April 27, 2018

Back to the Future, by Kim Smith

When I was about seven or eight-years-old, Back to the Future was my favourite movie. Marty McFly was so unfathomably cool hitching a ride on his skateboard around town, and the movie suggested a perfectly ordered universe where there was such a thing as destiny (and  density) in that mom was always going to fall in love with dad, Michael J. Fox actually invented rock and roll, and the bully wouldn’t triumph. I mean, just as long as no one disrupted the Space Time Continuum, obviously. In a perfectly ’80s anecdote, I will tell you that I once tried to install a flux capacitor (I think it was a a coat hanger) to make a time machine out of my Dukes of Hazzard Big Wheel. Sadly, it didn’t actually work, probably because I couldn’t get any plutonium.

A few months ago, I decided it was finally time for us to sit down and watch Back to the Future en famille. (“Your kids, Marty! We’ve got to do something about your kids!”) And unlike many movies that had delighted me once upon a time (The Goonies? So shrill!) Back to the Future held up perfectly. 33 years later, Marty’s suspenders/puffy vest outfit just works somehow, the Huey Lewis is fantastic, the ’80s are the future arrived at, and the jokes are still funny—remember Uncle “Jailbird” Joey and “get used to those bars, kid?” Plus, Wayne from The Wonder Years in a Davy Crockett hat.

Harriet loved Back to the Future as much as I did when I was her age, which has made the new Back to the Future picture book an especially coveted item at our house.

Part of Quirk Books’ series of nostalgic pop-culture picture books (whose titles include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the X Files and E.T.) by Canadian illustrator Kim Smith, these books are a kids’-eye-view of the pop-classics we grew up loving. Skipping some bits—the Libyan terrorists, George McFly as a peeping tom, the whole “Calvin Klein” mix-up surrounding Lorraine and Marty’s underwear—the film’s plot is told in picture book form, right down to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance and the disappearing photo of Marty and his siblings in front of the wishing well.

Will Marty be able to teach his dad to stand up for himself, reunite his parents, invent rock and roll, and drive his De Lorean by the Hill Valley clock tower at the precise moment that lightning strikes, by which powering his journey back to the future? Well, no spoilers here, but I’ll tell you that the story ends with Doc Brown and Marty heading off on another time travelling adventure.

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads…” 

April 26, 2018

This Week’s Reading

• Saturday is Canadian Independent Bookstore Day
• “Or maybe they still liked Judy Blume but wouldn’t admit it to each other, and now sulky vampires and dystopian divas were passé, so I had no idea what they were into.”
• “If I was an observer, I would envy me this moment. But as a participant, I am grateful for this unexpected outcome of Earth Day: My family, cocooned in purposeful darkness, sharing our stories.”
• “Almost 30 years after the École Polytechnique massacre, we must continue to find any reason for violent misogyny besides violent misogyny.”
• “Courage is not about the absence of fear or anger or extreme emotion. The definition of courage is, when experiencing those emotions, refusing to let them govern your behaviour.” 
• “Terrorism is a trap of meaning. The terrorists win because they convince others that their insanity has larger meaning and that that larger meaning can be confronted by political or military means. Such a response empowers their psychopathology.”
• “Why is it that men are so freely awarded the benefit of the doubt while women are constantly challenged to prove themselves in politics?”
• “I’ve been riding the subway and reading Penelope Fitzgerald and crying lately.”
• “Maybe what happens in my ribcage isn’t my soul at all but there’s no real proof that it isn’t.”
• “Ten thousand years ago when summers were long and the sun shone every day…”
• “So….here’s to failure. And more failure.”
• “There were just two things a young Kate Inglis wanted to be when she grew up: a professional roller skater and an author.”

April 25, 2018

This is not okay

On Saturday I came across a scene that was surreal, whose pieces I couldn’t put together until the whole thing was explained to me. My husband was standing on the corner of Bloor Street and Spadina Avenue with our children picking up litter as a part of our neighbourhood clean-up—and this man was screaming at him about feminism. Not very articulately, mind you, and one got the impression from this man’s oration that he wasn’t one of the world’s great thinkers. He was yelling, “Fucking feminists. Go to India! That’s where they need you.” Which, incidentally, is one of my favourite rhetorical strategies, enabling a speaker to be misogynist and racist at once. And my husband was being remarkably patient for a person who was being screamed at while picking up litter in the street with his children. He kept saying, “Raising up girls doesn’t mean bringing other people down.” Repeating it like a mantra. Eventually the man continued on his way, no doubt to an engagement that was probably very pressing. And I realized the origin of this conflict, which was the button my husband wears on his coat, a button from the Women’s March in January.

