October 21, 2024

Death of Persephone, by Yvonne Blomer

I walked home reading this book on Saturday evening, the setting sun turning the tall buildings east of us golden, and it felt like the book was casting a spell. I was a woman walking in the city reading a book about women walking in the city, a riff on the myth of Persephone told through poetry structured as a detective story, and this book was doing it all, the plot, the language, the allusions, the truth of it. Blomer’s Persephone in Death of Persephone is Stephanie, a young woman who’s grown up in the tunnels beneath Montreal where her Uncle H. runs a souvlaki stand, her story punctuated by case notes from Detective Inspector Boca, investigating a series of violent deaths by young women throughout the city. Each poem taken on its own is a marvel, colours ever-changing when it’s held up to the light, but they come together to take on the rhythm of a gripping crime novel, a fierce feminist tale and who dunnit is misogyny. From “Violence is a bone in the body”: metatarsal, metacarpal, maxilla,/ mandible. How violence bites.”

October 18, 2024

The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, a Covid-era novel by Regina Porter, a book that came to my attention via Maris Kreizman’s wonderful substack. A novel whose first section begins with an encyclopedia definition of “door”: “barrier of wood, stone, metal, glass, paper, leaves, or a combination of materials, installed to swing, fold, slide, or roll in order to close an opening to a room or building,” the novel’s following two sections beginning with similar definitions of “doorframe” and “threshold.” And Porter’s doorway/opening to the novel itself, (which is to say, her book’s first paragraph): “Mr. Harper takes sex in doorways. Halts new lovers at the threshold of his front door. Left hand on shoulder. Right hand on hip. He searches the ninth-floor hallway for furtive eyes before pressing the whole of himself in the tender nook of his lover’s ass.” I mean, what now?

Nothing is what it seems in THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, set in March 2020 as the world has shut down, neither Mr. Harper himself, who is Theo, presumed suspicious when his young pregnant (white) wife Darla (a bassoonist) disappears on a hike near their cottage in upstate New York, nor the teen in the Cardi B t-shirt who seems to be loitering in Theo’s Park Slope building, nor Darla herself with her secret skills in hotwiring vehicles, or her father, who perished on 9/11. Porter is also an award-winning playwright, and the novel’s playful heteroglossia has those skills on display, resulting in a dynamic and shapeshifting text, full of tricks but never cheap ones, missing white lady/GONE GIRL tropes turned inside out and on their noses, and it’s all so interesting. The narrative moving swiftly through that strange and harrowing season (the teen in the Cardi B shirt’s mother is hospitalized with Covid; she comes off her ventilator; she goes back on her ventilator…) to late spring, late May, the teen boy’s phone blowing up, Minneaopolis, another threshold. “Did you see it?” No resolution. A story without end, but that is also what makes the novel particularly satisfying.

October 16, 2024

Keep, by Jenny Haysom

I’ve been reading all over the place lately, out of necessity, sometimes seven books at at time, bits and pieces, and so it was quite delightful to fall into a novel for the first time in a long time, to read the whole thing in a day. I loved KEEP, by Jenny Haysom, a novel following her award-winning debut poetry collection DIVIDING THE WAYSIDE. KEEP is the story of two real estate stagers charged with packing up the life of Harriet, an elderly poet with dementia, who become entangled in the mess of her life. Although their own lives are not so tidy either—Jacob, in his early 20s, has just been dumped by the boyfriend he moved to Ottawa to be with, having tried and failed to conjure domestic bliss for them; Eleanor, 20-some years older, is dissatisfied with her own domestic arrangement, the small home she shares with her husband and three children altogether too confining, everybody relying on her labour to make it work, and she’s exhausting. KEEP is a novel about building home, about keeping house, about what life does to everybody’s best intentions, and the distance between the faces we present to the world and the realities we’re actually facing. The braided narrative is so well balanced, each character a vivid and engaging presence in the novel, and it’s interesting (and refreshing!) to encounter a book presenting three different generations together and the genuine connections between them.

October 16, 2024

BOOKSPO Season Two

7/10 episodes of the BOOKSPO podcast are up now (with more to come on the next three Wednesdays). I’m also so pleased to report that the podcast is now available on Spotify, along with Apple Podcasts, Substack, and (pretty much) everywhere else you get your podcasts.

Guests so far are Corinna Chong, author of the Giller-longlisted BAD LAND; Ayelet Tsbari, author of SONGS FOR THE BROKENHEARTED; Alice Zorn, author of COLORS IN HER HANDS; Marissa Stapley, author of THE LIGHTNING BOTTLES; Suzy Krause, author of I THINK WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE; Jennifer Whiteford, author of MAKE ME A MIXTAPE; and Anne Hawk, author of THE PAGES OF THE SEA. More to come!

