October 5, 2025
The Story and Science of Hope
A packed house (and top tier snacks) to celebrate Andrea Curtis’s beautiful new book THE STORY AND SCIENCE OF HOPE today, a middle grade picture book for readers of all ages, out now from Groundwood Books gorgeously illustrated by Ana Suarez. Hope is the place to begin, Curtis tells us, with research backed by science to prove it. And it’s up to us to turn that hope into action, which all of us can do every single day.
October 2, 2025
Gliff, by Ali Smith
I’m not a horse person, and my Ali Smith mileage varies, so I approached her latest novel, Gliff, most tentatively, plucking it from a library display and not reading it for weeks and weeks (it’s already been renewed twice) before I finally picked it up, the description of its setting in a dystopian future not exactly a draw either. But oh, I really loved it, and read it as a extension of the Seasonal Quartet more than I did her previous novel Companion Piece, which I didn’t love as much as I’d wanted to. Gliff is the story of two siblings in a world that feels torn from contemporary headlines—masked thugs are grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into vans. Vast swaths of society are being determined as UVs, or unverifiables, red circles painted around their homes, which are then bulldozed. And to be unverifiable is to be not quite one thing or another, in all kinds of ways, involving ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and an infinite list of other distinctions. Bri and their sister are holing up in an empty home awaiting the return of their mother, which they both know is actually unlikely to happen. And in the field behind their garden are horses destined for the abattoir, and Bri is glad their sister doesn’t know that “abattoir” means. Words and their meanings (their sparkly meanings, their slippery meanings, their strange and unverifiable meanings) the engine of this novel, along with the horse(power), and also names and re-names, and the power to name oneself, to escape the boxes into which the algorithm would like to squeeze us.
Gliff might have been a heavy and depressing book, but it isn’t. It reads up quickly and breezily, and is infused by a spirit of hope and possibility, even in its darkest moments. It’s a novel about the power of refusal and resistance, about the actual smallness of tyranny. “His opponent is everywhere. His opponent is everything.”
September 29, 2025
Starry Starry Night, by Shani Mootoo
There is nothing precious or cloying about the child’s perspective at the centre of Shani Mootoo’s latest novel, Starry Starry Night, the story of a young girl emerging into consciousness in 1960s’ Trinidad. No, instead Anju’s point of view is considered as seriously as Anju herself considers the world around her, the narrative following her attempts to understand it between the ages of four and 12, which are pivotal years in her own life, but also for her country as it breaks away from the United Kingdom, becoming independent in 1962.
When we first meet Anju, she’s comfortable and indulged in the care of her Ma and Pa, her world carefully ordered, though she’s not always safe—there are male neighbours and relatives who are dangerous, though she can’t exactly articulate why. Early on, there are gaps between Anju’s grasp of her reality and what’s really going on, things that Anju can’t see or that she doesn’t want to see, for example that woman called “Mummy” whom she speaks to on the phone, who later appears with someone who is apparently Anju’s father, both of them just back from Ireland, with a little brother and sister in tow.
Starry Starry Night is a stunning example of what “show don’t tell” can do, the narrative so steeped in Anju’s perspective that the reader feels her experiences viscerally, in particular the first great trauma of her life when she’s taken from the grandmother who raised her and forced to resume her life in a household to which she never feels she belongs, and that feeling of being a misfit only intensifies as Anju grows older and finds herself resisting the gender norms inflicted on her. We also feel her confusion as she struggles to make sense of things that don’t actually make sense, such as Trindad’s racial hierarchy, the tensions in her parents’ marriage, and her mother’s feelings for her, which move between hot and cold.
I’ve never understood the point of autofiction (which I’ve always suspected is merely a device for blame-dodging) as much as I understand it with this book, which includes photographs from Mootoo’s own childhood, as well as items from her biography. One of the novel’s epigraphs is taken from Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story: “…The girl in the picture is not me, but neither is she a fictional creation. There is no one else in the world I know in such vast and inexhaustible detail.” Here, such vast and inexhaustible detail serve to bring a long-gone world back to life.
