April 24, 2025
Restaurant Kid, by Rachel Phan
I was expecting…less?…from Rachel Phan’s memoir, Restaurant Kid. The story of growing up Chinese in a small town in Ontario, the experience of having the family business be the centre of domestic life, what it’s like having immigrant parents who give everything to their jobs in order to make enough money to give their children the kind of life they couldn’t have imagined growing up in in wartime Vietnam. I wasn’t expecting a memoir quite so intimate, so personal, and all-encompassing, but then I realized that this was the point—that where she came from would define everything for Phan. How she felt about her Chinese identity as a child in a community where racism was ordinary, how her parents were too busy to give her the attention she desired from them and so sought it elsewhere, how stereotypes of Asian woman would be part of her early sexual experiences, how her parents’ story would underline her own relationship with money and finances, and more. Restaurant Kid is capacious enough to hold Phan’s anger and resentment at some of her parents’ choices, but also her extraordinary love for them, and the sacrifices they made to give their children a life in Canada. I loved the whole book, but a particular highlight is the epic trip she takes to Vietnam with her parents once she’s in her 30s and her parents can afford to take time away from the business (which her brother runs now, a complicated inheritance, as most inheritances are). In Vietnam, she has the opportunity to see a different side of her parents, being at ease in their native tongue, at home and familiar even in this place that holds so many traumatic memories, and her ability to hold them and love in them in all their messiness and complexity is so extraordinarily moving. Which a rich and brilliant book.
April 18, 2025
The Float Test, by Lynn Steger Strong
I don’t know if The Corrections started it, but for a long time now, all books about unhappy families have been alike in a similar way. Grown children returned to the nest, long simmering secrets and resentments, neuroses and addictions, third person narratives moving between different perspectives, the inevitable blow-up, but THE FLOAT TEST felt like something different. It felt like more of a narrative tangle, a knot. The narrator is Jude whose mother has just died, a difficult and demanding woman, and part of the narrative trajectory is Jude and her three siblings unpacking their relationship with her, the cutting edge of her affection and attention. Although Jude does not make herself the centre of the story, that place belonging to her older sister Fred, whose story Jude “imagines herself into,” portraying moments and incidents she would not be party too. Which is interesting, because Fred is the storyteller in the family, a novelist who has helped herself to bits and pieces of other people’s lives, her family included, scattering these throughout her fiction, and also something has happened between Fred and Jude that isn’t clear. And the backdrop to all of this is Florida, where the family comes from, and to where Fred and Jude both have been loathe to return, where the vultures are circling, the hottest summer ever so everyone is dripping with sweat, and swimming is the only respite—the novel’s title comes from the test that Jude and her siblings were never able to pass because their talent has always been for striving, moving, winning, instead of stopping, floating, being. And there is something suspended about the narrative too, all of the siblings stranded in the in-between in various ways, except for these absolutely wrenching moments that hit on the complicated nature of love, how it can be riddled with pain, the impossible gnarl that is family and history and that place from which we come.
April 16, 2025
She’s a Lamb!, by Meredith Hambrock
Jessamyn St. Germain is bound for greatness, and her confidence is unshakable. Even though the discerning reader will swiftly note the gap between her self-perception and how the world receives her in Meredith Hambrock’s second novel, SHE’S A LAMB! (the title taken from a lyric in THE SOUND OF MUSIC’S “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria,” “She’s a darling! She’s a demon! She’s a lamb!”).
Instead of receiving a role in a regional production of the famous Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, Jessamyn is offered the job of childminder for the show’s youngest actors, an offer she suffers with indignation until it occurs to her that it’s an opportunity in disguise, that surely the director has little faith in the actress playing Maria and needs to keep Jessamyn nearby so she can step into the role when the time arises and finally have her moment in the spotlight.
SHE’S A LAMB! has been compared to the novel MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION for its portrayal of a heroine so stuck up on in her own head that she’s disconnected from the world around her, although I liked Hambrock’s novel so much more for its character’s fierce and ferocious need and desire. There is no such thing as rest or relaxation for Jessamyn, whose singular pursuit of her goals leads her down dangerous paths and is going to end up with a body count.
On one level, SHE’S A LAMB! is a very dark comedy of the absurd in which Jessamyn is willing to do anything to make her dream come true—and get rid of anyone in her path in the meantime. With remarkable restraint, Hambrock leans away any possibility of redemption and focuses her narrative just as narrowly as Jessamyn herself has on her own possibilities. The result is hilarious, ridiculous, creepy and chilling at once.
