July 2, 2025
A Dark Death, by Alice Fitzpatrick
I was lucky to be born in Canada, and doubly lucky to also be able to also choose Canada when I moved (back) here with my immigrant spouse exactly 20 years and two days ago. My feelings about Canada Day and nationalism are always complicated (which I think they should be), and they’re additionally complicated this year with Canada’s sovereignty under threat. The world is so weird and interesting, and nations are made-up stories, but also so is everything.
This past long weekend (which stretched four days long) kicked off summer for us with a beautiful weekend camping in one of our favourite places on the shores of Lake Erie. And I was thrilled to delighting in a Canadian novel on the beach, Alice Fitzpatrick’s A DARK DEATH, the second book in her Meredith Island Mystery series (I haven’t read the first, jumped right into this one, and it was fine!). Meredith Island is a small and homey Welsh island where retired teacher Kate Galway (who solved her aunt’s murder the summer before) is hoping to finish her novel, but there is too much happening for that even before the first body turns up. A group of archaeology students is unearthing supposed evidence of a Roman temple, and a conman posing as a psychic is stirring up trouble among her neighbours, and then all hope of tranquility is lost when a body turns up amidst the dig site. Once again, the local constabulary is going to require Kate’s assistance, although they’re calling it meddling. And what about the minister who has locked herself inside the church and seems to have lost her faith? Or the shopkeeper who has fallen under suspicion for the murder, even though Kate knows that surely he hasn’t done it.
The narrative moves between multiple perspectives, Kate sharing the story with her neighbours, with the young police detective who is one of Kate’s former students, her artist friend who is looking to seduce the detective, the Professor leading the dig, his errant students, with the Minister, and her doctor husband. The result is a satisfying (and amusing) picture of a community with Three Pines vibes, each character with his or her own struggles and temptations, and a fun and absorbing mystery to follow, and this series might be joining my own personal list of must-reads.
It’s also one of 49thShelf’s July Summer Reading picks, if you feel like doing some Canadian reading yourself. And even better—each and every title on the list is up for giveaway!
June 26, 2025
In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, by James Cairns
I have trouble with understanding things, with understanding proportion. As someone with anxiety, I tend towards catastrophic thinking anyway, and so I get confused with how the media reports such things, how it all gets compounded. An example, say, like Covid, which came along with the most infectious variant ever, and then the one after that which was even more infectious, and then one that 20 times more infectious, and that was around the time my brain broke into bits, because how is that even possible?
What does it mean when everything everywhere is a crisis? James Cairns’ essay collection In Crisis, On Crisis is an effort to answer that question, and belongs to a genre of literature from which I’ve been finding answers this spring, and includes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theories of Water and The Snag, by Tessa McWatt. There was a time, a little under a decade ago, when people who marching around holding signs that said, “I WANT YOU TO PANIC,” and let me tell you, I did what they said, but all I got was a mental breakdown. And so what I’m looking for these days are stories for how we can still live rich and meaningful lives in this moment, while envisioning possibilities for a different kind of future.
These essays by Cairns—a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and also a socialist—are a fascinating blending of personal, cultural, and scholarly, many of his broader ideas about living amidst crisis underlined by his experience as someone who lives with addiction, someone who has relapsed and recovered in the past, and could very well do so again: “The fact is, I’m not going to drink today. And if I relapse tomorrow or ten months from now, I have experience and supports to get me through it. It won’t necessarily mean my life is ruined. But it might. There is no curing, no transcending my alcoholism./ This is a crisis. This is not a crisis.”
How do we live knowing that bad things can happen? How do we live knowing that bad things will happen? In these essays—which delve into Trumpism, apocalyptic reading, whether we are in fact living through a crisis of democracy, midlife crises and Karl Ove Knausgaard, fatalism and Sylvia Plath, the experience of moving during a pandemic, if now is a “post-truth” moment, fears and anxieties about his children and their futures in the face of the climate crisis—Cairns delves deep into these questions and urges the reader to leave room for possibility.
