May 29, 2025
Cattail Lane, by Fran Kimmel
If the warm and gorgeous cover of Fran Kimmel’s Cattail Lane invites you in, then you’re likely going to love this book, a story of unconventional family and community that begins with Nick, aimless and drifting, receiving the news out of nowhere that he has a 14-year-old son, Billy, and that he’s been charged with the boy’s care now that his grandmother’s dementia has progressed where she needs to enter a care home. Both Billy and his grandmother, Evie, come to live in Nick’s small town, not far from the shores of the lake he grew up beside, and where he made a mistake years ago that he has yet to atone for.
Billy is resentful and standoffish, and no wonder. He seeks solace in visits with his grandmother in the dementia ward where she lives now, and where he’s drawn to Sarah, who works there, and whom Nick is drawn toward too, though for different reasons. With Sarah’s support, Billy and his artist grandmother begin a project to enliven the halls of the dementia ward with murals of nature (drawn from Nick’s photographs of the lake’s short and wetlands), and it’s a project that changes the atmosphere of the ward and shows Billy that he might be able to find a way to belong in his new life, and with Nick.
There are no straightforward villains in this novel (though a few contenders for the title, it’s true), instead a bunch of flawed and broken people who’d like to be trying their best, but can’t always manage to pull it off, which is everyone, from time-to-time. And in the generous world of this novel, redemption is possible, goodness is just beneath the core, and beauty is everywhere, if you only have the eye to see it.
May 28, 2025
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, by Colette Shade
Unlike my children—whose precision in understanding their respective cohorts (Z and Alpha) and how they’re defined by them is more than ridiculous considering that they’re two people with the same genes who share a bunkbed—I’ve never had a sense of my own place on the generational spectrum. Born in 1979, I was 11 when Douglas Coupland published Generation X in 1991, and certainly never supposed that it was a story about me. And then when the “millennials” discourse arrived about 15 years later (mainly denigrating), I didn’t think that was me either. Truly on the cusp, it’s been hard to measure (and these things are hardly scientific anyway), but I’ve recently come down on the millennial side of it all, which is pretty undeniable since my all-time favourite song is “I Want It That Way.”
Y2K looms large in my mind, not the predicted chaos necessarily (I was too young and self-centred to properly understand that anything bad could ever happen in my world), but the era, an era that Colette Shade marks as 1997 to the 2008 economic meltdown at which points dreams of a future that seems like THE future were officially over. And her book about that era is partly an exercise in nostalgia, but only a little bit. The rest of it a biting cultural analysis of the Y2k era as a period of neoliberal excess, the promise of infinite growth and infinite good times, and bubble that—like the inflatable chair she convinced her mother to buy her at Target—was only ever going to burst.
Shade’s essay collection Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything joins a shelf of great nonfiction that I’ve been reading this year (John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke; At a Loss for Words, by Carol Off), books which answer the bewildering question of “How did we get here?” To a cultural moment of nastiness, inequality, technofascism, and deep polarization, where truth is relative, and the climate just gets hotter. And Shade points to the Y2K era as one in which the seeds of all of this were planted, her fun cultural commentary connected to a broader and cutting economic and political analysis: the growth of Starbucks and the decline of unions; 9/11 as a midpoint in an era of “unquestioned rule of American-led capitalism” instead of the end of any kind of era; the plundering of Russian state resources and the burgeoning fashion industry; the failure of Liberalism to counter Bush and the Iraq war; a nasty gossip industry to reality TV pipeline that becomes everybody’s reality now in a moment where you to be a brand or you are nothing. And so much more.
“The ice we skate is gettin’ pretty thin/ The water’s gettin’ warm so you might as well swim/ My world’s on fire, how ’bout yours?/ That’s the way I like it and I’ll never get bored.”
May 27, 2025
Olive, Again
The tragic news is that my #WinterofStrout is nearly over, and that OLIVE, AGAIN was the last time I got to read an Elizabeth Strout book for the very first time (until whatever she publishes next), and oh my gosh, I loved it. It’s funny because I think reading Strout’s latest book TELL ME EVERYTHING ruined me a bit for my reread of OLIVE KITTERIDGE, leading to me to expect all kinds of things that this book was never going to deliver. But OLIVE, AGAIN is completely a prequel to TELL ME EVERYTHING, a bridge between Olive’s stories and THE BURGESS BOYS and while Lucy Barton doesn’t appear here, I know that Olive will be meeting her soon (and I loved reading about Olive’s friendship with Isabel, whom I met in TELL ME EVERYTHING, and REALLY got to know on my #WinterofStrout when I finally read Strout’s debut, AMY AND ISABELLE).
