November 2, 2022
10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, Aaron W. Hughes
Reading 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, it occurred to me that too many of us take for granted what a huge and ambitious project Canada is (and society at all, for that matter). I never properly knew what the stakes were as I lived through many of the historic moments Hughes documents in this accessible, engaging book, though this is usually the way with history, and also I was too young to properly understand—the 1995 Quebec Referendum, for example. It’s stunning to read Hughes’ chapter on that now in light of Brexit and the disasters it’s brought and to think that could have happened here, how perilous is our arrangement of French and English cultures, to the exclusion of the Indigenous peoples who were here from the start, not to mention the immigrant groups who’ve settled in Canada over the years, becoming part of Canada’s cultural fabric. I never knew that Canada’s multiculturalism act was inspired by groups such as Ukrainian-Canadians who felt Canada’s endless focus on French/English relations was unfair to other cultural groups. I never knew what the Meech Lake Accord was at all. Or that the real story of the 1972 Summit hockey series was not as heroic as we’ve been taught it was (and I hadn’t thought about Igor Gouzenko in years!). How Pierre Trudeau’s “Just watch me” relates to this year’s “freedom” convoy, and how the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique murders changed conversations about violence against women and gun control, and how—no matter what political party was in power‚ the project of federalism was such a challenging one, different means toward the very same ends, tension and conflict baked right into the recipe.
I loved this book, its breadth and thoughtfulness, the way that Hughes made politics and legal history understandable, and how the pop culture references were just as resonant and interesting. I also appreciate how the book is no definitive, but instead the beginning of a conversation about where we are and how we got here. I learned so much, and definitely recommend it.
PS If you’re my dad, you’re getting a signed copy for Christmas.
October 28, 2022
The Change, by Kirsten Miller
I bought Kirsten Miller’s The Change after reading a review in The Guardian, which coined a new literary genre called “hot flush noir,” and I’ve got to tell you that I’ve been burned before by enticing-sounding thrillers with gorgeous covers like this one and in the end it all fell flat. But The Change was fantastic, as tangled and sprawling as the vines that have taken shape ever since Harriett Osborne got divorced and let herself go, but just as powerful and under control.
This is a witchy story of three women who reach menopause and realize they’re now in possession of formidable powers. Former ad-exec Harriett is a full-on witch, with tinctures and potions, and no fucks left to give about what anybody thinks of her. Mess with her, and you’ll like end up with some invasive hogweed on your lawn.
She in joined by Jo, who has left her job in hotel management to run a gym where menopausal women can work out their fury, the heat from her flashes leaving any men who dares to touch her with blistering burn, and by Nessa, a retired nurse, who has inherited a gift from her grandmother of being able to see and hear ghosts of dead women who are lost and can’t find their way home.
When they come upon a body wrapped in a garbage bag near the shore in their homes in Mattauk, NY, they have reason to believe that more bodies are out there, and a serial killer may be on the lose. When the usual channels of justice fail to get results, these three women decide to take matters into their own vengeful hands.
I loved this book! Smart, brutal, and engrossing, it’s a story that—like the truth—might set you free, but first—in the words of Gloria Steinem—it’s going really to piss you off.
October 27, 2022
Serving Elizabeth, by Marcia Johnson
Serving Elizabeth is a play by Marcia Johnson, which I bought after seeking Canadian stories about the Queen following her death last month, and it turned out to be even better than I was hoping, a really interesting complement to The Gown, by Jennifer Robson, both stories imagining the lives of the working class people behind iconic moments in the history of the royal family.
Inspired by the episode of The Crown set in Kenya, in which not a single Black actor had a speaking role, Johnson’s play tells the story of two women who cook for and serve the then-Princess Elizabeth on that pivotal tour during which Elizabeth’s father dies, she becomes Queen, and her life is transformed forever.
Mercy is working hard to run her restaurant to pay for care for her ailing husband, butting heads with her forthright daughter Faith who longs to leave her family and study at university. When the women receive the opportunity to work serving the royal couple on their tour, Mercy refuses, but Faith forges her signature on the contract.
Meanwhile in London on the eve of Brexit, Tia, a Black Canadian film student interning in an English production, learns that her own romantic ideas about the British monarchy might be more complicated than she thinks, this story line and the other woven together cleverly to become a meditation on colonialism, representation, and British history, a big picture view that made me feel as excited as I did when I encountered my favourite play—Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia—for the very first time.
