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.
December 3, 2024
COLOURED TELEVISION, by Danzy Senna
TOO REAL is my main criticism of recent publishing satires like YELLOWFACE and now Danzy Senna’s COLOURED TELEVISION, just because it’s personal, strikes close the bone, offering a terrifying glimpse into the parts of my psyche I’d prefer not to look at. Apart from the trauma of that, however, I really liked this novel, even through witnessing its main character’s descent into disaster made me want to yell at the page, “Don’t do it.” COLOURED TELEVISION is a novel about race and class in America, about academia, about Hollywood, and marriage, and parenthood, and precarity, and about everything—possibly to a fault, but by design. After taking ten years of complete her magnum opus, a novel her artist husband has nicknamed “the Mulatto War & Peace,” Jane Gibson reconsiders the many life choices that has kept her family from reaching the middle class stability she longed for in her bohemian childhood. They’re currently spending a year house-sitting for a friend in the Hollywood Hills, and Jane’s been hoping selling her novel will finally turn their fortunes around. When this fails to transpire, she tells some fibs and steals a friend’s idea, hoping to pull off the plot twist and happy ending she’s been waiting for. Unsurprisingly, things do not go well. But they’re biting and funny and the book has real heart.
November 18, 2024
The Knowing, by Tanya Talaga
As opposed to “The Knowing”—which Tanya Talaga explains in her book of the same name is a sense among Indigenous people of the truth as to what happened to themselves and their relations as part of the genocidal residential schools system in Canada—there is the fact that I knew nothing. Not an excuse, a plea for absolution, just a fact, and so I came to this book most humbly, a book that began with Talaga’s journey for the details of what happened to Annie, her great-great-grandmother, buried in an unmarked grave off the QEW expressway in Toronto, on the former grounds of a psychiatric hospital. Through her own research, in conjunction with the work of so many others, Talaga is able to piece together the story of Annie and her family, one of colonization, subjugation, but also survival (though sometimes not), and her quest for facts and records is its own thread in this many-threaded work, the obstacles in her way (poor record keeping, destroyed documents, other unavailable, and more) telling their own story of colonial power which continues to this day.
November 14, 2024
Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, by Amal Alhomsi
SENSESCENCE: A YEAR IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES, by Amal Alhomsi, is as much about a year in the Canadian Rockies as Annie Dillard’s first book was about a creek, which is to say that it is about that, but it’s also about everything, about seeing, and being, and (dis)connection to nature, all from the particular viewpoint of a Syrian writer based in Alberta’s Bow Valley, which is not one encountered enough in nature writing. A tiny book that you can slip in your coat pocket, this one was one gorgeous gift after another.
“On the bank of the Bow I was duped. The world seemed still until it wasn’t. What use is a root if the earth it’s embedded in keeps spinning. This motion without consent is dizzying. You open a book and blink a few times, and before you know it, you are now where Mongolia was. A sea sponge, after nestling in a good spot, will move two millimetres an hour simply by breathing. In the morning I inhaled and there was a terrible noise; currents and killdeer and cudweed against the wind. Now there’s a fire near, and ash is riding the air like snow. I have done nothing but breathe, and the noise is now numb. Smog has a silence like ice, like blood. I have done it again; I came here to test the waters, then I was knee-deep in time, then I was swallowed.”
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.
November 12, 2024
Heartbreak is the National Anthem, by Rob Sheffield
“The Eras Tour is a journey through her past, starring all the Taylors she’s ever been, which means all the Taylors you’ve ever been.” —Rob Sheffield
The first time I heard Taylor Swift, it was 2009 and I was driving a rental van to The Junction to pick up a secondhand (recalled) drop-side crib I’d bought off Craigslist for my six-week-old baby, and “Love Story” came on the radio, and I just loved it (that bridge! That key change! How it recalls Katie and Tommy on the old porch watching the chickens peck the ground!).
Although Swift would remain otherwise peripheral to my experience for a while longer, until my daughter (by then 6) arrived home one day from daycamp reporting a song called “Bad Blood” that she’d overheard kids singing, and wanted to hear more of, and there was no going back after that (which was fine, because who doesn’t need a little music in our minds saying “It’s gonna be alright”?).
We’ve been a crew of Swifties ever since, mishearing the lyrics to “Blank Space,” going back to turning “Red,” being unsure about “Reputation” but eventually won over, leaning into the cringe on “Lover,” being rescued from pandemic doldrums by the magic of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” wondering about the auto-tune on “Midnights” and belting out the killer tracks on “TPD.”