PS If you liked this book, you should check out another story of 1960s’ Caribbean childhood, The Pages of the Sea, by Anne Hawk, who I interviewed for BOOKSPO last fall.
September 24, 2025
Hearts, by Hilma Wolitzer
I learned about Hearts, by Hilma Wolitzer (mother of Meg!), from a in the New York Times piece this summer on “18 Great Road Trip Books That Aren’t ‘On the Road’”, a feature that must have been a little inspired by The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett, one of my top reads of the season. The piece recommended Hearts for fans of Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; the work of Laurie Colwin. SIGN. ME. UP. Except then Wolitzer’s 1980 novel proved hard to come by, out of print, unavailable at the library. (You can buy it as an ebook though!) I ended up purchasing a secondhand copy from Alibris.com, springing a couple of bucks more for the hardcover “in good condition,” and am I ever glad I did, because it’s a First Edition, impeccably typeset, that COVER, and it’s a book I’m going to be cherishing for a really long time.
Hearts is the story of Linda Reissman, a dance teacher suddenly widowed from her husband of only six weeks who has to overcome her fear of driving in order to deliver her sullen 13-year-old stepdaughter, Robin, from their former home in New Jersey to her father’s relatives in Iowa, and who, along the journey, discovers she is pregnant. Linda is just 27, and has never—metaphorically or otherwise—occupied the driver’s seat in her own life. Once she’s dropped Robin off, she has vague dreams of arriving in California, but everything else about her future is still undefined, her pregnancy putting all that possibility into jeopardy.
It’s remarkable to be reading this novel now at a moment in which Linda’s abortion in Iowa would be illegal. While it’s devastating to consider just how far we’ve regressed in the 45 years since Hearts was first published, how much American women have lost, I suspect that Wolitzer is not completely surprised, because the signs of the unmaking progress are already there in 1980, less than a decade after Roe vs. Wade. The abortion clinic is swarmed by furious protesters, and a terrible act of violence takes place during Linda’s procedure. The law might be settled, but the people are not.
Hearts is set during a weird time in America that has strong parallels to right now, in addition to the abortion issue—the economy is a mess, oil prices are wild, the Middle East is in crisis. And this—along with Howard Johnsons and motel pools—is the backdrop as Linda and Robin undertake their journey, getting to something particular about the moment, but something essential too about the American Dream, and what it promises to women. Neither of them is especially prone to drama, and they spend a lot of their journey not talking, the narrative brisk and even, moving between their different perspectives, underlining how much they each get wrong about the other, and showing them growing closer as they make their way.
I loved this book, whose story felt as fresh and pristine as my gorgeous first edition, the kind of book I looked forward to picking up again all day once I’d started reading, a double coming-of-age story about womanhood and chosen family, funny, poignant, and real.
September 22, 2025
Bad Indians Book Club, by Patty Krawec
The moment of hideous social backlash which we’re all enduring right now is evidence of how furiously and violently some people cling to white supremacy and the colonial systems upon which this country and so many others were built, which only underlines the subversiveness of a book like Patty Krawec’s Bad Indians Book Club, a book that centres writers whose stories usually are told on the margins. It is a book that was born of a question, and then conversations that turned into a podcast, and as a result, the narrative is rich with connections—between writers, between readers, between books themselves—as Krawec maps a year of reading. “Rather than allowing us to stand on what we think is the stable ground of a singular expert, reading many books draws us into the mashkiig—the swamp—where the ideas in one book layer with the ideas in another.” She goes on to write, “Even if the centre of influence is one that we have come to respect and admire, the borderlands—or places where the influence of that centre extends and then layers with others—brings us to new ways of thinking and to possibly the creation of new centres.”
