January 4, 2024
Apples on the Windowsill, by Shawna Lemay
If you’ve been following, you’ll know that I’ve been rethinking a lot of my social media habits with the advent of the new year, habits that I think were defined by the pandemic when Instagram was of one of the few means of connection in a time of stark isolation, and also gave me a real sense of what everyone was going through (which is to say, a lot). And one of the great joys of my online life in more recent years has been the vicarious excitement of seeing people returning to the world, doing those things that they were baking bread instead of doing in 2020, all of the adventures and connections the loss of which they’d been profoundly grieving. I knew what it meant when Shawna Lemay finally returned to Rome, is what I’m trying to tell you—I’d become that invested in the story she was telling. And now I’m thinking of all of our pandemic Instagrams as still lifes, these windows into each other’s worlds which seemed especially essentially when the life had gone completely still.
Shawna Lemay’s new essay collection is the first book I’ve read in 2024, and while it’s called Apples on the Windowsill, it’s as much about lemons, not only about how the light falls on their unwinding rinds, but also what we do when life gives them to us. Which is to say, put them in a bowl and take their picture, and notice them, how they absorb the light, and how they change, the same way that Lemay documented a series of still life images throughout 2020-22, images that included such various items as pop tarts, Kraft dinner, a crystal bowl filled with strawberries, and various arrangements of grocery store flowers that Lemay’s husband, a painter, would use in his own work. As will come to no surprise to anyone who has been following Lemay’s blog for the past few years, Bruce Springsteen is referenced again and again throughout this collection, and this quotation from an interview comes close to summing up Lemay’s focus in her book: “What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do if they don’t?”
Apples on a Windowsill is a meditation on being human, and on staying human (soft and porous) in a world that makes this difficult. These are essays about marriage, and being an artist, and being the wife of an artist, working at a library, and about finding inspiration in the ordinary. As I begin a new year, I also find these essays are a helpful guide for how to be, and how to see, and I underlined all kinds of passages: “The magic trick of art, and perhaps particularly still life, is to remind us above all that there is beauty at the same time as evil. Evil is a given, but beauty persists. The magic trick of still life is that it reminds us that we’re not alone. The magic trick of still life is that it’s really not a trick at all.”
December 7, 2023
We Meant Well, by Erum Shazia Hasan
“The fire became its own story. The great fire. People spoke of it as a temporal event, “before the fire,” “after the fire.” It wasn’t linked to anything other than to itself and time. There was never any blame, only mention of misfortune. Everything happened in such fragmented pieces that seldom were connector strings drawn between events. It was its own monster. People would talk of where they were during the fire. They recounted the miracles, the people who survived. They relived the losses. They have anniversaries. And time kept going. The fire had nothing to do with the Todds and the Toms, their umbrellas and baseball caps, or the fact that a mass movement of people had been forced, increasing risks and pressure in a small dense location. It had nothing to do with the fact that my mutual funds back home, which I’d set up when I was eighteen, had investments in the mining company that Todd worked for. No, the fire was what it was. An unfortunate event. Like Lele’s rape.”
Erum Shazia Hasan’s WE MEANT WELL (longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize) begins with a phone call in the middle of the night received by Maya at her home in Los Angeles. There is an emergency in the unnamed African country to which Maya has been tied to for years through her work in International Aid, work she is yearning to leave behind for a fresh and less complicated start so that she might be able to be more present (both physically and otherwise) for her husband and young daughter. But it’s work that has changed her, and so has the place, Likanni, creating what seems like an unbridgeable distance between Maya and those who’ve never known the struggles of life in the Global South—her husband in particular, a high flying corporate lawyer. Who, Maya is aware, is having an affair, just one of the reasons—she realizes—he so easily lets her leave again, but she also knows that he knows that she’d be going regardless, because Likanni—and the ways that life there seems real in a way that her sanitized American existence so rarely does—has become a compulsion that’s unshakable.