And while we did not win the ticket lottery for her Eras Tour in Toronto, I am leaning into the shimmer of #Tayronto this month in lieu of more dreadful things I could be paying attention to, and part of that project was anticipating Rob Sheffield’s HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM, a fun and engaging journey through the weird, wonderful, over-dramatic and TRUE world of Swift’s music and her remarkable career.
“Champagne Problems” was playing in the donut shop when I took this photo. Taylor Swift is omnipresent, and neither she nor I would have it any other way.
November 7, 2024
Loved and Missed, by Susie Boyt
“If we had spoken then it would have been to apologise to each other endlessly and then to apologise for apologising…until there was a high tower of sorryness and of sorrow between us, in recognition that for some reason our lives were rather difficult compared to other people’s. Although, of course, we were well up to it because we were strong, because we were brave and intelligent, although if we were being completely honest, it was a bit much.”
I knew nothing about Susie Boyt or this novel going in, except LOVED AND MISSED had been recommended by a writer friend who said I’m enjoy it, and it was unusual for me to start reading a text this way, just me and the very first line, that first paragraph. But I was hooked, by this spare and pointed narrative voice, by Ruth, whose adult daughter Eleanor is an addict, and the novel profiles their engagement, the eggshells upon which Ruth has to walk in order to have access to her daughter, the bright face she puts on, not a single word that might ruffle or offend, and the reader has to go between the lines a bit to understand what the story is, because Ruth is careful, reticent. She gets on with things, as she does when she begins caring for Eleanor’s daughter Lily, the baby’s presence bringing warmth and purpose into Ruth’s world. She notes that her friends don’t look upon her with such pity now that she has her grandchild to care for, that there is some envy even, which doesn’t happen to Ruth very often, her personal life—single mum, troubled daughter—usually discussed by these friends in hushed tones.
Ruth is very aware of how she’s seen. She’s an experienced and capable high school teacher, and she notes the disconnect between of her professional success and her relationship with her own daughter, with Eleanor’s troubles. Although Lily is more of a tribute to her care, and the quiet narrative shows the joy and comfort Ruth takes in their domestic arrangements, in their closeness. The novel is slim, but follows Lily all the way into her teenage years, and nothing much actually happens, really, except the kind of daily care and gestures that happen all the time, that are what a life, a family, is made of. In Lily, Ruth finds a bit of redemption, her pattern with Eleanor not perpetuated…although the final chapters of the book show that the truth is more complicated, and older, deeper patterns are actually still at work. That there are secrets that Ruth carries close to her heart, and shame that goes unspoken.
This is a novel about love and care, their joys and disappointments, about friendship and motherhood, the people who carry us, the people who save us in ways they’ll never really understand. Strange and quiet and so so good.
November 5, 2024
LIES I TOLD MY SISTER and WHO WILL BURY YOU?
Lies I Told My Sister, by Louise Ells
Louise Ells has become a friend since we “met” in 2019, after I read her story collection NOTES TOWARDS RECOVERY, and so it’s a real delight to be able to pick up her new book, the novel LIES I TOLD MY SISTER. The entire novel takes place over the night protagonist Lily spends with her younger sister Rose in a hospital emergency room after Rose’s husband is in a catastrophic car accident, the hours and the tension finally bringing to the surface years of secrets, resentments, and unspoken things.
The novel moves between the current moment in the ER in 2014 and incidents from the past—a traumatic loss from Lily’s childhood, a difficult marriage with painful struggles with pregnancy loss and infertility, Lily’s years living abroad when her husband was posted overseas, and the years the sisters lived much closer but were still worlds apart, each with secrets and pain in her life that the other would never know about. Until that night in the hospital, when the words are finally spoken.
It’s a tricky narrative set-up (how can one night contain an entire lifetime?) with so much of the novel told in flashbacks, but it works, mostly because Ells chooses to make the real journey Lily’s internal one as she finally faces her own reality, including the painful fact of her beloved second husband’s young-onset dementia. There’s a lot of love and forgiveness in this very moving story, and I enjoyed it all so much.
