October 21, 2025
The Witch of Willow Sound, by Vanessa F. Penney
It was that cover that won me over first, and then it turned up on the inaugural CIBA Booksellers’ List among other stellar selections, and so when I finally got my hands on a copy of The Witch of Willow Sound, by Vanessa F. Penney, at Word in the Street in Toronto, I had to buy it. Even though stories of magic and witches aren’t always my speed, but there was something about Penney’s narrative—plain spoken, understated, somehow embedded in the actual world—that held me fast even when wild things were happening. And it’s the perfect book for October, Chapter 1 opening with Phaedra “Fade” Luck waking up from a slumber beneath a tombstone, “frost in my hair and bony little fingers digging in my hoodie pocket.” (The fingers belong to a skinny raccoon who is after her half-finished bag of ketchup chips.) She’s mostly estranged from her mother, but it turns out there’s no one else her mother can call when Fade’s Aunt Madeleine is reported missing, Fade tasked with travelling to Aunt Madeleine’s dreamy little cottage built on a cliff above the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia where she hasn’t been since her mother and aunt broke off contact more than 20 years before. But when Fade arrives, nothing is the way it’s supposed to be—the house is decaying, the gardens are dead, there’s almost no sign of Aunt Madeleine, and officials from the neighbouring town of Grand Tea (a somewhat nefarious place whose inhabitants live under the constant thread of being crushed by a mountain) seem far too up in Aunt Madeleine’s business. Meanwhile, a hurricane is approaching that threatens to flatten Aunt Madeleine’s little house for good and eliminate any chance that Fade will ever be able to figure out what’s happened to her once beloved aunt. But with her own doggedness (and useful detective skills), plus the help of a trusted archivist (every book needs one!) Fade might just be able to learn the true story of her family’s history—if she’s brave enough to face it! This fun and twisty story is also an ode to the wisdom of nature and the women who carry it, as well as reminder of the importance of balance and the way that histories will haunt us unless we are honest about what our stories really are.
October 20, 2025
Call Me Gray, by Andrew Larsen, Bells Larsen, and Tallulah Fontaine
Some things are hard to intuit, difficult to understand if you only know about it in theory, instead of in practice, or if you only learn about it via, say, the Harry Potter lady’s unhinged tweets. As somebody whose gender has usually fit comfortably, I actually can imagine a very different world from the one I live in—where I happen to be surrounded by a wide range of gender expression and encountering trans people is an unremarkable everyday occurrence—where transness might be tricky to get my head around. And the reason why it’s not tricky is because I know people whose lives and stories are what we’re talking about when we’re talking about those things that other people like to yell about on Twitter, and let me tell you that this kind of knowledge—created of human connection and understanding—makes all the difference in the world.
And this kind of bridge between experiences serves as the foundation of CALL ME GRAY, the new picture book by my friend Andrew Larsen and his son, the musician Bells Larsen, illustrated by Tallulah Fontaine. It’s the story of a parent and child partaking in their annual tradition of constructing a backyard ice rink, the same way they do every year, continuity and tradition being oh so important—except that one thing has changed. Being a boy, the child explains to their dad, just doesn’t feel right. Which the father doesn’t understand at first—when asked if he ever feels mixed up about who he is, the father answers, ‘”I feel mixed up about a lot of things… I think most people do.”‘ It takes some time for him to actually catch on, as the two work together to build their rink.
Later the child tries again, “‘My name feels like an itchy sweater,’ I tell him. ‘I want to change it… [W]ill you call me Gray?'” The father answers, “‘I’ll try.'” And while the father doesn’t get it right immediately, he gets there eventually, the two completing the rink with their usual rituals of the first skate and hot chocolate, all those things that don’t have to change just because other things do.
What gifts the child in this book offers their parent—wisdom, trust, and the opportunity to receive their child’s essential self with abject love. Humanity is at the core of all of this, and CALL ME GRAY provides some hints for how we ought to show up for each other, whether the other person in question is our own child or somebody else’s.
October 16, 2025
I Make My Own Fun, by Hannah Beer
I LOVED I Make My Own Fun, the debut novel by UK journalist Hannah Beer, which has just been published in North America by House of Anansi Press. It’s a gripping, hilarious, agonizingly homicidally perfect take on celebrity, told from the perspective of the world famous and universally adored movie star, Marina, whose fans revere her to no end and track her every move, and who is able to control every aspect of her life and her press so that nobody suspects that she’s anything except the benevolent humanist that she pretends to be. Except that she’s actually a monster who’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants, until she meets the one thing she can’t get—Anna, a cute bartender, who fails to engage with Marina’s attempted manipulations via text after their one night stand. It’s a calamity that sends the already unhinged Marina even further off the rails as she sets her sights on winning Anna’s affections, completely oblivious to the way her obsession might be construed, her connection to Anna oddly mirroring the parasocial relationships Marina’s fans have with her, relationships the reader follows through the inclusion of fan forum threads throughout the narrative, which starts off nuts and only gets more and more wild. Beer pulls the whole thing off so perfectly, albeit very very darkly, and if you like that sort of thing, you’ll find this novel so delicious.
October 15, 2025
Property, by Kate Cayley
Property, the debut novel by the award-winner Cayley—who has previously published short fiction, poetry and plays—is set over a single day in west end Toronto, a contemporary riff on the Mrs. Dalloway arc with a little “Hurry up please it’s time” from “The Waste Land” thrown in for good measure, but it’s also unabashedly itself, rich and propulsive, the story of a neighbourhood and its motley crew of inhabitants including the rats scurrying around the very wet basement of a house under construction, and by the end of the day—we know from the start—somebody will be dead.