And chilling most of all for the parts of it that seem most familiar. While Jessamyn never doubts herself, she knows that everybody else around her wonders about their own talent, their own potential, their own destiny. ‘”You don’t know,'” she tells the actress playing Maria, the role she covets, undermining her confidence. ‘”You wish. You hope. But you don’t know. You can’t know. You can never know.”‘
It’s a terrifying message that will ring true for anyone who ever wanted to be anything.
April 11, 2025
Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, by Mark Bourrie
Imagine releasing a book about current events in 2025, the challenge of telling a story with everything so unstable and with no indication of how that story is going to end. RIPPER, Mark Bourrie’s new biography of Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party, is current right up until the beginning of February, which is less remarkable for a book that I’m reading in April than absolutely incredible. Although the one advantage that Bourrie had was that, while the world is unstable, ever-changing, plotted with twists and surprises, his biographical subject is much easier to pin down. The thesis of RIPPER is that Poilievre is the same person he’s always been, ever since he was Grade 9 student vying for a spot on the executive of Preston Manning’s riding association, attending seminars at the Fraser Institute, and—like many teens—being outraged about the capital gains tax.
Bourrie writes in his introduction: “Is he a bad person? I’m reluctant to make that claim. I think he’s an angry teenager in the body of a grown man. That makes him a stellar opposition politician. It is a bad combination in a prime minister.”
RIPPER is not just about one man, but also about the place he comes from, Alberta, which has always played an out-sized role in Canadian politics compared to other provinces, and Bourrie tells the story of Alberta’s booms and busts, its sense of grievance, and why The Reform Party would emerge from there in the 1990s to remake Canadian politics. Through his story he shows that someone like Poilievre—whose politics and character would have seemed strange and fringe as he came of age—has had mainstream opinion shift in his favour over the last 25 years, through the fall of traditional media, the rise of partisan pseudo-media, a decline in standards of living that suggests there might be something to his claim of Canada being broken (although this decline is a global one), a data-driven approach to courting voters (which lends itself to dirty tricks), and an attack-dog style to politics that’s embodied by Poilievre himself and the people he surrounds himself with.
Bourrie’s narrative voice is personable, engaging and authentic—he makes clear in his introduction that he is not anti-conservative, but that he’s opposed to what Conservatism has become, employing American-style tactics and unafraid of undermining democracy, wholeheartedly embracing the protesters who occupied downtown Ottawa for weeks in February 2022 whose plans were to overthrow the government. Bourrie’s story is fast paced, and gripping, and—with real restraint—not petty (not a word about Poilievre’s remarkable SHE’S ALL THAT-style makeover once he’d become Conservative leader). The book’s depth and focus—as with so many other books I’ve read lately which are most current in their approach—is most clarifying, helping me connect the dots in the chaos of our moment and recent history, making some kind of sense of it. (This is the kind of understanding that inoculates one against becoming a conspiracy theory nut-job).
Imagine releasing a book about current events in 2025, the challenge of telling a story with everything so unstable and with no indication of how that story is going to end. And then, imagine—even worse—not even trying.
Kudos to Mark Bourrie and his publisher Biblioasis for meeting this moment.
And everybody else: read this book. (And also read Catherine Tsalikis’s biography of Chrystia Freeland, who you might remember as the person who orchestrated any and every hope of the Liberal Party doing well in our upcoming federal election.)
April 7, 2025
Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology, by Susan Holbrook
My first child was born in 2009, which was the year that Susan Holbook published her collection JOY IS SO EXHAUSTING, a book bursting with life and bodily fluids. I felt so seen by her epic poem “Nursery,” twelve pages documenting breastfeeding from side to side: “Left: Now that you’ve started solids, applesauce in your eyebrows, I’ve become a course. Right: Spider on the plastic space mobile, walking the perimeter of the yellow crescent moon. Left: Dollop. Right: Now it’s on Saturn’s rings; if it fell off, it would drop right into my mouth. Left: I take 2%, you take hindmilk. Right: Fingers shrimp their way through the afghan holes. Left: I have hindmilk.”