If the brutal events of Monday afternoon had never happened (and I refuse to call it a tragedy. A tragedy suggests something inevitable, natural, but terrible. Brutal murder is not a tragedy) then that weird scene I came upon on Saturday would be an amusing anecdote, that one time my white husband was screamed at for feminism and told to go back to India. A bizarro version of the status quo—but what happened Monday affirms that this is the status quo. Attitudes like this man’s, and that of a man who’d see fit to run down a street full of women, are shockingly widespread and normal. And of course not everyone who holds those opinions is screaming on a corner or partaking in a murderous rampage. That’s not the point. Obviously these men are unhinged, but my point is that anti-feminist rhetoric is the fuel.

It is not so much that a man could hate women enough to feel entitled to go out and commit an act of mass murder that surprises me—I was ten years old in 1989 after all. This is the world I’ve come of age in. I also know that Monday’s violence is really not such an anomaly—Canadian women are murdered by their male partners all the time. But what continues to baffle me again and again are the people who refuse to see it. The people who claim that misogyny is not a thing, and that strong women don’t need feminism, and even that feminism is hurting men. Even worse: that feminism is the cause of this kind of violent behaviour, as though women have brought it on themselves. Fully absolving us all from taking responsibility for our part in perpetuating a culture that teaches men to act this way.

This is not normal. This is not okay.

April 24, 2018

It Begins in Betrayal, by Iona Whishaw

Oh my gosh, I am in love. I’ve been noting Iona Whishaw’s Lane Winslow mystery series since the first title came out in 2016, most because of the spectacular cover design. But it wasn’t until Friday that I’d actually had a copy in my hands—her latest, It Begins in Betrayal —and started reading. Two days and 360 pages later I finally put the book down an unabashed Lane Winslow/Iona Whishaw convert. The book was brilliant! Absolutely in the spirit of Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey mysteries, but smart and fresh in its own right. For lovers of cozy mysteries and British police procedurals—there’s even a murder investigation in which evidence includes fragments of a broken tea set—this title will not disappoint. But of course there are three more in the series before it, so maybe go back to the start?

From where I dove in mid-action, however, it was easy to find my bearings. The novels are set in BC’s interior during the 1940s, and by this fourth title ex-British Spy Lane Winslow who retired to Canada after a tumultuous war is in the throes of love with Police Inspector Frederick Darling—there is a reference to the first time they met when he arrested her. There’s a lot going on here—a woman’s body has been discovered in a remote area with suspicious injuries, obviously murder. But before Darling is able to investigate, he’s called away for a meeting with a mysterious government agent asking questions about the downing of his Lancaster bomber four years before in 1943, an event that killed two men in his crew. And the questions he’s being asked are not so straightforward—turns out Darling is about to be charged with murder, a hangable offence.

Thankfully Darling has Lane Winslow in his corner, with her wits, savvy, and intelligence connections. When he’s summoned to London and put in jail, she follows across the ocean to find out more about this vast conspiracy that’s engulfed Darling and his reputation—and can’t help turning up contacts with people from her espionage days whom she’d fled to Canada in hopes of ever avoiding. Could what’s happening to Darling have something to do with her after all? And is she willing to put her own life on the line to save him by travelling into Berlin to spy on the Soviets? If she does, will it even work?

As Darling waits in jail, and Lane works with his lawyer to figure out the real story of what’s happening, Darling’s subordinate back home is at work solving the murder of the woman in the woods, which also has ties to the woman’s family in England and her sister who’d been jilted decades before, and he and Lane assist each other via a couple of rare and miraculous transatlantic phone calls, thereby weaving this wide-reaching story neatly together. And it was such a pleasure to read it, the humour, the intelligence, the underlying feminism. Lane on the world of espionage: “…she was beginning to think the entire enterprise was run by a group of men who had never advanced past the age of thirteen.” The writing was wonderful, the plotting rock-solid, and I adored these characters. Can’t wait to delve into the backlist and discover what I’ve been missing.