June 26, 2025
Abundance
My anxiety was really bad this winter, February and March spent in a state of generalized terror, for reasons that were all in my head, and also not entirely. It was awful. And near the end of March, I wrote about the seeds I’d planted, using the examples of the hard winters I’ve been through before to suggest that these don’t last forever. That we can plant seeds that bloom, even when the planting seems futile, the blooming impossible. To plant seeds at all is to believe in the future, even if that believing is difficult. It’s a kind of faith, and I was wrestling with all that as I wrote about the seeds that had planted, the seeds that had sprouted.
And then for maybe a week or so, nothing happened at all, and I wondered if I’d jinxed myself by writing that post. (I’ve learned that I really can’t write about my anxiety. To write about my anxiety is to try to harness it, control it, and whenever I do, even with the best intentions, I get even more anxious. I’m learning that I just have to let my anxiety be…) But eventually, more seeds sprouted, and then more and more, those snapdragon specks I’d stuck in the soil growing into seedlings (and also chamomile, and also nasturtiums, one with its first flower that I picked and ate this morning, the circle of life).
I love snapdragons so very much. They’re so eye-catching, colourful, and they grow and grow—I was still making bouquets out of them last November! And this year, for the first time ever, there were snapdragon seedlings for sale at our local convenience store/garden centre, so I bought a bunch of these, partly because I’m greedy, but also because I still wasn’t sure that my seedlings would grow—or that they were even snapdragons at all because I’m a very disorganized gardener who plants my seeds and then loses track of everything.
But as the seedlings grew (and were transplanted outside into pots), I finally learned what they looked like, which meant that when even more started popping up everywhere, I recognized them immediately. Turns out that, in addition to the snapdragons I’d planted in March and bought at the store in May, the plants from last year had self-seeded all over the place, so that so many of the pots in my garden have snapdragons growing up around the edges, and as the flowers begin to arrive, I am just so in love with this entire arrangement (and also with how much better I feel than I felt a few months ago).
I am glad I had faith and planted seeds with abandon, but it’s also amazing to consider that, had I done nothing at all, the flowers still would have bloomed.
June 25, 2025
Gleanings
- One of my photography passions is wildflowers; they fascinate and charm me. All of them — even the simplest, most humble dandelions. Especially the dandelions.
- There are less and less … both dances, and people of that time. I look around the room, and can’t help but think it is inevitable, before this too, is gone. The man now alone with his guitar and laptop was once a part of a band, widows dancing with widows, some barely shuffling their feet and yet, here we are, the young so delighted by the old, the old enlivened by the young.
- And honestly, that’s my favourite thing about travel: the way that even the most foreign of experiences can remind you of something familiar.
- Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity.
- I trust my imaginative plane as much as some people trust their god, or their tarot, or their psychic. I do. So, as I float about… what does it mean that i can’t stay still, that my foundation is afloat? Is it bad? Is it the world? Has the utter crazy of the global and national scene just knocked my roots from under me? The hope that is a usual tether has been snipped and I’m off.
- It turns out that being a real friend means doing something incredibly hard and, in a way, unkind: confronting Nicola with the truth. “Wake up,” Helen finally says; “You’ve got to get ready.”
- When Judith’s peonies, poppies and Irises are all in full bloom (and her red door is flung wide open to let the breeze in on her jewel of a home) it is a sight to drop-your-Metro-bags and behold. I learn so much about gardening –– about human nature –– by observing people in their gardens.
- We need beauty to help us weather out the storm.
- ‘Welp, I read the internet,’ he’d sometimes tell me around 10 am. “Got anything else for me?”
- But watching the bear, who was no doubt the offspring of one of the original bears — a child, a grandchild? — I realized that the orchard is remembered, in the way the beautiful old crabapple tree is remembered by successive generations of those same bears. It’s not what I expected but it’s something sweet.
- Baiting with Tolkien, luring Whippets named Rapunzel, and other ways to make friends.
- It occurs to me that we writers should emulate lighthouses and shine our lights without prejudice or favour, just keep putting our beams out there. If it guides some away from the treacherous shoals of life, all the better. If it helps other readers keep their own boats on course, comforted to know another kindred spirit is out there, has been through these same storms and survived, that’s all good too.