October 17, 2022
Nine Dash Line, by Emily Saso
The most fascinating, original, well crafted novel I’ve read in a long time is Nine Dash Line, by Emily Saso, a novel whose premise—I will admit—didn’t grab me immediately, because it’s about a guy who’s stranded alone on an atoll in the South China sea, exiled by the Chinese communist government. All the things I tend to like best about novels are impossible in novels about people stranded in the middle of the sea—family drama, elaborate dinner scenes, bookshop settings, etc.—even if the guy on a atoll shares parallel chapters with a female US Navy officer who—for reasons as convoluted as the first character’s exile—has found herself marooned in an inflatable life boat, the sea around her rife with sharks and mines, about to wash up aboard a rusted out vessel belonging to the Philippines.
So how is this author going to pull this one off, you might ask?
To which I’ll reply with one single word: MASTERFULLY.
The book itself, it grabbed me at once, because oh my gosh, this is such a good one, built on the kind of premise that has to be pitch perfect to work at all, but it really is. By the end of the first chapter, I was absolutely hooked, riveted, Saso’s plotting and prose casting an incredible spell that held to the final page, resulting in such a strange and expansive novel, a story of geopolitics, about espionage, war, and ideology, and pain, and longing, and the necessity of living by one’s wits to survive impossible situations, about the impossible becoming possible, for better and for worse.
I’ve got no THIS BOOK MEETS THAT BOOK comparison here, because I’ve never read another quite like this one, a book so deftly imagined that I’m in awe of Saso’s talent, mind-blown by the creative skills required to even begin to imagine a book like this, let alone the technique required to execute it.
All I can tell you is that you’ve got to read it.
October 14, 2022
Finding Edward, by Sheila Murray
After hearing great things about Sheila Murray’s novel Finding Edward, I finally picked it up last weekend to discover it lives up to the praise of critics like Donna Bailey Nurse (who’s written, “This beautiful necessary novel will become a touchstone.”)
And then this week, it was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award!
Though it took a bit of time for all its pieces to come together for me, a book that starts off kind of quiet, which is fitting seeing as its protagonist, Cyril, is quiet, understated, someone you might not even notice if you passed him on the street.
Cyril, just 21, raised by his mother in Jamaica after his white English father leaves their family, is left alone after his mother dies, but he has an inheritance from a benefactor, his mother’s former employer, who’d encouraged him to pursue an education, and Cyril decides to finally take this advice and travels to Canada to enroll at then-Ryerson University (the novel is set in 2012), but being in Canada, and being Black in Canada, turns out to be far more complicated and fraught than he’d expected. His understanding of situation is deepened after he finds photographs and documents from the 1920s pertaining to a mixed race child called Edward, and begins archival research to determine Edward’s identity, thereby weaving in key (and under-celebrated) elements of Canadian Black history including Thornton Blackburn, who started Toronto’s first taxi company in the 1850s; Mary-Ann Shadd, the first Black newspaper publisher in Canada; the story of Nova Scotia’s Africville community; the experiences of Black railway porters (which is also portrayed in the Giller-nominated novel The Sleeping Car Porter, by Suzette Mayr); and more.
At the same time, Cyril’s violent encounters with police and precarious situation with work, housing, school and finances (he’s helping to support his two siblings back in Jamaica) are reflective how little has changed over the years, all this bringing him into contact with local Black activists who help him to imagine possibilities for a different kind of Black future.
Just a satisfying literary experience, plus a rich portrayal of Black experience in Toronto and beyond.
October 6, 2022
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
In Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson’s thirteenth book—which is truly an amalgam of her divergent literary preoccupations over the last twenty five years—there are secret exits, disorienting corridors, narrow staircases, and a bar that swings out of sight at the push of a button, and so too are there tricks in her prose, although they’re not cheap ones, and the prose itself is truly luminous (and also had me reaching for my dictionary several times—”testudinal”…who knew?).
Like all of Atkinson’s books, this one plays tricks with time—albeit less overtly than Life After Life, just say—the entire book taking place over the course of a few weeks, but its chronology including small jumps back in time to show readers what we think we already know from a different angle—and perhaps also suggesting that moving forward in time in 1926 was an uneasy prospect, the traumas of WW1 still unbearably present, no matter how nobody wanted to talk about it.
The novel opens with the release from prison of Nellie Coker, the notorious owner of several clubs in London’s Soho district, who’d been put away for a few months for her defiance of licensing laws. She’s the mother of two sons and a handful of daughters, plus the possessor of shady origins and dealings just as dodgy, which is why John Frobisher is on her tail, a police inspector relocated to the local precinct to look into corruption and possible alliances between Nellie and the force.