The stakes are always so high—maybe that’s it? And perhaps they’ve never been higher than now as a colleague has been accused of raping a local woman who’s worked in their charity’s office. And now Maya has arrived to deescalate the situation, to smooth things over to keep their donors happy while also maintaining trust from the community, with whom she’s always had strong ties through her work. The matter boiling down to a simple he said/she said situation—but of course there has never been anything simple about that, WE MEANT WELL examining the space between all things (B)lack and white, a space embodied by Maya herself as brown-skinned woman, an American adopted as an infant from Bangladesh, a person who ever benefits from white privilege in a place like Likanni.
WE MEANT WELL is a novel of ideas (as well as part of a developing canon of works by Canadian writers about the complicated reality of NGOs), but also a terrific, fast paced, plot driven work that’s horrifying, fascinating, and absolutely gripping at once.
December 5, 2023
The Clarion, by Nina Dunic
I really loved The Clarion, a strangely shaped novel about loneliness and connection, a quiet story of two siblings launched into the world from a difficult childhood whose adult trajectories (told in alternating chapters) are very different, the narrative reflecting that. Peter’s world is small, and his story takes place over a handful of days, beginning with a monumental one as he auditions for a spot playing trumpet in a part time gig at a local restaurant. Peter is an unlikely performer—he’s nondescript, unassuming, and while he plays the notes, discerning listeners can tell that he doesn’t feel them. He works behind the scenes in a restaurant kitchen—a job his sister got him—and finds connection and release at a local bar whose DJ’s tracks are mesmerizing and allow Peter to be absorbed into the crowd, to become part of something larger than himself.
Whereas his sister Stasi feels she is too much of the world, and has lost herself within it, in serving its goals and spending so much of her life caring for first her troubled mother, and then her brother. Striving to succeed in the corporate world, the hollowness of all this becoming apparent when she’s passed up for a promotion. Her story—reflective of its larger scale—take place over several weeks as she contemplates her grief and listlessness, tries out therapy, and continues an affair that threatens to put her domestic life at risk, all the while just as lonely and lost as her brother is.
Are we all different or are we the same, is a question the novel returns to several times, a question of nature versus nurture, and the idea of a clarion call haunts the story too, a longing for a song to summon everyone, a common humanity. And the beauty of this book are the fleeting moments of connection where such a thing almost seems possible. However meagre, and also everything.
November 20, 2023
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was the Little Free Library discovery of Deacon King Kong (in hardcover, even!), a novel that turned James McBride into one of my must-buy authors. That book was brilliant, huge in scope, full of play and wisdom and literary magic. And now I’m raving about McBride’s latest, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, set in a Pennsylvania community that’s home to Black Americans and Jewish European immigrants, and it’s just as strange and wonderful, a story to get lost in. A novel I’m finding it hard to find words to describe, arriving at “spectacular,” with emphasis on “spectacle,” because there’s just so much going on here. The way that McBride has constructed an entirely literary universe in Chicken Hill, with buildings with something going on (or being stored) on every single story, and tunnels dug underneath all that, the action never quits, which isn’t too say that so much of it’s not going on inside the minds of its incredible characters, fallible people of such feeling and depth. I just loved it, though it really was “a story to get lost in” at first, pitched—as I was—into 1925 with Moshe Ludlow’s vision about Moses as he strives to make a go of his theatre in Pottstown, Pensnsylvania; his wife, Chona, who works behind the counter in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and writes furious letters to the editor calling out the town doctor for marching with the Klan; the deaf Black boy being harboured in the basement from government agents who want to send him to a local asylum; Moshe’s bigshot cousin Isaac in Philadelphia; old Malachi, the world’s worst baker, and a tiny pair of cowboy pants; the neigbourhood gossip, whose name is Paper; not to mention Soap, and Fatty, and Nate Timblin, who had a different name before. And how do all these characters connect? Well, therein lies the adventure, a gorgeous tale of community, solidarity, and humanity. Larger than life, and somehow also its essence.