Krawac, who is an Anishnaabe/Ukrainian writer belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation who grew up in southern Ontario, writes about connecting with her Native family and ancestry in the 1990s, these connections informed by her ideas about Good Indians and Bad Indians, as understood by Hollywood films: “Good Indians: those who rescue white heroes so that they can in turn be saved. And…Bad Indians..: those who refuse to be rescued or to be saved themselves.” And over time, she can to be drawn to the Bad Indians who, she writes, “…offered me a vision of new worlds being born—worlds rooted in differences that bring balance and life , not differences that play out in hierarchies and power.” The first rule of Bad Indians Book Club, according to Krawec? “Always carry a book.”
And thus begins a journey into the wonders of reading, the questions books raise, and the connections we can make between stories—and between each other. Krawec refers to books by Indigenous, Black, and Jewish writers, and those by writers of other usually marginalized communities to construct a network of overlapping concerns and understanding, stories that inform each other, with characters like Nanaboozhoo and Ananzi. She refers to the books and writers from her podcast, and the panellists that presented those works, and supplements these with books that have occurred to her since the original conversations (including works as recent as Leanne Betasamoske Simpson’s Theory of Water, which just came out this spring, and which helped inspire her idea of writing from the mashkiig). As with the stories Krawec writes about, her narrative is more cyclical than linear, more layered than straightforward, as she organizes her Bad Indians reading list into themes—books about beginnings, about history, memoir, nonfiction, horror books, and speculative fiction.
How do we imagine a world that de-centres whiteness and colonialism? With kindness, humour, thoughtfulness, and curiosity (as well as acknowledgement that nobody will ever get it right all the time), Krawec shows the way, her citations an example of gratitude and generosity. I loved the way she cites writers’ racial and cultural identities when she refers them (because these things are central to people’s experience) all the while underlining how these identities can also be points of connection as we learn from and listen to each other instead of rigid lines of division.
As you might expect from a text that’s inspired by mashkiig, Bad Indians Book Club can be a dense read, thick with ideas and meaning, and it doesn’t read up quick, but you won’t want it to. It’s a book to be savoured and experienced, returned to again to let it change you, and for those of us with a bookish bent, reading it is a rich and wondrous pleasure.
September 16, 2025
Lucky Night, by Eliza Kennedy
I was a different person ten years ago when I read and reviewed Eliza Kennedy’s novel I Take You, and praised its portrayal of a woman who dares to defy societal expectations of what a wife is supposed to be, how a woman is supposed to behave (in commercial fiction, no less!). Or maybe I was the exact same person but had not yet learned how much our society resists these narratives; how the patriarchy is determined to prevail, whatever it takes; and what a low tolerance commercial fiction readers tend to have for female protagonists who are, shall we say, imperfect candidates. For protagonists who blur the lines between right and wrong, who aren’t trying to make us like them, who know themselves if they know anything at all. (I published my own book with such a protagonist in 2017. The reception on Goodreads caught me by surprise, which seems so naive now.)
A decade later, I picked up Kennedy’s third novel, Lucky Night, about Jenny and Nick, both married (to other people) who’ve been having illicit trysts here and there for six years, but never have they managed to spend a whole night together. Until now, when Nick books them into a brand new luxury hotel in a Manhattan high rise, and their time together begins as expected, although not without hiccups—it’s a heady moment as they contemplate their situation (the novel moves between their two third-person perspectives, back and forth in scene) and also alarms keep going off in the building, glitches in the system, simply a distraction (and they’re assured that everything is fine).
Even without the alarms, things would be fraught for Nick and Jenny. What do they really mean to each other? And why does each of them find it impossible to say? After six years of relations, they’re still putting on masks for each other, still pretending to be people other than who they are, still resistant to admitting what they really mean to each other and what consequences that could mean for their marriages, their children, their entire lives. (Refreshingly, this is a not a novel about guilt or shame regarding adultery. Both Nick and Jenny have worked through those feelings, and Lucky Night is about something more complicated, more interesting. Kennedy cites Laura Kipnis’s Against Love in her acknowledgements, a book that’s described as “an indictment of the martial ideal”).