- It felt like life was curating the perfect evening.
- I have a terminal case of wanderlust. But even as the scrolling and research heightens my anticipation, once I arrive, alone, in a foreign city, I’m often struck by the question: Why? Why did I haul myself in a cramped seat across the ocean and plunk myself down, alone, in a strange place. What am I doing here?
- I also think it’s essential for an editor to be connected to the world at large, because the publishing industry is a mirror for society.
- The funny thing about bookshops is that their most regular patrons are the ones who aren’t short of things to read at all!The double-stackers, the hoarders, the ambitious lunatics, I love them dearly.
June 23, 2025
School’s Out Forever
“But because I am neither my protagonist nor a bad-ass, I ended up joining Parent Council just so nobody would think I was Mitzi Bytes (in spite of all the ways I obviously was), and due to many qualities that would eventually land me in therapy, I dove into school volunteerism like a maniac…” All readers can read my essay “School’s Out Forever,” a reflection on the last 12 years I’ve spent as part of my kids’ school community as we’re now in our final week there.
And my June essay for paid subscribers is out now, which begins, “Of all the authorial humblings I’ve experienced, having the autobiographical protagonist of my debut novel deemed generally unlikeable has been one of the more complicated to process.” Don’t miss “The Perils of Writing to Find Friends.”
June 20, 2025
Water Borne, by Dan Rubinstein
I became an admirer of Dan Rubinstein with his 2015 book BORN TO WALK: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF A PEDESTRIAN ACT, which I read not long after Rebeccca Solnit’s WANDERLUST, loving how the two books were complementary, and with his latest release, WATER BORNE, I am once again struck by how beautifully his work fits into a wider literary context, specifically books about water and rivers that have also come out this spring by Robert Macfarlane and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, both of whom would likely also have underlined the following lines from Rubinstein’s book, “…borders, like the fringes of any lake, river, or ocean, are transition zones. The rough margins where change comes slowly, from the friction of daily and seasonal cycles. Or in a tremendous burst, like water breaching a dam.”
WATER BORNE is the story of Rubinstein’s journey by stand-up paddleboard (SUP) from his home in Ottawa, Ontario, to Montreal on the Ottawa River; from Montreal to New York City via the Lake Champlain and the Hudson River; and Albany, NY, to Buffalo, via the Erie Canal; and then from St. Catharines to Kingston, via Lake Ontario; and back home to Ottawa on the Rideau Canal. It’s also the story of the strangers he met along the way, the friends and relations who supported him, odd conversations at campgrounds, a chronicle of lost sunglasses., and the history of these waterways, man-made, histories that tell of the rise and fall of different industries over centuries, a progress that led to the degradation of lakes and rivers and the health of creatures who make their lives by their waters.
But it’s also the story of people who are working to change this cycle, of projects to restore life to waterways, both in terms of the natural world and actually making these waterways accessible to the people who’d most benefit from this access, people who don’t have the luxury of vacation houses or even swimming lessons. Throughout the book, Rubinstein imparts the wonders of “blue spaces,” which are like green spaces, but even better for our mental health. Considering all of this as he paddles during a season where the temperature is breaking heat records and the air is thick with smoke from wildfires. What lessons can blue spaces teach us at a moment when the stakes are oh so high.
Rubinstein’s narrative is funny and engaging, and personal as he weaves his family’s story in among the broader history. (His mother, who tracks his locations, and sends worried texts, is one of the best characters in the book.) Nimbly, he blends memoir with reportage to make a story that flows beautifully, and is both hopeful and inspiring, and a must-read for those of us who love blue spaces already.
June 17, 2025
Mystery Books I’ve Loved This Spring
Widows and Orphans, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti
There is no joy quite like the second instalment of a mystery series being EVEN BETTER THAN THE FIRST, especially when the writers are your friends and you get to tell them so. I loved Bury The Lead, the first book in the Quill & Packet series about journalist Cat Conway’s relocation to a small cottage community where she works at the local paper, and the next book finds her covering a wellness conference where the supplements include murder. I was expecting a fun mystery, and was delighted to find this underlined by a biting critique of conspiracy quackery which reads as all too timely.