November 3, 2023
Four Books I Really Loved
These four books are going to have spots on my Favourite Books of the Year list for sure, so I want to make note of them them here, but (apart from Penance, which I read last weekend) they were also books just so thoroughly read for pleasure that I didn’t want the work of writing a proper review….
Penance, by Eliza Clark
I bought Penance after reading a review in the New York Times and I was so glad I did. Set in a desolate English seaside town (is there any other kind of English seaside town?) on the literal eve of Brexit, it’s the story of a teenage girl who is set on fire by a group of her peers, the novel framed as a Capote-esque true crime expose by a male author who has interviewed the girls involved in the incident, as well as the mother of the victim. Although by the end of the book, readers will be asking who isn’t the victim here, and while the dead girl hardly had it coming, this also isn’t a typical story of bullies gone homicidal—there are all kinds of dynamics at play, and there’s a centuries old curse, a legacy of witch trials, a haunted amusement park, and more, which made it a pretty satisfying read for near Halloween.
*
Games and Rituals, by Katherine Heiny
It’s possible that loving Katherine Heiny’s work could constitute a very large part of my literary identity if I let it, and a highlight of 2023 for me was that a new Heiny book was in it, just as I’d read everything else she’d written (and I guess it’s time to reread now). I didn’t love Games and Rituals as much as I did her earlier collection Single, Carefree, Mellow, but that’s a high bar, and I did love it enough to read an advanced copy during a snow storm in December and then buy a hardcover and read the whole thing again in April. All these months later, I’m still thinking about the story of the women dressed inadequately as she’s helping her husband’s ex-wife move, hauling boxes in the freezing cold, a woman she’d first encountered years before when the two of them worked a overnight suicide hotline together. Heiny gets compared to Laurie Colwin (I encountered her first as emcee of a literary event celebrated the reissue of Colwin’s work in 2021), but she also has Sue Miller vibes in mapping unconventional emotional terrain and reinvention of the family tree as family is made and remade. I love her.
*
The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue
I read this one over the August long weekend, partly on the beach, and it was incredible, twisty and full of surprises. It’s about an Irish journalist who lives in London covering Irish issues, their abortion referendum in particular, and she happens to be quite pregnant with her first child, all this the backdrop to a story of something that happened years before when she was a student in Cork and shared a house with her friend James, who’d been her colleague at a bookstore where they’d finagled a professor she’d had a crush on into holding a book launch for his academic book that really wasn’t of interest to anyone, but what happens that night changes the course of everybody’s life. A story of class, love, and friendship. I loved it.
*
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
I bought the hype, and the book lived up to it, but also I wasn’t resisting, and I think that’s key. A slow and cozy book, set during Covid lockdown. A mother’s three grown daughters return home to help with the family’s cherry harvest, and she tells them stories of her experiences playing Emily in productions of “Our Town,” the daughters still scarce believing that once upon a time, their mother was almost a movie star. This is a novel about mothers and daughters and their unknowability to each other in fundamental ways. It’s also an ode to Thornston Wilder’s “Our Town,” which I know absolutely nothing about (I think it’s quintessentially American…), and I enjoyed it anyway. Plus I found a used copy of “Our Town,” which I’m looking forward to reading soon.
October 18, 2023
Clara at the Door With a Revolver, by Carolyn Whitzman
A sad reality of my life is that there are more books than time, which means that many review copies that arrive on my doorstep don’t end up getting read (and for many of these, I was never the target audience anyway). And usually my calculation for what to keep and what to pass along works out fine, but it sure didn’t in the case of Carolyn Whitzman’s Clara at the Door With a Revolver, which I may have even received two copies of, but I don’t read a ton of nonfiction anyway, and never got around to which I was terribly sorry about once I’d attended the Toronto Arts and Letters Club’s panel for the Toronto Book Awards and listened to Whitzman read from and present about her book, which was a side project to her academic work on housing policy. Because the presentation was fantastic and Whitzman made clear that this story of a Black woman in 1890s’ Toronto who dressed in men’s clothing and famously carried a gun who managed to be acquitted by an (all white male, obviously) jury for the murder of a wealthy young man has a lot to tell readers about both its time and our own.