April 20, 2018

The Bagel King, by Andrew Larsen

We love Andrew Larsen’s new book, The Bagel King, about Eli, whose Sunday morning ritual involves his grandfather arriving with bagels fresh from the bakery. Sometimes Zaida lets Eli come with him, and Eli gets a pickle from the big jar behind the counter, but usually Zaida comes to him. With the bagels. Except one Sunday he doesn’t! Turns out Zaida slipped on some schmaltz and hurt his tuches—and one of the best parts of this book is the Yiddish glossary which means we now know how to say “tuches.” Zaida’s injury has taken the best thing out of Sunday for not only Eli, but also for Zaida’s neighbours, who’d come to rely on his bagel deliveries as well. And so the next Sunday Eli steps in to fill the gap, and it becomes apparent that the bagel kingdom is something a person can inherit. And good thing—because what’s a Sunday without bagels, Zaida asks, in this story about intergenerational relationships, family and neighbourhood connections, the importance of ritual, plus pickles and carbs. “Warm. Chewy. Salty. Bagels were the best thing about Sunday. The best thing, that is, except for Zaida.”

April 19, 2018

What that chip means

Everything about the world that I didn’t learn from reading I know about from the stretch of city block below our front windows which are usually open in the summer. Every few months, a couple breaks up while sitting on our garden wall, and other couples break up elsewhere but not before fighting on our curb in the middle of the night. I’ve learned so much from snippets of conversation from people passing by, from people riding by on their bikes screaming at someone on the phone, and from the disproportionate number of individuals who stand outside rapping, beat-boxing or singing acapella. We still wonder about the person who once breezed past on his skateboard while demanding of someone on the phone this curious question, “Who goes deep inside you?” Who indeed?

I don’t get out much. And can you blame me? I’ve got British crime dramas on Netflix, and plenty of books, and venturing outside would only mean engaging with all the weirdos outside my door. Next year I’m turning forty, I work from home, and I’m pretty ensconced in my bubble. I like my bubble. But the price of my bubble is that whenever I go outside of it, I’m tremendously uncomfortable. It is most likely that I’ve been more socially awkward in my life than I am right now, but I’ve never been so aware of it. It’s like walking around with a sign on my back, but I’m not wise enough to decipher it—so I imagine every possibility.

The other week I spent the afternoon in a coffee shop while waiting to pick up my daughter, and while the place had a certain charm and also wifi, it was kind of shitty. But crowded, so the only place available to sit was at this counter at a window where the sun was too bright even though it was overcast. Two hours on a stool made my back hurt, because I am old, and there was no place to rest my feet because the part of the wall that was under the counter was a part of the wall that was nearly falling off the wall. But the tea was good, and there was baked goods. I had work to do, so I sat at my laptop, feet dangling, and listened to curious conversations from young Bohemians, like about whether it was a good idea to apply for a job at Soulpepper (“because of all the drama” [ha ha, but it wasn’t a joke]); about “Savoury Scone Lady” who comes and clears them out of the cheddar thyme scones on most mornings and refuses to make a special order so that they never have any left for the rest of the day, “But it’s good for business,” and there’s the quandary; and about the differences between math metal and Dungeons and Dragons metal, which are both genres of nerd metal—who knew? What a think to imagine yourself as a central character, and then to receive these glimpses into worlds, cultures, stories, in which you do not remotely factor.

It was not a bad afternoon. It was just strange to think about how much of the world goes on without me, how much of the world manages not even to ride its bike past my house screaming obscenities. My angst was existential, but then it usually is. I’d posted a photo on Instagram of my tea cup, which was a chipped cup. And then someone posted a comment: “Oh, Kerry, I don’t even want to tell you what that chip means.” I didn’t know this person. I thought, “If you don’t want to tell me, then why even let me know the the chip has meaning?” I’d just assumed it was part of the wall-falling-off-the-wall aesthetic of the place. I’m pretty  accustomed to crockery chips—have you looked in my cupboards?  But it turns out that I had been had.

Because I am totally normal, I went for the logical conclusion regarding what that chip means. Naturally, it’s the mug they all ejaculate in. Obviously. All coffee shops keep such a mug in reserve, maybe having a ceremonial communal wank at closing time on Fridays. And everybody knows about this except me, and I’m such an idiot that I unwittingly took a photograph as evidence and posted it on Instagram.

I couldn’t think of any other possibility, and did what I always do it times of distress, which is, I called my husband. I said, “I think I drank from the jizz cup.” He said, “The jizz cup? What’s a jizz cup?” I said, “It’s the cup they keep at hipster coffee shops and all ejaculate into, and then they serve people with ugly winter coats their tea in it.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I don’t know, but this person on Instagram doesn’t even want to tell me what that chip means, and what else could it mean?” He said, “I don’t know, but probably not the jizz cup.” He said, “There’s no such thing as the jizz cup.” And I said, “How do you know? As Princess Diana’s butler Paul Burrell once reported the Queen informed him, ‘There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.’”