And then the stakes get kicked way up high when it turns out the building is on fire, and Jenny and Nick are stranded way up above the blaze, awaiting a rescue that may never come, their story a locked room thriller with a consideration of the minutiae of high rise fires and the dynamics of adultery, sex and love. Will the lovers get what they deserve? And what they deserve exactly, I suppose, depends on your perspective, something that each of them is aware of. And the novel’s author is surely aware of this too, but makes Lucky Night brave, propulsive, and interesting.
September 15, 2025
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss
This is not a review. I’m still piecing together my experience of reading RIPENESS, the latest novel by Sarah Moss (out now in Canada), whose work I fell in love with through her three short novels, GHOST WALL, SUMMERWATER, and THE FELL. Her most release is the memoir MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF, about her childhood and more recent experiences with anorexia. And now RIPENESS, a novel-sized novel, but which rips apart convention regarding structure. The very first sentence is, “Yes, Edith says.” Quotation marks done away with, long long paragraphs, dialogue within those paragraphs, the novel comprising two sections whose relationship is hard to discern, except that they are both about Edith, one (in third person) set in the present where Edith is around 70, divorced, living a comfortable life in Ireland, and the other (first person) about Edith’s experience in the 1960s on the cusp of adulthood travelling to a villa in Italy to spend time with her older sister, a ballerina, who is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy.
How do these two sections knit together? The answers to that question are not straightforward, but they’re interesting, even if I’m not sure what they are yet. How does the story of her sister’s child connect to Edith’s friend’s discovery in the present that her mother had once given up a child long ago, a son who was raised in America and who is returning to Ireland, a place to which he feels he belongs? A place to which Edith, who is Edith, will never belong. Edith an exile who is the child of an exile, her mother a Jew who was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust when she was sent to the British midlands just in time. How does all this connect to the Ukrainian refugees who’ve made their homes in Ireland, and the less familiar-seeming refugees from other places whom Edith’s neighbours resent and wave placards against?
There is all this and so much more, so much ripeness—the fruits on the trees in Italy, the very pregnant Lydia, Edith at the beginning of her experience just before she goes to study at Oxford. There is no sex for young Edith, but plenty for Edith in the present day (she utters the first line in the midst of it). A study of maternal ambivalence, of bodies, of citizenship, of youth, and age, and fathoming unfathomable things. RIPENESS is a novel about saying YES, and also saying no, sometimes. About life, and consequences, and I need to read it again in order to fully understand it, but the point is that I want to.
September 10, 2025
A Sense of Things Beyond, by Renée Belliveau
Who gets to remember in war? Who gets to be remembered? And how does that remembering perpetuate the very narratives that makes war possible (and often likely) in the first place? These questions and more are at heart of A Sense of Things Beyond, the second novel by Renée Belliveau, whose fiction is informed by her work as an archivist, and who I had the good luck of being able to work with in the early stages of this book. It tells the story of two people in the early 1920s who are struggling to move forward from their experiences in WW1, especially since those experiences fail to conform with the simplistic and conventional narratives of war and all its glory.
Rose was a nurse who worked on the front lines, who enlisted from her home in Toronto with pride at lending her skills to a cause she believed in, along with her fellow Canadians fighting on the side of righteousness. For Frederick, who Rose has met once before (his brother is married to her sister), things are more complicated. He’s studying languages in Berlin when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, and has come to think of Germany as his home, which means he stays too long once war is declared and spends the duration as a civilian detainee at the Ruhleben internment camp, an experience with its own trauma inherent, but nobody around him sees it that way afterwards. Some even think he got off easy because he never had to fight, and he makes his case even less sympathetic by refusing to demonize the Germans as an enemy. He’d been there when the war ended, saw the people of Berlin starving and suffering, and he refuses to mark a line between “us” and “them.”