On top of that, women’s bodies keep turning up, and it’s two missing girls who’ve brought Gwendolen Kelling from York, a librarian who’s recently experienced her own change of fortune and who has volunteered to come to the city to seek her friend’s runaway half-sister and her companion, two young teens starry-eyed and looking for fame on the London stage and who are therefore ripe for exploitation…
It’s a seedy underbelly for a world that, on its surface, is so sparkling and fun, and it’s this juxtaposition that Atkinson explores, as well as the cheapness of that shiny veneer and what lies beneath it, which is trauma, addiction, violence, and longing. An exploration that feels quite resonant a century after the story is set—as well as ominous, because 1926 would be as good as it got for a very long time.
John Frobisher is no Jackson Brodie, and it becomes clear that Atkinson is not launching a detective fiction series here, the novel remarkably self-contained, all its ends tied up neatly—though perhaps with a bit too much fizzle after more than three hundred pages of sizzle. (So what, is the question I expect my favourite critic Rohan Maitzen will be asking, and I can’t wait to read her review, because I’m always just dazzled by Atkinson, while Maitzen holds her to the rigorous literary standard I think her work deserves…)
In the four days since I finished reading Shrines of Gaiety, however, the story has very much stayed on my mind, suggesting the novel is not mere frippery, but instead a work of literature that—like the best of Atkinson’s works—asks vital questions about the terrible sublimity of human experience and the real meaning of the stories we tell.
September 29, 2022
Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds
I LOVED this book! Louise de Kiriline Lawrence is the most fascinating woman I’d never heard of, born to Swedish aristocracy, goddaughter of the Queen of Denmark, trained as a Red Cross nurse in WW1, which is how she met her Russian husband, whom she followed into a post-revolutionary Soviet Union beset by civil war, and then he was eventually killed by the Bolsheviks, and in the aftermath of that loss, she emigrates to Canada to begin nursing in Northern Ontario, where she becomes the nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets during their first year of life…all this taking up just 64 pages in a book that runs for 300 more.
Because after those extraordinary formative experiences, according to Merilyn Simonds in biography Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, is where the real story begins, Lawrence buying a rural property where she builds a log cabin (without plumbing or electricity) and becoming one of the foremost ornithologists of her time, thanks to her own powers of observation and correspondence with other bird experts who informed her ideas. She’s able to note effects of habitat loss and other human interference before Rachel Carson became well known or celebrated, build support and information networks with other women birders, and write six books, many articles and magazine stories, and a foundational monograph on woodpeckers.
Born into affluence, Lawrence’s early years of hardship would have primed her to be resourceful and grateful for small pleasures, but even still, her strength and stoicism were remarkable—there is a part where she ventures into the bush to find moss with which to insulate her windows for her unheated cabin, and then she falls and dislocates her shoulder, but (as she reports cheerfully to her correspondent—she was also a prolific letter writer, fortunately for her biographer!) she was able to push the joint back into place AND ended up getting some of the best moss she’d ever gathered.
In some ways, this story of Lawrence’s cabin near North Bay reminded me of Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, with the city ever encroaching, growing closer. It’s also a story of the North American Conservation movement (some parts of this mapping beautifully with Michelle Nijhuis’s Beloved Beasts, another book I loved), of discrimination against women in science, of changes to science so that amateur observers have less to contribute, of the struggles in the career of a writer, and the perils of growing old, but most of all, it’s a story about birds, and what we might see if pay attention to the world around us, of the wonders and miracles of the natural world.
September 13, 2022
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson
Debra Thompson’s The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging is an excellent and bracing work of memoir and social science, providing a Canadian lens on topics explored in the works of Isabel Wilkerson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thompson writes about being a Black Canadian and her relationship to America, the land from which her once enslaved ancestors had escaped for Canada, which makes it a curious kind of homeland. And then about what kind of “escape” Canada offered after all, Canada’s own legacy of enslavement and racism seemingly muted in contrast to its southern neighbours, but that legacy lives. Growing up in Oshawa, ON, during the 1980s, Thompson was so often the only Black person, “[which] didn’t make me feel particularly unique or successful or special. It made me think that there was something inherently wrong with Black people and that I had to fight against it every day to defy what the fates had in store for us.”