We googled it. I am still not sure what the chipped cup means, to be honest, and maybe I am only underlining my humiliation, but the most we were able to discern was that chipped mugs are extremely unhygienic. Chips can harbour all kind of bacteria that cause disease…but honestly, who cares? It’s the reason I was born with an immune system. And if I seem particularly blasé about it, it’s only because it’s better than the jizz cup.

April 18, 2018

My Garden, So To Speak…

The internet is awful, and this week I met the exciting milestone of my first report of a threat to my personal safety on Twitter. Obviously, they found the threat doesn’t violate their terms. To suggest the comment was something I actually find threatening is to give some sad little worm too much credit, but still, what a sorry thing when this is how people communicate, and somebody else decides it’s acceptable. Even sorrier that someone like that gets to define our online experience—and so he doesn’t. I also love the internet. I’ve also spent this week jumping through portals into rich and colourful stories and experiences, and I share links to these places on Twitter. Where, I find, there isn’t tremendous engagement anyway. And so in celebration of the goodness, I’m going to bring back the links round-up to my blog, that little corner of the internet that is mine. My garden, so to speak.

• “I find minimal design beautiful, but boring. Give me tchotchke, colour clashes and contradictions.”
• “I will take Kathleen Wynne’s arrogance over [Conservative leader] Doug Ford’s stupidity any day of the week.”
• “I have spent most of my adult life worrying I have inherited my father’s darkness.”
• “The aroma emerging from your oven while this baby bakes is enough to make you believe any world that smells this divine must inherently be safe.”
• “The Second Shelf Rare books, modern first editions, manuscripts, & rediscovered works by women. On mission to balance the bookshelves.”
• “…when I see her photo, I see Tina Fontaine as every high school kid who could land in my first-year university classroom, the one where I teach Marilyn Dumont’s poem, a class where she’d hand in essays and I’d write on them Good point! and I like how you’ve figured this out.”
• ‘“Worrying about its worth and value to others before it exists,” she remarks in a later section, “can keep us immobilized forever.’
• “My noticing, if I may call it that, is part of the way I remember, the way I try to keep intact the world I cherish.” 
• “I found my new favorite spring lunch salad while I was hiding from a pot of brisket…”
• “But of course I also love talking about the things a novel in particular does that, say, the 24-hour news cycle doesn’t. The slow, deep dive into a world that a novel gives you.”
• “I wish I could apologize to Tante Geneviève for questioning her wits…”
• “Sourdough made me both crave spicy soup and freshly made bread.”
• “It’s strange that my only material evidence of the Barred Owl also happens to be the worst photo I’ve ever taken.”
• “There is a reason we have foods like pickles, and it is the same reason we crave good art.” 
• “My friends, it is a long time since I’ve had a solo visit to the park, a hike, and a chance to observe the park’s abundant wildlife.  And I’ve missed it. Terribly.”
• “Another thing I find useful to remember is that all of the secrets to writing are also secrets to living.”

April 17, 2018

1979 and That Time I Loved You

Ray Robertson’s new novel, 1979, is set in Robertson’s hometown, Chatham, ON, the story Tom Buzby, of a small town paperboy who once come back from the dead and now everybody thinks he must have some uncanny knowledge of the world and its workings. Which he does, actually, but in a more practical sense than assumed, the way he’s privy to glimpses of private lives, and wise to the cycles and seasons of the town and its residents. He’s not sure either why everybody thinks he’s got access to wisdom, but that’s because he takes his point of view for granted, his unique perspective on ordinary lives, and the fact that there is really no such thing.

Full disclosure: not a long happens in this book. Tom dies and comes back from the dead before the story starts, which is also when his mother, a former stripper turned religious zealot, runs off with the pastor, leaving her tattoo-artist husband to care of Tom and his older sister Julie. There’s a simmering tension involving Tom’s dad finally buying his own property, and the destruction of a local building to make way for a downtown mall, but otherwise it’s Tom on his paper-round, listening to his sister’s records, hanging out with his friends, thinking about his mother, checking out the books at Cole’s, and trying to impress an older girl by lying and telling her he’s read Fear of Flying. All of these characters are richly and sympathetically imagined, and realized.