And now that I am 46, constantly itchy and getting my period every nineteen days, signalling the beginning of my perimenopausal journey, Holbrook has delivered STEAMY: A MENOPAUSE SYMTOMOLOGY, a poetic memoir that’s hilarious and searing at once. The baby from “Nursery” is all grown up now (see Symptom 29, “Dry Eyes,” in which the grown child is dropped off at university, and the poet does not cry. “For most of my life you could count on me to descend into blubbery convulsions at a filmic dog death or an airport farewell or, of course, a real dog death. I would readily cry for sad or happy reasons any old time. Now you can rarely squeeze a sob out of me. Maybe I’ve used up all my tears along with my eggs.”) and the poet is contending with other changes (see Symptom 3, “Cessation of Menses”: “I’m not sure why I never went to the doctor./ Maybe because I was so relieved each time my tsunami ended that I didn’t want to think about it again until three weeks later when I ruined the *other* side of the couch cushion”).
Like the symptoms of menopause themselves, Holbrook’s symptoms can go off on a tangent and sometimes end up being about raccoons or the time she broke her arm at age 11, which I don’t mind in the slightest because, like menopause, this book is full of twists and surprises, and, unlike menopause, it’s also very funny and rich with meaning (see Symptom 33, “Reduced Libido” for former, which is mostly about her grandpa, and Symptom 30, “Panic Disorder,” for the latter, “A year later my heart dances with the daffodils. I found a drug that muffles my panic but not my joy.”).
April 3, 2025
How to Survive a Bear Attack, by Claire Cameron
I never read Claire Cameron’s 2014 novel The Bear. My kids were 5 and 1 when the book came out, and at the time (and even now) I felt far too tender to contend with a story in which parents are killed in a bear attack and their small children are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Not unrelated to the arrival of my children OR my aversion to reading the story was also an anxiety that had settled into my consciousness like a fug and years later would knock me totally flat. (It’s curious to read my first novel and see it there, when my protagonist takes in the big old trees in her neighbourhood, and how vulnerable she is to dangerous objects falling from the sky, how vulnerable even her home is, and that safety is an act of faith more than it’s ever a fact). But that same anxiety, which I’m learning to live with and understand better, was absolutely why I very much wanted to read Cameron’s latest book, the memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack. Because it’s a book about anxiety and fear, and living with them both, and the fact that maybe we’ll even be strong enough when we have to step up to fight, but we can’t plan these things, and the danger is never quite where we imagine it will be.
Cameron’s father died of skin cancer when she was nine-years-old, and in the years after, she found her way back to herself, and through the weight of her grief, by immersion in the great outdoors. She became an avid canoeist, wilderness trekker, rock climber, tree planter, finding solace in nature and wildness, and also power in her own strength and abilities to succeed at the challenges the wilderness threw up at her, including run-ins with bears. She even fancied that she’d know what to do if the unlikely event of a bear attack occurred. Such attacks were rare, but Cameron she was interested in stories of these outliers, like the Canadian couple killed in Algonquin Park in 1991. Understanding what happened to them became an insurance of sorts, because if she could just figure out what they’d done wrong and do it differently, then she would be fine. It was also gateway to her literary breakout, with her second novel’s great success.
But when the danger finally arrived, it came from a place that Cameron had never seen coming. At 45, she was diagnosed with skin cancer, and learned she had a rare genetic mutation making her especially susceptible. She was advised by her doctor that her optimal UV exposure was precisely none. Facing her own mortality brought her back to her memories of her father, a professor of Old English, and the stories he’d taught and shared with her of monsters and dragon slaying. She calls on his courage and strength to help get her through her diagnosis, and many surgeries, and also begins to consider anew the story of the couple killed in Algonquin Park all those years ago. What had she missed from the story the first time? What other lessons might there be? How was she to find her home in nature again when parts of her life she’d always taken for granted—paddling in the sunshine on a lake that reflects the light like a mirror, for instance—had suddenly become perilous. And what of the bear itself? Where, exactly, was the heart of this story?
I tore through this memoir in a day, absorbed by every thread in this multifaceted narrative. The bear stuff BLEW MY MIND and Cameron’s own journey is gorgeously and emotionally wrought, and I came away with just the kind of perspective I’d been hoping to get. “Being alive is one big risk and it will end in death, but the bridge between those two things is love.”
April 1, 2025
At a Loss for Words, by Carol Off
“Populist politicians blame the government for the disparity between classes, feeding public resentment, distrust and anger. But that anger isn’t aimed at the 1 percent who play little to no tax, or at those whose obscene wealth can now pay for private trips into space for just lark. Instead of resenting the greed that drives the income gap, people direct their anger exactly where the agents of chaos want it directed—at government and civil society.”