After completing her doctorate (with experiences in academia rife with anti-Black racism), Thompson arrives at Harvard on a post-doctoral fellowship in 2010, just as the hopefulness of America’s first Black president was beginning to crest, and the story of her decade to follow traces a powerful trajectory in American history and politics, particularly in regards to race. She writes of her own ambivalence towards notions of American democracy, an ideal that has forever failed to live up to its potential and was imagined for the white men who have long been its beneficiaries, a process in which “African Americans are perpetual losers.” Her connection to American is further complicated as she moves on to teach in a town in rural Ohio, then in Chicago, and finally Oregon, as American moves from Obama to the election of Donald Trump, and then the “reckoning” of Black Lives Matter throughout the entire decade and public demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. (She wonders if racial justice, for many white liberals, wasn’t just another Covid hobby to cut through the boredom, up there with Tiger King and sourdough.)
n 2020, Thompson moves—with her American partner and their children—back to Canada, to Montreal, which offers a whole additional layer of complexity to her lens, as she takes on notions of Blackness in the very specific context of Quebec. And throughout all of this she’s mindful of her place on Indigenous lands, with teachings by Indigenous scholars such as Eve Tuck and Leanne Betasamoske Simpson underlining her approaches to political science and being a human in the world.
The Long Road Home is a sparkling and engaging work, and also a demanding one, for white readers. Not that it’s difficult to read (see previous sentence on “sparkling and engaging”; I read it in two days) but that it’s literally demanding something of us, white readers—our discomfort, our willingness to see the white supremacy inherent in our systems, to wake up to the realities of racial injustice and begin to imagine a better, fairer world.
September 9, 2022
Blue Portugal, by Theresa Kishkan
To those of us who’ve been following Theresa Kishkan on her blog for many years, the preoccupations of her latest book, the collection Blue Portugal & Other Essays, will be familiar, the quilts, the homesteads, the memories, the blue. But it’s the stunning craftsmanship of the book, the fascinating threads that weave the pieces together and also recur throughout the text, that make this book such a pleasure to discover. How quilting squares are analogous to the rectangles from which, one by one, Kishkan and her husband literally constructed their home on BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, and the blueprints, and the blues of dye, and of veins, and of rivers, and of how one thing turns into another—how? How does a body get old? How do children grow? How does a family tree sprout so many new branches? And from where did it all begin, Kishkan going back to seek her parents’ nebulous roots in the Czech Republic and Ukraine, in a 1917 map of lots in Drumheller, AB, in everything that was lost in the Spanish Flu, and how we’re connected to everything our ancestors lived through.
Kishkan, as she tells us in her preface, came to writing via poetry, which she put aside when her children arrived, and when she picked up her pen again, she wasn’t a poet any longer: “I had the impulse to write, I had ideas to explore, material accumulating in my mind as my quilting basket accumulated scraps of cotton, but I didn’t have a shape for my thinking any longer. The lines I wrote continued past the point where a poet would consider the stanza, the lyric, complete. At first I tried to wrangle them, contain them, but one day I just let those lines continue, as prose maintaining a certain rhythm but given the freedom of the wide space on a page, One line led to another, then another. Their purpose was not to create fiction but instead to make a map of my own reflections, main roads and secondary roads, river systems, mountains, an beautiful circled stars for settlements. One line led to another, a threads leading me into the heart of meaning I hoped would be there, a little knot at the centre.”
And the meaning is there, but the poetry is too, still, (but not still!), this book a heartful, artful offering.
September 2, 2022
All of This, by Rebecca Woolf
Rebecca Woolf (formerly of Girls Gone Child) is the only blogger on the planet whose sponsored posts I could actually stomach.
She once wrote a post sponsored by an almond company, and I still remember it.
So it’s not exactly shocking that her beautiful, gutting, raw, and awesome memoir, All of This, has proved to be unputdownable, a brave and visceral story of marriage, death, and widowhood from someone who has made a career out of making the unvarnished truth shine.
As a long-time reader of Woolf’s blog and instagram, I was wholly invested in her family life, in her marriage, and the story of her husband’s painful death from pancreatic cancer. And because part of that investment involved my admiration of her ability to hold two truths at once—that, say, her own decision to proceed with an accidental pregnancy at age 23, and her staunchly pro-abortion feminist politics are not incongruous—that the story of her family life, marriage and Hal’s death turned out to be far more complicated and tumultuous than it appeared from the outside only seems to be only adding texture to the story we’d been reading all along.
I remember the rats in the walls. I remember her commitment to telling the story until it came true. I know how hard she tried.
And I’m awed by her capacity for truth telling, and growth, and learning in public.
What does it mean when your husband dies and you feel relief? To be a widow who wants to fuck? To be a mother of four children who’ve just lost their father, and also a mother to one’s own self, one’s own soul? Beginnings and ends all at once. Everything is a circle.
Extraordinary writing, candour, courage and generosity is on display in this beautiful memoir, and also so much raw and bloody love.