(Listen to the authors talking about their first book on the first season of the BOOKSPO podcast!)
Detective Aunty, by Uzma Jalalludin
Imagine a Miss Marple-type detective, a sharp eyed older woman whose invisibility permits her all kinds of access, except she’s a Muslim-Canadian on a cusp of a brand new life after her husband’s death who is called on to help prove her daughter’s innocence when she’s accused of killing her shady landlord in Scarborough, Ontario. Can Kausar Kaur crack the case? Jalalludin is best known for her romance novels, but as she told me in our recent conversation on BOOKSPO, she was a mystery reader first and this is the detective novel she’s been hoping to write since the beginning of career as a novelist.
A Most Puzzling Murder, by Bianca Marais
The never-boring Marais returns with her fourth novel, a book unlike anything you’ve ever read before, except maybe the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels that absorbed your attention during childhood, because A Most Puzzling Murder is just as engaging, the story of Destiny, a brilliant young woman who is alone in the world and hoping to find family when she encounters the Scruffmore family on their strange and isolated island. But it turns out that the stakes are higher than she thought, and it’s up Destiny to solve a series of puzzles (which are the reader solves alongside her) to solve a murder and figure out the mystery of her past.
Who By Water, by Greg Rhyno
Another second-book-in-the-series that didn’t let me down, Greg Rhyno’s Who By Water marks the return of Dame Polara, reluctant PI, except she’s a single mother now, which means the stakes are oh-so-high when her ex-husband is killed and Dame has apparently been framed for his murder. The novel’s vivid Toronto setting and the complicated character of its protagonist are just two of the reasons to pick this up (listen to Rhyno on BOOKSPO talking about how he went about writing a female character whose depiction wouldn’t make woman readers throw the book at the wall), and the great mystery at its heart will keep you gripped.
The Cost of a Hostage, by Iona Whishaw
And oh, I look forward to Iona Whisaw’s Lane Winslow mysteries so very much, with their setting and people that feel like home to me. I already wrote about The Cost of a Hostage here! Once again, Whishaw brings her readers a story with fascinating moral complexity and a healthy dose of feminism and progressive values. And yes, just enough peril that you’ll be totally gripped.
The Last Exile, by Sam Wiebe
And from my “On Our Radar” column at 49thShelf: My toxic trait is jumping right into mystery series midway through, a habit that horrifies some people, but I promise you that good writers design their books so it’s possible, and if I had to start at the beginning every time, I might never ever bother. But I’m so glad I did with Sam Wiebe’s Dave Wakeland series, and its latest installment, The Last Exiles, in which PI Wakeland returns to Vancouver to help prove the innocence of a rough-around-the-edges single mother accused of murdering a retired biker and his wife in their luxurious float home. It’s deftly plotted, absolutely gripping, and has real heart. (And yes, I will read the other books now!)
June 16, 2025
As Long as There are Stars Above You
When I was little, any time I spent not wondering just what exactly was going on on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Hell album, I was likely listening to The Beach Boys, and understanding everything. And I don’t mean it as a rebuke to Brian Wilson’s talent and genius that his music managed to speak to me on a visceral level when I was a toddler—lines like, “There’s a world where I can go/ And tell my secrets to/ In my room.” “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long?” “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip” [on my Big Wheel]. The Beach Boys sang songs about being true to your school, about wanting to go home. “And we’ll have fun fun fun til her Daddy takes the t-bird away.” When The Beach Boys sang, I felt like they were telling my story, even though I was landlocked in the middle of the continent and still years away from a driver’s license, with no understanding yet that a t-bird was not, in fact, a kind of bird. Or even what a bushy blonde hairdo looked like.
When I was little, I thought The Beach Boys was this obscure band that only me and my family knew about, their music playing on the boombox we had on our boat. I remember mentioning them once to one of my contemporaries—I was about six at the time—and her correcting me: They were called the BEASTIE boys. But not at my house they weren’t. My very first concert was The Beach Boys live at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, when I was about six years old, though I don’t think Brian Wilson was touring with them by then. When they returned to the pop charts in 1998 with “Kokomo” on the soundtrack from the movie Cocktail, we were ecstatic. I can’t help but think that a small part of the reason I’ve never done drugs is because “Drugs” was always the explanation my dad gave me for the more unlistenable Beach Boys songs, compared to their lush tones and gorgeous harmonies. I mean, what if I did LSD and ended up trapped inside “The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow)”?