All of which primed me to be altogether ready to be hand-sold a copy of this book by the amazing Mary Fairhurst Breen (whose memoir I read awhile back!) at the Spacing Store on Saturday, and am I ever glad I bought it. I had my Covid booster on Saturday afternoon and spent a grey and blustery Sunday resting it off and speeding through this fast-paced story that’s gripping and fascinating, but also so rich with historical detail about, say, what life was like for a Black woman in 1890s Toronto, how the city’s robust newspaper scene (there were seven dailies) helped to define the stories they told, or that boathouses were notorious scenes of carnal activity (who knew!). There is also a cameo by Arthur Conan-Doyle, and lots about housing, and my suspician that Whitzman’s work would turn out to be fresh, engaging, vivid and relevant turned out to be spot on.
October 16, 2023
Cocktail, by Lisa Alward
I adored Lisa Alward’s Cocktail, a short story collection whose compelling sepia tones (both on the cover and within the text) manage not to undermine how fresh and vibrant each and every single story is. These are stories about houses and the secrets they hold, about fractured families and the limits of family life—the end of childhood, a marriage unravelled. In the title story, a woman looks back on her parents’ parties, and the strange guest who ended up in her bedroom. In “Old Growth,” a woman travels with her very-ex-husband to see the off-the-grid property he’s thinking of buying and contemplates the ways in which they’re forever connected. “Hawthorne Yellow” tells the story of a new mother whose paint stripping reveals haunting images beneath the layers (recalled in the book’s cover). “Orlando, 1974” begins, “My father says Stephen only threw up because of the Hawaiian pancakes and can still go to the Magic Kingdom (and Stephen’s stomach becomes this story’s Chekhov’s gun). The ex-husband from “Old Growth” is the protagonist of “Bear Country,” set a few years earlier, in which a father escapes his troubled son (and a difficult life) by flirting with a stranger. The mother of an adult son grapples with his connection to her ex-husband’s partner in “Hyacinth Girl.” In “Maeve,” a woman in a moms’ group probes the mysteries of another woman’s life. “Wise Men Say” is a love story of a different kind, as a woman reconnects with a partner she wasn’t kind to years ago and things don’t turn out the way she imagines. “Pomegranate” is a collectively narrated story of teenage girls and their hunger. “Bundle of Joy” was my very favourite story, one that’s agonizingly “cringe,” as the kids say, about Ruth, a mother who shares a difficult relationship with her adult daughter who has just given birth to a baby, and Ruth’s not quite good enough intentions gone oh-so-wrong as she struggles to connect. In “Little Girl Lost,” a woman encounters an artist and his daughter at two pivotal times in her life. And finally “How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a story that contains lifetimes about an elderly widow whose children don’t understand the decisions she made in her marriage, and all those things that seem like a small price to pay for love.
October 11, 2023
The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love
Considering that I am someone whose new novel contains the line, “The children we have make any other world impossible*,” a novel that’s world’s away from this one but also taps right into notions of postpartum and parental anxiety (ASKING FOR A FRIEND also contains the line, on its very first page, “Parenthood…was—if you were lucky—like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”) then you won’t be surprised to know that Yael Goldstein-Love’s THE POSSIBILITIES tapped into something real and fundamental in my own psyche, but it also hooked (and fascinated) me as a reader in a deep and most visceral way.
And if you’re also an anxious sort when it comes to parenting, then you will know what it means to “ride the possibilities,” what Goldstein-Love’s protagonist described as the “car swerve” feeling, where it seems like some disastrous outcome has just been averted by a hair’s breadth. (Another line from my novel—”And how do you measure that line between everything that could have happened and what actually did?**). An idea that becomes literalized in this fantastic (in all senses of the word) speculative/literary mashup in which new mom Hannah’s debilitating anxiety actually becomes a superpower as she has to voyage into the multiverse to search for her missing baby (who is missing because, for babies, the boundaries between worlds and possibilities are especially blurry and thin).