October 15, 2024

Toxemia, by Chistine McNair

TOXEMIA‘s gorgeous cover (a collage by @rhinocerospoems) sets the reader up for what’s to come, the literary bricolage, a hybrid of memoir and poetry. “To Lady Sybil,” the book is dedicated, the character from DOWNTOWN ABBEY who died of pre-eclampsia in the show’s third season (after which I refused to watch any more because *how could they have done that?!*). Christine McNair blends high and low cultures, arts and science, words and images, memoir and research to tell the story of her life as a woman with a body, a body that is so often wrong or dangerous, her symptoms and experience disbelieved, disregarded. McNair’s experiences of pre-eclampsia during her two pregnancies don’t just have consequences for her mental and physical health in the years afterwards, but also tap into her experiences with depression, self-harm, and eating disorders. “I am now more afraid of telling doctors my history,” she writes. Though with TOXEMIA, she’s made art of that story, a moving and compelling narrative, strange and edgy, unsettling. Unputdownable.

October 10, 2024

The Accomplice, by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson

I will admit that I first picked up 50 Cent’s debut novel because I found the idea of a novel by 50 Cent really funny, but when I opened up THE ACCOMPLICE, I was surprised from the very first line: “Nia Adams doesn’t have a green thumb, but waters her garden diligently, cares for the soil, tends to the flowers, and tames the weeds. Her favourite perennial is the Lupinus texensis, the Texas blue bonnet. The bright blue petals are the showpiece of her front yard. The flowers thrive on full sunlight and damp soil and are resilient during dry spells. Like Nia, they’re survivors.”

With delight, I can tell you that I loved this book, the story of Nia Adams, the first Black female Texas Ranger, whose fate becomes bound up with that of Vietnam-vet turned thief Desmond Bell after a bank robbery goes very strange with nothing of value appearing to be stolen. The lines between good guy and bad guy, and right and wrong, becomes blurred as we learn more about Bell’s story and as Adams comes to understand her colleagues and the institution she works for.

Written in partnership with crime novelist Aaron Philip Clark, THE ACCOMPLICE is a deft thriller with proper twists and turns, and is absolutely gripping. The only thing that tripped me up was some fairly gruesome violence in a couple of parts, but thankfully the story doesn’t linger there, instead tackling big questions about history, race, power and the possibility of redemption. And 50 Cent even makes a cameo in the text, or at least his music does, when “P.I.M.P.” is being played on somebody’s karaoke machine—Desmond Bell unplugs it.

It’s all a little ridiculous, but I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t.

October 8, 2024

The Lodgers, by Holly Pester

“If you’re unsettled, you’re unsettling,” the narrator tells us in THE LODGERS, the debut novel by UK poet Holly Pester (and also the debut novel published by Assembly Press here in Canada). It was a novel I wanted to like based on its premise (a woman returns to her hometown to live in a sublet, all the while reflecting on the person who’s moved into her just-vacated previous quarters) and also based on its cover design (“For some reason I ate [the sandwich], I wasn’t happy. But as a result the triangular box was empty, with an inside that resembled, like sarcasm, the one I was in. I looked inside. It had a window too.”) but very styled slightly abstract fiction that refuses to show its hand isn’t always my favourite thing (so many cool books I tried to love, but couldn’t) so I wasn’t sure how THE LODGERS might go over. It isn’t that I don’t like being unsettled per se, but instead that I want my novels to add up to something, being cool is not enough, but this one does add up. Strange, disorientating, and indeed unsettling, but it has a hook for me to hang my hat, metaphorically speaking. Our unnamed narrator’s new sublet is around the corner from the home of her mother, Moffa, a home to which the narrator still has a backdoor key, letting herself in from time to time once she’s back in town, but Moffa is never there. And neither is Kav, the supposed inhabitant of the second bedroom in her sublet, whose arrival could come at any time, the narrator never able to relax into her new abode because of this anticipation. And meanwhile she addresses the new inhabitant of the room she’d left behind, a room that was only ever hers between the hours of 6pm and 9am because otherwise her landlady operating her massage business of the space, and the narrator found comfort in belonging to this home, however tangentially, and her connection to the landlady’s child, the suggestion of a stable domestic situation that our narrator herself has never known. This is a novel that goes in circles, the way the narrator’s life seems to be, every path leading back again to a home that never was, poignant, comic, and biting at once.

