November 17, 2022
Francie’s Got a Gun, by Carrie Snyder
I loved Francie’s Got a Gun, a new novel by Carrie Snyder, whose Juliet Stories was a finalist for the Governor General’s Awards in 2012, and whose debut, Hair Hat, was part of a Canada Reads spin-off I ran in 2010. (Her third book, Girl Runner, was a finalist for the Writers Trust Fiction Prize.) It’s a taut, tension-filled story of a young girl who’s running with a gun in her hand, the question of “where did she come from” taking precedent over “where is she going?” because maybe the ending it inevitable. But is it? The story moving between Francie on the run and the story of what led to the events that sent her running, this latter told through a variety of voices—Francie’s family, her teacher, friends—and it’s a story of community, and responsibility, and how we do and don’t belong to each other, how we stand by and/or fail each other, and these voices weave a gorgeous tapestry of life and heart, a treatise on story itself. How one thing leads to another, for want of a nail the shoe was lost, etc. I started reading this book and found it hard to put it down, but refrained from posting about it until I’d reached the very end, so I’d be able to tell you with certainty that Carrie Snyder has pulled off, with flawless execution, a rich and sprawling story, and she really, really has.
November 12, 2022
The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favourite authors, one of those whose new releases are always a must-purchase. Ever since Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which I read in 2014, I’ve been dazzled by the wonderful strangeness of McCracken’s perspective; in The Hero of This Book, her narrator writes, “I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life.”
The narrator of The Hero of the This Book is not McCracken herself, for this book is not a memoir—and its narrator is just as sure that she is no memoirist (whereas McCracken herself has published a memoir before). The book cannot be a memoir because McCracken had always promised her mother that she’d never appear as a character in her work, never mind that McCracken’s mother would make a remarkable character if she did, and that the eponymous hero of McCracken’s novel (a slim book made up of reflections and memories, ideas about writing and storytelling, and episodes from a trip the narrator takes to London in 2019 in the wake of her mother’s death) bears a resemblance to such a character. “Everything makes more sense if you know what my parents looked like,” a section of this book begins, the narrator’s enormous father countered by his wife who was less than five feet tall, was disabled and walked with canes. “She was a Jewish girl of Eastern European descent, born in a small town near Des Moines, Iowa, the older of twin girls. She always loved what made her statistically unusual.”
It’s the most peculiar, extraordinary love story, an ode to a mother who never said “I love you,” because she didn’t have to. A woman fiercely protective of her own self, her own story, and who would—her daughter is sure—be affronted by being put in a book. But here she is, but it’s fiction, or is it, but it doesn’t matter. Like everything McCracken writes, it’s weird, rich and wonderful.
November 4, 2022
Ezra’s Ghosts, by Darcy Tamayose
It took me this long to pick up Darcy Tamayose’s Ezra’s Ghosts because of the line in an otherwise rave review in Publisher’s Weekly that said, “Tamayose’s experimental story structures and tight focus on academia make for a collection that will likely put off casual readers.” I thought this book was going to be difficult, but it wasn’t. It was interesting, and richly intelligent, and strange and surprising, but it was also gripping, and full of suspense. I read it as part of the Turning the Page on Cancer readathon last weekend, and it was just the best pick, pages flying by.
The eponymous Ezra is a Canadian prairie city, the book comprising four different stories set around there. In the first, the shortest, an academic returns from a research trip to China—his focus is on the Ryukyu Islands, where Okinawa is located—in early 2020, and finds his pregnant partner acting strangely aloof. The second story is about another academic, a professor, who finds herself in the afterlife following her murder in which the wrong person is put away for the crime, the murderer goes unpunished, and her family members steep in their despair. In the third story, on an isolated farmstead, a grieving journalist encounters a man, an immigrant from Japan in the early 1900s, who, at 130 years, claims to be the oldest person in the world, all the while dead birds are falling down from the sky in curious weather. And finally, in the last story, we’re taken more than 20 years into the future as the partner of the academic in the first story visits Paris against a backdrop of violence and chaos to which she’s become somewhat inured.
For someone who doesn’t know who Derrida is, I loved this book an awful lot, finding it gripping, pulsing. I loved its insistence on mutability, on the arbitrariness of borders, the Japanese-Canadian writer raised on the Prairies can write about an Island chain in the East China Sea, about ghosts, about missing and murdered Indigenous women, and blend critical theory with elements of murder mystery.
Ezra’s Ghosts was terrific and not a chore at all.
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.