I also love that I tripped walking up the stairs while holding this book and a mug of turmeric oat milk latte, splattering the top of the book with yellow, the same yellow bursts that are conspicuous throughout the pages of TELL ME EVERYTHING, forsythia and daffodils and everything.
I love the way that Olive grows in this book, or maybe it’s that both she and we get a little bit closer to knowing who she really is. And what she realizes about who she is, which is so different from who she’d been before, is that she really doesn’t know anything at all. “It seemed to her she had never before completely understood how far apart human experience was… She, who always thought that she knew everything that others did not. It just wasn’t true.” It’s a message that I think is so important right now, as so many otherwise kind and thoughtful people dig themselves deeper and deeper into the holes of their convictions.
And the message too that maybe not knowing everything is…fine? A line from the story “Helped,” “‘I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to…bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”
May 23, 2025
The Names, by Florence Knapp
I was swept away by Florence Knapp’s novel THE NAMES a book that came on my radar when UK. bookseller Katie Clapham made it her book club pick. I was besotted by the premise: a mother in 1980s’ England walks to the registry office after a giant storm to register the birth of her son, a child is who intended carry the name of his father and his father’s father before him. But the child’s father is a monster, and so the mother makes a last minute switch and gives her baby a name chosen by his older sister. Or else she makes a different switch, and names the child herself. Or else she goes along with the original plan, naming the baby for her abusive husband as she’s expected to do, and the narrative rolls out in three different threads with what transpires with these different choices. The choices not just about the name the boy will carry—we encounter him and his family at seven year intervals throughout the next four decades—but the novel is so much more richly textured than that, being also about everything else that happens around him, especially his father’s responses to the different things the mother has done in choosing the names that she has and the different narratives that are put into motion, oftentimes unstoppable. (This book is tough to read in places. Imagine how many times the average novel might break your heart, and then multiply it by three. OOF.)
The NAMES recalled Kate Atkinson’s LIFE AFTER LIFE, another novel about fate and chance, and flaps of butterfly wings, and about how it’s impossible to ever get life completely right no matter how many opportunities you have to try. This is true especially in the novel’s depiction of domestic violence—there is not a single choice the mother will make that will ever be the right one. But in a more general sense, life is like that for everyone, every good outcome occurring with something else that’s lost, or other unseen consequences. To be in the world at all is only wild and capricious, risky, amazing, and awesome at once.
May 21, 2025
Catch You on the Flip Side, by Lee Kvern
All right, buckle up. Lee Kvern’s Catch You on the Flip Side, whose central setting is a Calgary casino in the early 1980s, begins at a pig farm in the Philippines, where the farmer is recruited for a mysterious mission. From there, we arrive at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, site of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, where Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., Opposition Leader of the Philippines and a threat to authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos, pays a brief visit before his return to his country from exile, a return that he knows will put him in grave danger. And then we meet a Manila baggage handler who will be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and forced to sneak out of the country, the piece of the puzzle that connects Aquino’s murder to the staff and patrons of the Calgary casino where shady dealings are ongoing and will have ramification for everybody involved for the next 40 years.
I’m a huge fan of Kvern’s work, both its energy and its scope, and I love how I picked up this novel with no idea where it would take me—and how it took me everywhere. There’s audacity in writing a novel about a real life political assassination on the other side of the world, and I love how Kvern pulls it off (and also how much more I know about contemporary Filipino history after reading it). A story this tangled can be disorienting at times (and I wish the book’s production had been more robust—there are several copy edits and messy typesetting that adds to the confusion), but I read it gripped and finished it satisfied. Funny, moving, and epic at once, Catch You on the Flip Side is a standout.
May 20, 2025
The Snag, by Tessa McWatt
The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief, by Tessa McWatt, the Guyanese-Canadian writer who lives in England, is a memoir woven of climate grief, the experience of slowly losing an aging parent, and one’s own experience of being in the world. How do we live? And how do we die? Which, of course, is mostly the very same question, and McWatt finds that the answer might lie in forests, and trees. In particular in the trees called “snags,” which are dead trees found in the forest and vital sites for biodiversity, a habitat for all kinds of creatures, and new life and possibilities. McWatt sees an analogy between snags and her own mother, whose dementia is worsening. The book begins on the day that her mother is moving out of her own home, one more uprooting in a life that’s been full of them. It is also, McWatt notes, “the last day of the hottest year in recorded history,” and she recounts a series of the catastrophes wrought by climate change over that year, plus an autumn that so much war and devastation.
“Grief arrives out of rupture. It is evidence of something treasures, now lost. If I sit with this evidence something else will surely come, the way a seed might eventually grow a tree. We are small and hungry and alive.”