October 7, 2024

The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing

“How strange time is. The same patterns keep recurring, a helical sequence of war and sickness, from out of which emerged the same green-veined dream.”

For a book that’s about her own backyard, Olivia Laing’s THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE takes her reader everywhere and back through time as she tells the story of her restoration of an 18th century walled garden begun when she and her partner move to Suffolk in 2020, a year that becomes “that year.” As she moves through her own plague seasons, she draws connections to gardens in the minds of Milton (PARADISE LOST) and rural poet John Clare, changes and trends in English landscaping ( a word that, she tells us, began with art and paintings), of how the mid-Atlantic slave-trade was the foundation of so much wealth that shaped the English landscape (I am also reading Tanya Talaga’s THE KNOWING, from which I learn that those very same investors were reaping the rewards of the North American fur trades that would decimate the continent’s Indigenous peoples), and how gardens have also been at the forefront of movements committed to imagining better ways of organizing society, which seems especially pressing to consider in the sweltering summer of 2022 as parts of the UK burned and watering her garden, Laing thought, seemed like an irresponsible indulgence. And how new life took root in the brutal bomb sites of London after the Blitz, so many of these sites turned into parks, and she casts her mind too back to Mark Rumary, the famed UK garden designer who’d once owned her home (and lived with his partner back when, a neighbour tells her, “it wasn’t good to be gay”) and whose vision is everywhere in the garden still, Laing reflecting on her own childhood growing up with a gay parent in the 1980s, and what the garden must have meant to both of them as place of freedom and belonging. And there’s so much more than that, every single page bringing fascinating rewards and gorgeous insight, doses of hard reality coupled with vision and hope. The garden is never simply this or that, instead the garden is a place for both, and, and for the remarkable persistence of living things (gardeners among them).

September 27, 2024

I Never Said I Was Brave, by Tasneem Jamal

There is so much to wonder about in Tasneem Jamal’s new novel, I NEVER SAID THAT I WAS BRAVE, a strange and compelling story of a complicated friendship between two women whose families were connected in Kitchener’s Ugandan-Indian community after arriving in Canada in the 1970s. Not least of all, what the narrator’s name is, as she takes us through the years of her friendship with Miriam, from their time together as children to their relationship as adults—the narrator flounders in academic, Miriam becomes an astrophysicist who studies dark matter. The narrator’s address is very intimate, her story seemingly meandering as she moves back and forth in time, and across the country too—but what is she hiding from us? What is left unsaid? Why does she frame her story precisely the way she does? How much can we rely on the narrator to tell us who Miriam was, as she describes her friend’s complicated relationships, the way she absorbed so much light, leaving everybody else in shadow. And why does she tell us so little of herself? In some ways, though this novel is far from gothic, I NEVER SAID THAT I WAS BRAVE reminded me of Daphne Du Maurier’s REBECCA, another novel of obsession in which the narrator obfuscates and hides.

September 24, 2024

HUM, by Helen Phillips

In Helen Phillips’ HUM, as with her previous novel THE NEED, the most unsettling parts of the narrative are those that are most familiar, and I don’t even mean the post-apocalyptic backdrop that certainly draws on the possibilities of our present (the forests have burned, May’s children have never seen strawberries growing on a plant, unhealthy air quality is a baseline, the heat is unrelenting, and society is structured on a network of AI systems called “hums”), but instead the anxiety underlying every sentence, an echo of the title. This is not so much a plot or character-based novel as a vibes-based novel, and the vibes are bad. Desperate for money after losing her job, AI developer May agrees to undergo a slight facial modification procedure that she believes is part of a counter-surveillance movement in a society where everything is tracked, and with the payout she splurges for tickets for her family to three days at The Botanical Gardens, a Disney-esque simulation of the natural world she so longs for: “She had done it. She had borne them to a clean green place.” May leaves her phone behind when they leave home, and makes her husband and children do the same (the children, like all children, wear gadgets on their wrist called “bunnies”), and May dares to suppose her family might have a reprieve from the relentless tracking and advertising from the devices they’re all attached to, but she comes to regret her choice when things go wrong and there is a chance her children might be lost to her. None of this description really doing justice to what’s going on here, to the force that drives the story forward, to the accelerated beat-beat-beat of May’s anxious heart as she struggles to hold her family, her marriage, her whole world together. Any parent who has ever considered picking up Jonathan Haidt’s THE ANXIOUS GENERATION will see themselves in May, and while all this might not sound so appealing (who really wants a mirror-image of their most stressed-out self?), Phillips’ taut narrative reads up fast and is utterly gripping, and is rooted in that part of the maternal experience that’s even more essential than worry, and that is love.