It might be a two hour drive from Chatham to Wingham, but I still got an Alice Munro vibe from Robertson’s small town scenes, and this was underlined by the “newspaper stories” that are scattered through the novel. Imagined stories (‘Young Woman Finds Ontological Comfort in New Pair of Pants:’ “When I Look at Them, They Remind Me of Who I am”; ‘Man Grows Old and Cranky:’ “I Knew it Happened to Everyone, but Somehow I Thought in My Case There Might Be an Exception”; ‘Man Found Dead in Next-Door Neighbour’s Swimming Pool:’ “I didn’t Necessarily Want to Die, but I Didn’t Want to be Alive Either”) providing readers with access to the inner lives of the people who are secondary characters in Tom Buzby’s own tale, giving answers to questions that Tom does not yet have the age and experience to be asking—although he’s already haunted by a sense that they’re coming.

The book is rich with allusions to literature and music, and one reference specifically informs the project, the poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, which narrates the epitaphs of residents of a small town. Robertson’s take with the newspaper stories is similar in approach, and connects with Tom’s job (and downtown circuits) in a meaningful way. The result is beautifully crafted, a rich and textured perspective of small town life, a nostalgic journey that resonates with the world of today.

When I picked up Carrianne Leung’s new book next, That Time I Loved You, it was purely a coincidence, and I wasn’t expecting a connection. Until the first paragraph, of course: “1979: This was the year the parents in my neighbourhood began killing themselves. I was eleven years old and in Grade  6. Elsewhere in world, big things were happening. McDonalds introduced the Happy Meal, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and Michael Jackson released his album Off the Wall. But none of that was as significant to me as the suicides…”

These two books are excellent companions, perfect contenders for “If you like this, read…” pairings. Instead of small town Ontario and the past meeting the future, Leung is chronicling the suburbs and the possibility of escaping the past. The setting is Scarborough, where brand new houses with their leafy lawns on winding streets represent fresh starts, new beginnings for the immigrant families who imagine they’ve finally arrived after years of struggle. There’s even a kid with a paper route, Josie, who’d inherited the route from her big brother: “Josie loved her routine and the sense of purpose her job gave her. She loved collecting the money at the end of the week from the neighbours, who often slipped her cookies, candy or even a tip.”

Although the centre of this novel is Josie’s best friend June, another first-generation Chinese-Canadian who revels in the expansiveness and freedom of her childhood, playing outside with her packs of friends until the streetlights come on. Like Tom Buzby, June has her eye on things, and she’s got surprising insight into the lives of her neighbours, although she doesn’t understand everything she learns either—least of all, why there’s been a suicide epidemic, and whose parent was going to be next?

A novel in stories is a perfect container for this book about the suburbs, every chapter a different house on the street. Open the door and go inside to find a different story, a closet full of secrets, a peek out the window to a new view of the street. The Portuguese housewife who is tired with putting up with her abusive husband; the young Italian-Canadian wife who has moved to Scarborough away from downtown, and who longs for a baby that doesn’t come; the neighbourhood social butterfly who is secretly a thief, and whose habits eventually get found out by her neighbours. Plus June’s friends, sweet and effeminate Nav, Darren whose academic potential is undermined by a racist teacher, and Josie, whose uncle is sexually abusing her. As with Robertson and the news articles, Leung’s structure permits her to include a wide range of different voices, and to suggest there is no such thing as a central narrative, but instead to shine a light on these remarkable places where stories intersect.

April 12, 2018

The Soup My Children Eat

Having children is a challenge to any notion of living in the moment, not just because children rarely sit still, but also because a moment in the life of a child is as changing as a garden in May. And so the closest I’ve come to really being present is looking back on five minutes previous and saying, “Well, thank goodness that’s over, and isn’t it amazing to be here right now.” Which is basically what I’ve been saying for my children’s entire lives, the first six weeks of their existences notwithstanding.

Of course, it helps that I am an insufferable diviner of silver linings. I also know that it’s not always going to keep getting better and better, this experience of raising children. Life is complicated. Although I am so insistent when it comes to those silver linings that I might possibly end up deluding myself into thinking this is the case—I’m an unreliable narrator. But still, here we are, with my children on the cusp of being five and nine, and we’ve never had it so good. Sometimes we go out for dinner, and I don’t even need to be bring crayons. All those terrains that were unnavigable by stroller are now ours for the taking—I look forward to a summer of walks in ravines. And when we wet our pants, it’s a special occasion instead of a regular occurrence. We’re capable of having interesting conversations that 35% of the time don’t descend into an in-depth analysis of farts. We can all go to the same movie and enjoy it, and even Iris has been following along with our reading of A Wrinkle in Time. But what makes me happier than anything else is that finally everybody likes soup.