The Beach Boys would also make way for my own adolescent zeitgeist, the harmonies of Brian Wilson’s daughters, Wendy and Carnie, along with Chynna Philips, whose songs are as much part of my musical DNA as their parents’, underlining the dadness of it all. So it seems fitting to have passed Father’s Day this year thinking about and listening to Brian Wilson, who died just a few days before. He was the dad’s dad, and his good vibrations will keep on vibrating even now that he’s gone.
June 12, 2025
Always the Smugness
As always, it’s the smugness that gets me in the end. If only I hadn’t valued my superiority as somebody who’d never click on one of those LOCAL STORE CLOSING AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS EVERYTHING MUST GO ads or buy a sack dress that turned out to be an actual sack. I knew enough not to buy soft pants that looked like hard pants, or tea that tastes like birthday cake. I could tell that the leather was really pleather and that the softest blanket other was anything but. I thought I was savvy, and I even was, a little bit. When the ad caught my eye—a basket for the bbq so that veggies don’t fall through the grill, just in time for Father’s Day—I googled the company in question. Where were they located? They had a street address in Edmonton. And possibly the red flag should have been the text I received from my bank after I made the credit card payment asking if I had actually made this purchase. But of course I had, and so I okayed it, and the transaction went through. SO SO STUPID. What was I thinking? $50 for a wire basket? Yes, it occurs to me now that the price is a little high. And then I got my shipping notification this morning—my $50 wire basket is on its way from ACTUAL WUHAN. But this was a reputable company, right? Um, no, there is another company with a similar name. The company that I’d just sent $50 to for a wire basket has social media accounts that are a month old and have no customer engagement. The address in Edmonton turned out to be for the Chinese dropshipping company will be handling the transport of my no doubt piece-of-crap FIFTY DOLLAR BASKET. I feel very dumb. Meta is a terrible company. And hopefully I’ve learned my lesson and will never do anything quite this idiotic again. [Editor’s note: she totally will do something this idiotic again, but hopefully not this precise thing.)
June 11, 2025
How to Lose Your Mother, by Molly Jong-Fast
I saw myself in Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, specifically the part where she writes about how strangers project onto her their feelings about her novelist mother, a burden that she has born in good spirits, all things considered. When I published an essay about her mother’s iconic 1973 novel Fear of Flying way back when, I tagged Jong-Fast in a Twitter post, and I think she even shared it. Although in the years since, Jong-Fast has come to mean an awful lot to me as a person in her own right, in the last five years that I’ve been listening to her podcast, which continues to be a balm to my anxiety and has helped me make (some) sense of the chaos of our era, but then it turns out that making sense of chaos is something Molly Jong-Fast has been doing for a very long time.
And this novel is a document of that process, a memoir of her childhood born to famous artistic parents for whom “parenting” was not a verb, and of the neglect she experienced as her mother chased fame and ignored her addictions, and also a memoir of Jong-Fast’s very difficult year as her mother’s dementia advanced and Jong-Fast’s husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, among other heartbreaks and calamities. Sober since age 19, Jong-Fast has designed a very different life from her mother’s, marrying at 24 and finding joy as the parent to three children, and now as her mother begins to decline (and her stepfather is dying from Parkinson’s concurrently), Jong-Fast resents the time she’s forced to spent caring for parents whom she feels never cared for her.
I really appreciated this honest portrayal of the realities of eldercare, and Jong-Fast’s awareness of her limits, her refusal to be a martyr. I also love the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship she constructs, that it’s all love all the same, even with the failures of mother and daughter both at various points in the relationship. That love is a multitudinous thing, but also that person has the right to own their own soul, their own story, which was the point of Fear of Flying after all, a lesson that perhaps is just one of many gifts (along with the burdens) that Molly Jong-Fast inherited from her imperfect mother.