Instead of looking for sense and meaning in newspaper live-blogs lately, I’ve been digging deeper and reading books, which definitely has helped with overwhelm, even when the books themselves are far from feel-good. (I’ve made a list of such books at 49thShelf: “Instead of Refreshing Your Feed.”) And former CBC journalist Carol Off’s At a Loss For Words: Conversations in an Age of Rage was positively chilling, instead of feel-good, but it was also so wise and made all sorts of connections between disparate things that look like random chaos from a distance, but Off shows that there’s nothing random about it. And that for decades, right-wing billionaires with nefarious intentions have been putting the pieces into place to lock in power for authoritarian leadership. And part of the way they’ve done this is by undermining our language, which is also our common ground, turning meaning inside out so that it becomes hard to know if anything is true. Off selects six words she explores to show how this has happened: Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Woke, Choice, and Taxes. Where do these words and ideas come from? How have their meanings and solidity been undermined, and who benefits from this happening?
What makes At a Loss for Words so important is its Canadian lens, highlighting the connections between what happens in Canada and the US, but also the ways in which Canada’s history is different. Throughout the book, she returns to her own childhood growing up, the child of parents who had rose to the middle class, and for whom the lessons of Europe in the first half of of the 20th century were close enough that they did not take for granted living in a pluralistic society where neighbours could think differently but also still have fundamental values in common.
This book was published in a world where the outcome of the 2024 US Presidential Election was still unknown, and it’s prescience is startling and disturbing—especially the part in the chapter in “Woke” in which she outlines Viktor Orban’s systematic dismantling of the university system in Hungary, how he brought these institutions under government control in a manner that the current US administration seems to be emulating to the letter. The implications are real and scary—former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now head of a global organization dedicated to electing right-wing governments around the world, and Orban has called him “a great ally.”
At the end of the book, Off tells us that it’s still not too late to change course, which seems harder to believe here in 2025 than it might have a year ago. But knowledge and understanding of what’s really unfolding is imperative, regardless and, having read this book, at the very least I feel better equipped to meet the considerable challenges of the moment.
March 31, 2025
A Bird in the House, by Margaret Laurence
My Manawaka journey continues! Except that I picked up A Bird in the House thinking it was the book Laurence published after A Jest of God, but it was not! Not that it matters entirely, because the books themselves aren’t published in chronological order—The Fire Dwellers takes place before A Jest of God, but was published after it. (I would be curious to know what order these books were written in, and one way to get to the bottom of that would be to reread Laurence’s wonderful collection of letters to publisher Jack McClelland.) A Bird in the House is also a story collection and so it was likely written across a wide span of time (with stories first published in magazines like Ladies Home Journal, Chatelaine, Atlantic Monthly, and by the CBC, which makes me nostalgic for such a literary landscape). Anyway, I’d already started reading when I figured out my mistake, and because I’m cool and laidback, I just kept on going, and am not bothered by the mix-up at all. (Note: This is a lie. I am! Alas.)
Okay, so A Bird in the House might be the Manawaka book with which I’ve had the longest and least complicated history. The copy I have, I think, might have been swiped from my mom’s bookshelf, a Seal paperback, which had become entirely unglued and fell apart when I opened it after all these years. So I went to BMV and found a newer secondhand copy, a New Canadian Library edition with a foreword by Isabel Huggan, who I was friends with before the pandemic but we’ve fallen out of touch. And just like a story from Huggan’s collection The Elizabeth Stories, I believe I first encountered one of the stories from this book (either “The Sound of the Singing” or the title story “A Bird in the House”) in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in my Grade 12 English class (which I wrote about here). I must have read the entire collection (which also constitutes a novel, a bildungsroman) at least once, but I don’t think I read it more than once, and the aspects of the story I remember are those I encountered in the short fiction anthology—young Vanessa, and the brick house where her grandfather lived, and the harbinger of death that was the sparrow, and then her father died not long after.