Here is the thing that I love about this book, McWatt’s acknowledgement that grief must be sat with, but that also that this sitting is not the end of it. That something can come after this, and it will, but what? And once again, the answer is in the forests and the trees.
The Snag is one of the wisest books I’ve ever read, a memoir about observing, and listening, about music and singing, about the wonders of forests and what we can learn from them about connection and how to care for each other.
“Another world is possible. The extractive, consumptive way we are living demonstrates a severe lack of imagination. But we have the tools, models we use to reclaim, renew, invent. There are communities around the world still rooted, still defending their ecosystems, that are potent sites of resistance. And there are new ones being born.”
May 16, 2025
Encampment, by Maggie Helwig
Maggie Helwig—Toronto poet and novelist, human rights activist, and also Anglican priest at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields in Kensington Market, just a few minutes walk from my house—isn’t preaching to the choir when I pick up her new book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community. It’s not politically fashionable in the circles in which I travel, but my feelings about homeless encampments have often been complicated and less than generous over the last five years. I know how I’m *supposed* to feel—the “I Support My Neighbours in Tents” signs that others installed on their front lawns signal that direction, but I have a hard time conjuring that support, sustaining it. It works in theory, I guess, but then I show up at the park with my kids and the people living in the tents along its perimeter start screaming at each other and it’s disturbing and frightening. And I have a hard time too with being told that my discomfort doesn’t matter, that my complicated feelings are morally dubious, and that the politics behind any of this are simple, that this is simply a case of rich homeowners versus everybody else, as encampments grow and those of us without our own backyards lose access to public parks and green spaces.
And what I appreciated about Encampment is that there was grace for that, for my complicated feelings and frustrations, just as there is grace for the people screaming in the park, and the people who’ve made their home in the encampment in the St. Stephen’s churchyard over the last few years, and so many others. Maggie Helwig’s capacity for grace is absolutely awe-inspiring, and I read Encampment wishing desperately that the world would give the woman a break. Her own challenges and struggles are woven into the text as well, which underlines just how much she needs a break, but also how her refusal to compartmentalize human experience—that of herself and of others—is where her compassion comes from. Humans are messy and hard. Community is messy and hard. Systems are broken, and what else can we do but try to love one another the best we can?
There is a woman in this book who might be me. (I suspect that, no matter who you are, you will see yourself in many of the people in this book.) That woman is a neighbour who stops Mother Maggie one chaotic day in the parking lot. She’s frustrated by some of the encampment residents, she is afraid of violence, but mostly she is angry because she never wanted to be somebody who turned against vulnerable people. And Helwig writes, “Because it is terrible, and it shouldn’t be like this, and coming up hard against the truth that we live in a society that will dump people like garbage on the side of the road, and there is no good thing we can do, is an awful moment for anyone who hasn’t been through it yet.”
Those of us who live in a world where people are well and housed and healthy and stable have no inkling of what life is like for those beyond those limits, and Encampment rectifies that, explaining away the myths of homelessness, dismissing easy solutions—couldn’t they just…? If only…? The most powerful part of the book for me was when Helwig writes about stuff, possessions: “Maybe this is a good time to talk about the relationship that people have with things, and how far it is really just an inflection of our whole society’s relationship with things.”
And it’s this refusal to see any difference between neighbours, regardless of their housing, that makes Helwig’s voice and vision so extraordinary, and what makes Encampment such a necessary, clarifying, and life-changing read for so many of us right now. Some of the most frightening characters in the book are people with six figure incomes and roofs over their heads, not the guy unconscious in the doorway. Helwig writes, “The true, terrible threat is that, if you just one let these people get too close, you might learn that, underneath it all, we actually are the same. Poor bare forked animals in King Lear’s storm, in a world that’s always ending.”
May 13, 2025
Favourite Daughter, by Morgan Dick
No one’s got their shit together in Morgan Dick’s debut novel, FAVOURITE DAUGHTER, the story of two women who share a father but who’ve never met each other. When her estranged dad dies, Mickey learns that she’s to inherit his estate with one proviso: she must complete seven sessions of therapy. And when she walks into the therapist’s office, it’s Arlo she encounters, her father’s other daughter, each woman with no idea who the other one really is, or that they have a connection at all. Which means that Arlo is technically violating no ethical guidelines as she takes on her sister as her patient, but maybe there is something to the sibling dynamic and boundaries have never been Arlo’s strong point anyway, years of trying to save her alcoholic and disappointing father leaving her prone to becoming tangled up in other people’s messes, and soon the siblings are as complicatedly invested in each other as true siblings can be.