Which makes sense to Rose, who has seen what war does to bodies, who knows it happens to bodies on both sides, who has seen the mud and seen the death, and knows that stories of heroism are mostly just myths. She has seen also the way that stories like hers have been left out of the narrative, and stories of colonial soldiers who were people of colour, and has lost faith that people like her beloved nephew died for a reason. And so when she connects with Frederick at his home in Nova Scotia while she’s visiting her sister’s family, a romance grows between them, and both of them are force to face the hard experiences they’ve been trying not to think about since war ended. And only once they’ve finally done that can Rose and Frederick begin to face a future, maybe even one together…
This is a novel that brings history to life, that brings untold stories into consciousness, and complicates the way we think about war and remembrance. At a moment when military conflict is all too common (and more dangerous than ever), we need stories like this one to remind us of what it is to be human.
September 5, 2025
Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler
When I reviewed Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful debut novel The Wild Heavens—about a quest to prove the existence of the Sasquatch—in 2020, I wrote, “it’s less about the finding than the searching, about the wonder instead of answers, about the stories we tell about the mysteries both of ourselves and of the world.” Her new novel, Rufous and Calliope, seems like a different kind of story on the surface, not a mythical creature in sight, but it similarly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, fancy and reality, and is wholly under the spell of its vivid natural setting deep in the rugged British Columbia interior.
The novel begins with Rufous, in his forties, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder. His hold on the present is tenuous, and he’s had to give up driving, leave his job as a cartographer, and the novel finds him on an epic quest across the landscape to return to the treehouse where he and older his siblings made a home for themselves for a season when he was five years old, after the death of their grandmother. And as Rufous walks, the narrative moves back those enchanted days when he and his siblings were ever skirting the authorities who would have brought them into the child welfare system, but he felt cared for, and everything was infused with a magical sense of freedom. But the season came to an end through circumstances that are not delineated until the end of the story, Rufuous’s siblings leaving him the care of a lesbian couple in a small town who run a cafe, and he grows up loved and cared for, but the loss of his siblings wears heavy on his soul and is as conspicuous as the missing little finger on his hand.
What was the cataclysmic event that tore the family apartment? Whatever happened to Rufuous’s twin sister, Calliope? And what’s really going on with Rufous in the present as he makes his way along the route back to the treehouse? Is he actually going to find his siblings there, or is this just another of his delusions and hallucinations, manifestations of the crumbling in his mind? His decline mirrored in the ecological devastation all around him, the wildfire smoke particles he breathes in all along the journey.
Does this sound bleak? Its not, not really. There are harsh truths that are central to the story—death, and loss, and heartache. But these are balanced out by other things that are just as true, examples of care, friendship, extraordinary survival, wonder at the nature and the mysteries of the universe. What an incredible book.
September 3, 2025
Snap, by Susin Nielsen
A picture book I really love is AUTHOR’S DAY, by Daniel Pinkwater, which is perhaps truest to the experience of being a writer in public as anything I’ve ever read, the story of a children’s book writer who shows up to a school visit and is met with one abject humiliation after another, to the obliviousness of school staff, and it’s an experience like that—no doubt somewhat universal—is the catalyst for SNAP, the first novel for adults from celebrated and award-winning author Susin Nielsen.
Frances Partridge is smack-dab in the worst year of her life: her children are grown, prickly and difficult; she feels like she’s losing her mother to dementia; and her husband has left her, out of the blue, after 25 years of what she’d always believed as a happy marriage. And so when an adolescent boy starts harassing her during a school visit where she’s reading from her beloved middle grade series, Phoebe Unknown, Frances—on her last nerve—is not having any of it, and tells him what she really thinks…while his classmate is filming the whole episode, the video going viral within hours, and soon Frances has being dumped by her publisher and charged with assault on a minor among the series of disasters that have befallen her lately.
SNAP is the story of what happens next, when Frances is sentenced to community service and an anger-management class during which she finds an unexpected connection to two of her classmates, and after some frustration and much humour, their lives become transformed. It’s a hilarious and heartwarming story of justice and vengeance (and very annoying lapses in swimming pool etiquette), and I loved it through and through.