*
Who Will Bury You, by Chido Muchemwa
“Who will bury you?” demands Timo’s mother, the question woven throughout the story “This Will Break Your Mother’s Heart,” Timo “a late leaver, a decade behind all my friends who left straight after high school for the US, the UK, Australia, anywhere they’d have a better chance of thriving.” The story focusses on the distance between Zimbabwean Timo’s experiences in Toronto, the beginning of her first same-sex relationship, and Timo’s mother’s expectations of her daughter, conveyed mostly through stories of women at her church. “Don’t you think it’s time you started thinking about marriage, Timo? If you wait too long, who will bury you?”
Although Timo’s mother is also asking, “Who will bury ME?” With a child so far away, and the collection shows readers both sides of this exile, Zimbabweans far from home as their parents die or become lost to them in other ways. The collection begins with Timo and her mother, centred in Toronto, and then takes its reader back home to Zimbabwe, to other characters who are leaving their homes or preparing to leave, and characters who are left behind—in “Paradise,” Wiki maintains his family’s graves at the Paradise Cemetary.
In “The Snore Monitor,” Hamu finds work in a delicate job in Johannesburg. The next three stories are fascinating and involve the lore and history of the Kariba Dam, a major project from colonial Rhodesia. “Rugare” is the story of a boy whose big dreams don’t get him as far as he wants to go in Harare. And finally, “The Last of the Boys,” set in a Rhodesia beset by civil war and impossible choices as Zimbabweans waited on her verge of independence, as story especially resonant in such a moment of global strife and warfare. These are stories most specific, but universal at the very same time.
October 31, 2024
Two Ace Picks for Halloween
On Saturday I read FOR EIGHT STRAIGHT HOURS as part of the Turning the Page on Cancer readathon, helping to raise a total of more than $66,000 (and counting!) for Rethink, improving outcomes so that women with metastatic breast cancer can live longer and better lives. And the readathon’s proximity to Halloween meant that, once again, I chose a couple of books with a seasonal theme, two books with basically nothing in common otherwise, except that they were both so good.
I read Suzy Krause for the first time this year with her latest novel, I THINK WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, and decided to delve into her backlist when she posted that her second book, SORRY I MISSED YOU, is about a (possibly) haunted house, ghostings, and maybe even actual ghosts, and therefore the perfect Halloween reading for those who don’t REALLY want to be all that scared. Which it was, exactly, and the scariest parts of the story really were the characters’ grief and loneliness, but offset by the warmest, sweetest story of unlikely connection and community. SORRY I MISSED YOU is about three women who move into a triplex, each of whom imagines she is the intended recipient when a strange letter turns up in the mailbox, and that the sender is someone particularly from her past. Twisty and terrifically funny, this one reminded me of a Claire Pooley novel, and gorgeously underlined Krause’s amazing literary talent.
And then I picked up THAT NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY, by Eva Jurczyk, whose debut novel I loved, and who just landed a very sweet deal for new thriller 11TH ARRONDISSEMENT. THAT NIGHT… is her second book, a locked room mystery set in the depths of a library sub-basement as a group of students endeavour to reenact the Greek ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but things go wrong soon after the students are locked in when one of them ends up dead, and then they’re all going down, one after the other, none of them knowing who among them—if anyone!—can be trusted…until the very end. This one is dark and twisted, really gory, and sprinkled with such delicious humour, perfect for fans of THE SECRET HISTORY (and I actually liked it better!).
October 29, 2024
300 Mason Jars, by Joanne Thomson
It’s curious that 300 Mason Jars is such a personal book, inspired by the author’s history, because it also feels like a book that was created just for me, the cosmos in a jar on the cover as familiar as the one on my kitchen table, but it’s the ordinariness of this image, and of the other quotidian objects preserved in the paintings on its pages—crochet hooks, sugar tongs, a pair of scissors, a yellow pencil, along with many plants and flowers—that has this effect. Joanne Thomson is telling her own family’s story through her series of paintings of objects in Mason jars, a riff on preservation that had me thinking about Mary Pratt’s own paintings of jars and scenes of domesticity, but this images will have viewers/readers recalling their own histories, whether their own families were Canadian settlers in the 20th century, as Thomson’s are, or if their stories are different and there would be other objects on display in their jars. There is a sense of play and whimsy to this project—”Mason jar with pliers”; each painting is accompanied by a short piece of verse—but also a real gravity to it, the project inspired by painful parts of her family’s story that Thomson’s ancestors didn’t talk about it, but she brings it to the light of day, light being the very point (Mary Pratt again!) and she imbues it all with such beauty. This book deserves a special spot on Canadian coffee tables, to be flipped through, and returned to, time and time again.