Although even without the genetic connection, Mickey would be a formidable challenge to a therapist. The centre of her world is her job as a kindergarten teacher, a job that gives her life shape and meaning—she’s been cut off by her mother, and doesn’t have any friends—but a bad call on the job and the fact of her drinking means that Mickey’s job might be taken away from her forever. After years of addiction, can Mickey finally make meaningful change in her life? And how different is she from Arlo anyway, who appears put together on the surface but whose security is just as fragile as Mickey’s is, and who has made her own mistakes? Or the very slutty lawyer, Tom, who’s settling their father’s estate, or their long-suffering mothers, or Mickey’s very weird neighbour with the luxury cat?
Each of them is a complete and utter mess, and yet also sparkling with some goodness, and wholly worthy of love, which is the charm of this novel, which is sometimes sad, sometimes deadpan, and ever surprising.
May 7, 2025
A Mouth Full of Salt, by Reem Gaafar
Reem Gaafar’s debut novel, A Mouth Full of Salt, 2023 winner of the Island Prize for a debut novel from Africa (and the first book by a Sudanese writer to be recognized by the prize) grips the reader from its opening line, “Until a body was actually found, they referred to him as ‘missing.'” The body in question is that of a young boy presumed drowned in the Nile, a too frequent incident among the people from his village: “The Nile was a trap that attracted, ensnared, and buried all at once. It took from them as much as it gave.” Which what happened to Fatima’s brother after all, years earlier, a tragedy from which her mother has never recovered, leaving her a little outside the local community of woman, and this Fatima can relate to. She too is also set apart from her peers, although this is by her determination to pursue her education, as opposed to her good friend Sawsan, whose wedding is approaching.
A Mouth Full of Salt moves between Fatima’s perspective and that of Sulafa, the mother of the missing boy, whose been relegated in her household after her failure to have more children, and whose husband’s second wife is currently pregnant with twins. As the villagers keep watch for the boy’s body to resurface, other catastrophes beset the village one-by-one: farm animals are struck by an illness, and die on mass; fires take down gardens and orchards. Villagers are talking about prophecies, worry about a curse, and soon that something has gone very wrong for these people are altogether undeniable.
Like Sudan itself, this novel is cut in two, and in its second half, readers begin to understand how the nation’s history is at the root of what’s happening in the village. From the 1990s, we’re taken back to 1943 and to Nyamakeem, from the country’s south, who has fallen in love with Hassan, a northerner, an Arab. Such unions are rare and frowned upon, and Hassan is rejected by his family. The two of them attempt to build a life together in Khartoum all the same, raising their son, but when Hassan eventually stops coming home to them, Nyamakeem has no choice but to go back to his home village and his family to find out what happened.
How the lives of the women in this novel intersect is the crux of a taut and measured story. Gaafar, who now lives in Ontario, and is also a physician, has crafted a beautiful and compelling novel about women attempting to break free from the limits of their power.
May 5, 2025
The Cost of a Hostage, by Iona Whishaw
For the last few years, I’ve looked forward to a new Lane Winslow mystery novel in the spring like I’ve looked worked to forsythia blooms and cherry blossoms, and just like spring herself, author Iona Whishaw has never failed me. The Cost of a Hostage is the twelfth instalment in her series about the brilliant polyglot whose wits are only matched by her beauty and whose desire for a quiet life in the small community of Kings Cove, outside Nelson, BC, is thwarted by her tendency to stumble upon dead bodies and wander into crimes in progress. Thankfully, however, nobody is better equipped to solve these crimes, much to the chagrin of local Police Inspector Frederick Darling, who eventually becomes Lane’s husband. Which means he often finds himself in fixes like the one that kicks of this latest novel: Darling’s brother has gone missing in Mexico, and has perhaps been kidnapped; is there any possibility that Darling can get to Mexico without convincing his dear wife that she’ll be just fine staying at home? The answer is, of course, no, and so off they go, which Darling is not exactly sorry for. Lane Winslow is surprisingly useful to have around, and besides he likes her company. Their marriage is a rare and beautiful thing in the late 1940s, an arrangement of equality, both partners ardent in their admiration and respect for each other’s keen intelligence (though Darling would admit that Lane’s is the keener one).
Anyway, staying home might not have been so quiet either, after all. When a small boy is kidnapped in Nelson, the circumstances are curious, and Ames and Terrell, running the Nelson Police Department in their boss’s absence, have their hands full solving the crime, especially once their chief suspects turns up dead in the local ferry’s paddle-wheel.
Once again, Whishaw brings her readers a story with fascinating moral complexity and a healthy dose of feminism and progressive values. And yes, just enough peril that you’ll be totally gripped.