Property is the story of three mothers—Nat, a queer mother whose middle classness has crept up on her; Maddy, a former actress, who longs to escape her marriage; and the older woman across the street with her flickering curtain, one of the street’s long-time residents before people like Nat and Maddy moved in with their renos and lush strollers, who worries about her troubled adult son. It’s also the story of Ilya, Russian builder working on the excavated house, the lady smoking on the porch with her dog, Nat and Maddy’s children, and how not a single one of these characters’ inner lives is at all what the people around them imagine.
A novel about gentrification, community, secrets, fears and anxieties, about the unstable foundations at the base of so many of the stories we tell ourselves of who we are and what we’re becoming, Property, in all its delectable prose, fast becomes a heart-wrenching page-turner. The narrative culminates in an ending that manages to be inevitable, awful and perfect.
October 8, 2025
The Pugilist and the Sailor, by Nadia Ragbar
Imagine the impossible conundrum: a set of brothers, conjoined twins, and one’s entire existence is bound up in being a boxer, while the other just wants to read a story of a sailor all alone at sea. How do you reconcile that? A question that serves as jumping off point for Nadia Ragbar’s debut novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor, the story of the Reuben brothers, Bruce and Dougie, but which is also a meditation that draws into the narrative the boys’ loving parents, their neighbours, their co-workers, and a benevolent tailor determined to make the brothers a new suit. Ragbar’s story is a rich imagining of Bruce and Dougie’s physical experience—how they walk into a room, the way they sleep, how one brother hovers inside a door to give the other a bit of privacy to (maybe!) kiss a girl goodnight. And the boxing too, where the brothers are known as The Reuben Beat, two fists and three legs, a force to be reckoned with, except that Bruce doesn’t want to do it any longer, and Dougie has been having troubling neurological symptoms. Meanwhile, Bruce has been exchanging letters with a woman in the neighbourhood who has been overwhelmed by her own grief, but he hasn’t informed her yet of his physical situation, and the narrative encompasses her own point of view, and that of the brothers’ mother, Jane, who made her own choices when her sons were born, and might have to let go of her conviction that these were the best ones for them, that her sons were perfect as they were and they’d have to have the world bend to meet them rather than the other way around. Which has served them well, until now, and this is a story of holding on and letting go, and about the connections that persist in spite of unfathomable distances, a generous, human, and most moving read.
October 7, 2025
Run Like a Girl, by Catherine McKenna
RUN LIKE A GIRL, the memoir by former MP and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, was an impulse buy. I picked it up at the bookstore because I was curious about who’d published it (it was Sutherland House Publishing) and discovered that it was more of a scrapbook than a typical memoir, like those SOUVENIR OF CANADA books that Douglas Coupland published about 20 years ago, replete with snapshots, clippings, photos of objects (the shoes she wore canvassing, her collection of swim caps, an array of campaign buttons, the cover of U2’s WAR, the first album McKenna ever bought), Nike ads she cut out of magazines and taped on her bedroom wall during the ’90s (which is both cringe AND very relatable), along with short passages of text. I was drawn by the book’s format and also interested in McKenna’s story as a female politician who’d received outsized hate and abuse during her tenure (there are people thought they were being clever by calling her “Climate Barbie”), so I took the book home…where I read her acknowledgements and discovered that the book’s unique format was dreamed up in the company of McKenna’s “swim friend,” Leanne Shapton, whose own books which are collections of objects and images are some of my favourites, her memoir SWIMMING STUDIES in particular. So of course I wanted to read RUN LIKE A GIRL. (If McKenna had called her book SWIM LIKE A GIRL, I would have purchased with more alacrity, but possibly I am a niche audience for that.)
“Run like a girl” was a phrase that McKenna adopted during her campaign for office before the 2015 federal election (after a gruelling nomination process during which others were waiting for a more traditional [male] candidate to drop into her Ottawa Centre riding), which basically meant staying true to herself and her values, and honouring her own particular style in getting things done, a style honed from the outset during her upbringing in gritty Hamilton, ON, and her experience as a competitive swimmer. The swimming remains a through-line for McKenna, even after she becomes a parent, and then an MP—as Environment Minister, she had responsibility for Canada’s national parks, and there are photos and anecdotes from her swimming in pristine places all over the country; she also writes about being part of the parliamentary swim team and having to dive under water to get away from Elizabeth May’s very persistent lobbying.
McKenna’s is an inspiring story of determination and finding her own way—at law school, as a lawyer, as a mother, as a politician. She writes candidly about her frustrations as a part of Justin Trudeau’s government where promises of sunny ways dissolved into a dearth of support and real leadership from above for MPs, where she feels as though she was too optimistic as Environment Minister in envisioning the oil and gas industry collaborating with policy makers to enact meaningful change to meet Canada’s emissions targets. She writes about her decision to leave politics at a moment that was right for her, and also about her current role where she continues to work for climate action through the company she founded, Climate and Nature Solutions.
Inspiring, engaging, hopeful and human, RUN LIKE A GIRL was a fun, colourful, and most compelling read. To anyone who finds traditional political memoir a little dry or who wants to be reminded of the what’s possible for the future of climate, politics, and more, this book will be a winner.
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.