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeline L’Engle, meets Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work? I adored this novel, which almost caused me to cancel Thanksgiving because all I wanted to do was sit down and read it straight to the end.
*This line was actually borrowed from my wise friend Rebecca Dolgoy
**The great thing about being a book blogger is that I get to quote extensively from my own book in reviews of other peoples’.
October 5, 2023
Wild Fires, by Sophie Jai
Sophie Jai’s debut novel Wild Fires (which is nominated for the 2023 Toronto Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2023 Kobo Emerging Author Award and Winner of 2023 Fred Kerner Award for Fiction) is a dizzying, mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, a container for a story about a container for a family, which is to say, a house. A three story house on an ordinary street in West Toronto that is home to the most of the Trinidad-Canadian Rampersad family, a house fled by narrator Cassandra years before to get away from the whispers, the secrets, the spectre of death—but of course, the last is inescapable, and Cassandra is called home after the death of her cousin whose entire life had been tragically touched by the deaths of his brother and his mother before him.
In the house on Florence Street, doors stay shut, mouths stay closed, secrets closely guarded, and Cassandra’s need to make sense of her family’s story—to have it to told to her, and to be able to understand it—is firmly resisted by her mother and her sisters, though these women find other outlets besides story for conveying their emotions, including rage and powerful, enormous grief. And so Cassandra has to find other more roundabout, indirect ways to get closer to what she wants to know, her family throwing up obstacles and diversions all the while, the house on Florence Street absolutely riddled with metaphorical trapdoors and landmines whose triggers are impossible to avoid.
Wild Fires is a wily text, a most compelling literary mystery, a novel whose heart seems elusive at first—with so much being, literally, unspeakable. But by having to a take a long and winding route into the house on Florence Street—there are no shortcuts here—the reader will find themselves so deeply invested and absorbed in this tale, and unable to forget it.
September 26, 2023
The Observer, by Marina Endicott
Tomorrow night (Wednesday September 27) I’m appearing in Hamilton with Marina Endicott as part of a fundraising event for the Hamilton CFUW with an author talk and live music. Books will be for sale and available for signing after the event. Tickets are $15, support the CFUW scholarship fund, and on sale online or at the door! Buy yours now!
(I was also fascinated to see that, in both our novels, somebody cooks eggs that nobody ends up eating and which sit for too long before they’re finally thrown out…)
*
Oh, how I loved this quiet, meditative book, which was not about quiet or meditative things, but instead about violence, abuse, trauma, PTSD, deprivation, loneliness, and LOVE. A novel that doesn’t try to explain, just the facts, ma’am, but between the lines lies such depth and heart-wrenching emotion, with such beautiful prose floating right on the surface: “Does someone teach us to see beauty, or does the world show it to us all the time?”
It also just sparkles with its depictions of the rituals and rhythms of ordinary life, all the waiting, and enduring, and surviving. (“Not one to go to pieces, Kendra had brought a spinach dip in a bread bowl.)
The Observer is a fictionalized story of the Endicott’s own experiences as an RCMP spouse in rural Alberta, her protagonist, Julia, a playwright who arrives in Medway with her partner Hardy, an outsider in every way, but she receives a particular vantage point working for the local newspaper, from where the novel gets its title, and the novel is indeed her observations with minimal editorial, and her keen eye gives us a vibrant sense of the community, for better or for worse, and these stories of particular people because of a treatment of people in general, of society, of humanity: “But I needed more information, more data—not for gossip, but to understand Hardy’s situation and my own, to understand and choose how to live my own life.”
The Observer would make a really interesting companion to Kate Beaton’s Ducks, a different kind of story about rural Alberta, about being an outsider, about work, and male dominated fields, and violence, and loneliness, and such environments are bad for women and ultimately bad for everybody.
It’s a novel about light in the darkness (literally—its opening image is that of a comet), of being soft and porous in hard place, about hope amidst the harshness of reality, and about how sometimes all it ever takes to keep going is the miracle of *just one good thing.*