Unlike, say, The Stone Angel, stories from A Bird in the House are well suited for young readers, and Laurence’s narration is more traditional in these stories than her other books are, which are very much interior-focused. Vanessa MacLeod, on the other hand, is looking outward, telling the stories of her parents and grandparents, of the world around her, albeit not connecting any of the dots to understand or explain what those stories mean, and this means that my impression of these stories was that they were simple and straightforward, but it turns out that was just by perspective that was simple and straightforward, and I’m now wise enough to understand what was going on between the lines in these stories, the pains and struggles of these characters’ lives. I really read it and thought was about a house, a girl, and a bird, but there is so much more than that. My own dawning awareness is analogous to that of Vanessa herself:
“For me, the Depression and drought were external and abstract, malevolent gods whose names I secretly learned although they were concealed from me, and whose evil I sensed only superstitiously, knowing they threatened us but not how or why. What I really saw only was what went on in our family.”
And when she gets a little older and writes about the music of her youth: “The music seemed the only music that ever was or ever would be. I had no means of knowing that it was being set into the mosaic of myself and that it would pass away quickly and yet remain always mine.”
About war: “It was then that war took on its meaning for me, a meaning that would never change. It meant only that people without choice in the matter were broken and spilled, and nothing could ever take the place of them.”
March 27, 2025
Storm the Ballot Box: An Inside’s Guide to a Voting Revolution, by Jo-Ann Roberts
The big picture continues to be overwhelming and terrible, and I’m finding solace at the granular level, with books like STORM THE BALLOT BOX, by Jo-Ann Roberts, a long-time journalist whose career in politics began when she was a federal candidate for the Green Party in 2015. After years of covering Canadian politics, Roberts figured she had a good sense of how her candidacy would unfold, which turned out not to be the case, partly because politics is always different when you’re in the thick of it, but also because 2015 was a pivotal point in politics, with new dynamics brought on by social media, less local news coverage, a promise by the Liberals of voter reform, and a whole lot of weirdness. (Remember the guy who peed in a mug?).
In this breezy and engaging book, combining memoir and reportage, Roberts shares her experiences in politics, and also shares her frustration with the fact that so many Canadians she encountered through her door knocking were disengaged with the political process. (Not me! I’ve only missed one election in my adult life, when I didn’t bother to show up to vote between David Miller and Jane Pitfield for Mayor in 2006, because I knew he was going to win and was fine with that, and I’ve been embarrassed about this ever since, that I would have been so blase about this right who other people have died for.) She also shares her understanding, however, about why it might be so easy for so many to feel disengaged with the political process—the allure of strategic voting, which limits real choice; the way that polls end up determining the story instead of telling it; the broken promise of proportional representation; parties engaging in disinformation instead of talking about the real issues that matter to Canadians; the unequal ways in which Canadian political parties are funded; and more.
To all these problems, Robert offers real and practical solutions—and also smart explanations, though I must admit that I still don’t understand what a polling margin error means in the slightest, but that’s the point, really, and maybe I should stop reading up on polling numbers like I do. What if media outlets were only permitted to release polls within a particular margin of error? What if Elections Canada was made responsible for voter turn-out? Roberts proposes a referendum on electoral reform, followed by an election under the new rules, and then another referendum for Canadians to determine if they wanted to keep the process? What if political parties were removed from ballots? (And did you know that political parties were not recognized under law in Canada until 1970?)
Storm the Ballot Box is as fascinating as it is inspiring. This is the kind of revolution we need.
March 24, 2025
Votive, by Annick MacAskill
In February (for the second year running!), my eldest daughter’s high school drama group won their district-level competition for the NTS Drama Festival (which many of us will recognize from back when it was the Sears Drama Festival), and I’m very excited that they’ll be part of the regional competition at Hart House Theatre in April performing their wonderful play, something infinitely more useful than poetry.
And I’m excited, not just because the play is terrific (it is!), but because it’s based on poetry by Governor’s General Award-winning Annick MacAskill, whose beautiful books are published by Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia, and the opportunity to see teenagers reciting Canadian contemporary poetry like they mean it is so good for my heart. It also meant that I had a perfect excuse to buy MacAskill’s latest book, Votive, and leave it lying around the house and my teen would even pick it up and flip through it.
Votive includes the poem “Praying for Rain,” which closes the performance, and from which the play takes its title, my daughter reciting, emphatic, “Still rain/ seemed like the only hope,/ the way it might charge the gaps/ left by humans, machines, and words.” (The high school performance does not continue into the next line about hot flashes….)
I loved this book, whose allusions include Freddie Prize Jr, Calla from Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, Penelope, and Sinead O’Connor. These are poems about rituals, about devotion, religion, love, coming-of-age, queerness, knitting environmental devastation, the internet, good poems, bad poems, and the patron saint of rain.
Bring it.