It has taken years to get here. I don’t know why. You’d think that soup would be child-friendly, as it doesn’t even require teeth to eat it, but my children were soup-intolerant from the get-go. And in some ways, I understood—small children like food to be straightforward and not touching, and soup was everything mixed up in a bowl. I would puree it, but they always claimed it tasted terrible. Chicken noodle they would tolerate, but only because they’d just pick out the noodles. And all of this was very hard on me, because soup is one of the things I love best in the world. Warm and comforting, full of nutritious goodness, handy for leftovers, and how it warms the house and steams everything up so you can draw hearts on the windows. I really love soup, and I never gave up serving it to my children in the hopes that one I’d finally succeed at making them love it too.

The tide finally turned about a year ago. I remember the night it happened—I served the soup thinking, “Will tonight be the night?” As I’d done numerous nights before, but this one did the trick. Everybody ate the soup. The blandest soup, it was true, but I was not going to quibble about details. Soup was soup and we were eating it together, and I kept serving it, gradually adding flavour. Originally it was sweet potato and I started using butternut squash instead, but not telling them. They kept eating it. I added a bit of curry—nobody complained. And now I serve it weekly, and everybody’s the teeniest bit sick of it, but they indulge me and also they don’t get a say because I’m the one cooking. We like to have our soup with a loaf of oatmeal quick bread and hummus and cheese on the side, as well as a drained can of chickpeas roasted in the oven with salt and olive oil as the bread is cooking.

The Soup My Children Eat (Adapted from here)

Ingredients: 

2 tablespoons coconut oil

1 onion, chopped

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon curry powder

1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 butternut squash, peeled and diced (or 4 sweet potatoes)

6 cups of chicken or vegetable stock

1 can of coconut milk

Instructions: 

Melt olive oil in a stock pot. Add onion and garlic and let them soften, then stir in spices. Add diced squash, and then stock. Bring to boil and simmer for 20 minutes (or longer?) and then add coconut milk. Puree with an immersion blender.

April 10, 2018

A Dangerous Crossing, by Ausma Zehanant Khan

Everything is a little too close to home in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s latest mystery, A Dangerous Crossing. Inspector Esa Khattak’s best friend Nathan Clare’s sister Audrey has gone missing from the migrant camp in Lesvos where she’d been working for a Canadian non-profit, fast-tracking Syrian refugees to Canada. An Interpol officer is dead and Audrey has disappeared—is she responsible for the murder? Where has she gone? Has she been taken, and by who? And how to account for the discrepancies between Audrey’s official business with the non-profit and what she’s actually been up to?

To stave off a diplomatic nightmare, Esa and Rachel fly to Greece and are overwhelmed by what they find there—the enormity of the need, the scarcity of resources, the boatloads of people that continue to arrive on the shores. And the people themselves, each with their own stories, people who balk at being considered part of a refugee “crisis.” Words matter, as Khan makes clear throughout the novel. What is the crisis? Are these migrants or refugees? All of these questions (and the story of the refugees in general) distracting from the matter at the heart of it all, the brutal war and tyranny in Syria, torture and war crimes, the devastation from which people are running for their lives. The details are hard to stomach, but necessary to witness, especially to understand their ramifications. Which manifest in so many ways—human trafficking, the rise of violent nationalism, the arrival of refugees, PTSD, corruption and abuse of power, and more.

This is a powerful and moving story that manages to weave these huge narrative strands together in a believable fashion. I had a harder time with the personal stories of Esa, Rachel and Nate—part of it is that Esa and Rachel are both characters who seem to be at a remove, and so these rare glimpses into their souls can sometimes only reveal a stranger. (Oh, Esa! How could you!!) I also got the feeling that this was a transitional novel in terms of the characters’ personal lives and some of the scenes in the middle felt like work to get to arrival, but I really like where they end up—Rachel’s revelations about her feelings towards Esa in particular was really beautiful.

Khan is a gorgeous writer, her prose is backed up by her background in international human rights law, and—though her previous novels suggest it this one definitely confirms it—she can craft a detective story up there with the best of them.