in the ecological devastation all around him, the wildfire smoke particles he breathes in all along the journey.
Does this sound bleak? Its not, not really. There are harsh truths that are central to the story—death, and loss, and heartache. But these are balanced out by other things that are just as true, examples of care, friendship, extraordinary survival, wonder at the nature and the mysteries of the universe. What an incredible book.
August 12, 2025
Kakigori Summer, by Emily Itami
“There’ll be days when the way things are will make you weep, and the fact of the world is too heavy to get out from underneath. And then other days, when you can’t believe you’re here, with people you love in the world that contains barley tea and kakigori, sun after rain, watermelons and grumpy cat, and this front door. Hikaru runs through it, in such a rush he barely has time to get his shoes on, roaring at me that it’s time to go. Sunshine catches one half of his face, and the only thing I want to tell him is to keep his face turned towards it. The light, always the light.”
Emily Itami’s sophomore novel KAKIGORI SUMMER is a beautiful summer novel about sisterhood, the story of three sisters—the eldest working in finance in London, the second a single mother in Tokyo, and the third a famous J-pop star—who together retreat to their childhood home on the Japanese coast one summer after the youngest suffers a national scandal that puts her mental health at risk. Their mother has died years before, their English father lives his own life far across the sea with a new family, and their grumpy great-grandmother is impossible to get along with, which means the sisters are on their own, the way they’ve always been, making sense of their place in the world as mixed-race Japanese, if being “haafu” means that they’ll never be whole. And the novel explores the sisters’ unique position between two different cultures and ethnicities, as well as their legacy of mental illness and secrets, moving between three different characters’ voices to tell a story that sparkles like kakigori, the Japanese shaved ice dessert.
August 8, 2025
Bring the House Down, by Charlotte Runcie
Okay, here’s the irresistible premise: theatre critic and infamous nepo-baby prick Alex Lyons writes a scathing review for a one woman show at the Edinburgh Festival, and then proceeds to pick up that one woman (an actor called Hayley Sinclair) at a bar later that evening, her having no idea who he is, and they spend the night together. By morning, the one star review is in actual print across the nation, and Hayley actually discovers it in Alex’s flat, seeing the photo beside his byline, and making the connection—she is furious, and proceeds to revamp her show into a revenge fuelled feminist takedown which quickly becomes the talk of the festival and goes viral turning Alex Lyons into an international pariah, the poster boy for shitty men everywhere.
What I didn’t expect from Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, however, (Runcie also published a beautiful nonfiction book a few years ago called SALT ON YOUR TONGUE: WOMEN AND THE SEA, which I enjoyed) was Sophie, Alex’s colleague, and the narrator of this story. An art critic, she’s sharing the flat with him in Edinburgh and unwittingly gains a front row sea on the drama, and what a curious seat it is, Sophie also working through her own problems as a new mother recently-returned-to-work and frustrated by her academic partner’s failure to share the load with her, resenting the ways in which her life has changed since their son was born, whereas his goes on the same (save for these weeks where she’s away in Edinburgh, a rare break). She’s also still grieving the loss of her mother, and wonders if she’s stayed with her partner because he is her only chance to be with somebody who knew her mum, whom her mother knew.
While BRING THE HOUSE DOWN lives up to expectations of its sensation and propulsiveness (because what a premise it is!), Sophie’s presence makes the novel something different than the usual commercial fare. And there were moments where I wished she hadn’t, where I felt as though she puts us as readers from a remove from the action (I want the sensation! I want the scandal! I want the dial turned up to MORE MORE MORE), I actually think this makes for a more interesting project, and the narrative arrangement itself is a comment on polarization, he said/she said, the quest for nuance, the need for there to be something in-between sometimes. Sometimes when people say they’re looking for the grey area between black and white, what they’re really telling you is that they’re firmly wedded to the status quo, but Runcie’s grey area via Sophie isn’t like that, is genuinely something more interesting.
And in the end, this book with a sensational premise actually becomes a meditation on culture and criticism, and what it means to exist in a culture that is forever RESPONDING to culture instead of creating it, which means that this isn’t just a novel that is fun to read, it’s also genuinely thoughtful and really interesting.
August 6, 2025
Milktooth, by Jamie Burnet
“I think the thing about life might be that it’s just hard, for no divine reason, and it will change you, with no preordained end, and it’s for you to decide whether the hardness hardens you or cracks you open.”
Oh my gosh, this novel is so good, stayed-up-past-my-bedtime good, because I had to see how it ended. (And how it ended! Wow!!). Jaime Burnet’s MILKTOOTH is absolutely spellbinding, and never misses a beat, the story of Sorcha, whose relationship with her girlfriend Chris fast becomes toxic and abusive, repeating patterns from Sorcha’s own childhood within her religious family from whom she’s been estranged since she came out to them. And while Sorcha knows that her relationship with Chris is not altogether healthy, she still wants to be with her, because otherwise what if she ends up alone and misses this one chance to fulfill her dream of having a baby?
But after she and Chris move to an isolated community in Cape Breton, leaving behind the close-knit queer community Sorcha had found for herself in Halifax, things between them only get worse, and when Sorcha finally gets pregnant, she decides there’s no way she can live with Chris anymore, fashioning an escape to the highlands of Scotland where she connects with her aunt, a midwife, who’s as estranged from the family as she is, and together they—along with Sorcha’s friends back home—begin to plot out a future for Sorcha and her baby.
With beautiful prose and gorgeously-rendered human characters (which is to say REAL), Burnet has created a story that swept me along, mesmerized. The dynamics of Sorcha and Chris’s relationship and of Chris’s emotional abuse are pitch-perfect and also hard to read in just how believable they are (how she wears Sorcha down; the gaslighting) and then just when it might be too much, Sorcha takes flight, and the triumph of her exit and everything that happens after that and also the solace and love of her friends—who are so steadfast, forgiving, and true—makes for the most moving, rich and also hilarious read. I loved it.
August 6, 2025
Born, by Heather Birrell
My propulsive reading recommendation for the summer of 2025 is Heather Birrell’s novel BORN, which grabbed me from the start and did not let go until its incredible perfect ending and even then not entirely. Gorgeous, compelling, fraught with tension, chasing shadows, full of light. Dazzlingly literary and unputdownable at once, this story of a high school English teacher who goes into labour during a lockdown is a polyphonic ode to caregiving, community, and public schools. It’s a fast paced read that will stay with you long after the final pages (which made me cry, they was so beautiful). Buy it! READ IT! (Or borrow it from your local library!)
