October 31, 2025
Monster Reads for Halloween
I read Frankenstein with my family this year, and we liked it a lot (unlike, say, The Iliad, which you might recall we ditched for Anastasia Krupnik, by Lois Lowry, which went over much better). And because the only biography of Mary Shelley I’d read until now has been the picture book Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein, by Linda Bailey, gorgeously illustrated by Julia Sarda, I was excited to find a copy of a Mary Shelley bio by none other than Muriel Spark at the Victoria College book sale last month to fill in the gaps in my Mary Shelley knowledge—although Spark’s book was a source for Bailey’s and you’d be surprised at how much she managed to cover with a pretty minimal word count.
Bailey didn’t include what a rat bastard Lord Byron was, however—impregnating Mary’s stepsister and then stealing the child away to live in a convent because he didn’t want his child raised by athiests, and then the baby died. Oh my god, so many babies died, Mary losing three of her children. And Percy Shelley died in a shipwreck. Meanwhile, Lord Byron was telling everybody that Shelley had knocked up their maid, which wasn’t even true, and Byron fought against Mary’s attempts to clear her husband’s name because those attempts would have outed him a vicious gossip. 200 year old scandal is more fascinating than I thought it would be, and reading it as filtered through Spark’s lens (she doesn’t think much of these people’s godless ways!)
The biography is divided into two parts, and I’m near the end of the biographical details. The next part is a critical assessment of her literary work. Maybe it’s time I read something by Mary Shelley other than Frankenstein…
October 31, 2025
Dead Books
Happy Halloween! Seems like a good day to talk about DEAD BOOKS.
I went to see Lily King at the Toronto Public Library this week, which was a great experience, although it made me realize I’d been overthinking things a bit when I wrote my October essay about King’s latest, Heart the Lover, but I stand by all my exuberance. (What can I say. I’d just finished my period. It’s always a wild ride.) And one of the parts of King’s conversation with Claire Cameron that I particularly enjoyed was when she mentioned her “dead books,” in particular the novel she’d been writing in 2020 before Heart the Lover walked in and stole the show. It was a book about a dead senator, and it opened with a body, and she’d really loved writing about that dead body…until she didn’t anymore. And she says that there are people who ask her about this book now, “Aren’t you sad?” That she’d put all this work into a project that never went anywhere, a book that will never see the light of the day.
And she said that she wasn’t sad at all. In fact, she was thrilled, because she didn’t want to work on that novel anymore, and this reminded me of the relief I felt at the beginning of this month, having just completed a marathon in September to nearly double the length of my manuscript, writing 2000 words a day. Reaching 70,000 words total, and all I could think when I was finished was, “Oh, wow! I never need to work on that story again.” Which seems a bit foolish, I know, to have spent all that time in September working on the book, but if I hadn’t, I might never have known. And I needed to know. Even though I think I knew already, but I really had to know for sure.
I started writing a new book last week—it’s 1462 words right now. (See more about my mountain here.) And while it’s early days (and early words), and while that word count does seem paltry compared to 70,000, I’m so happy to be writing it, and I’ve got no qualms about the dead book behind me. Which might be resurrected one day when I’m finally ready to write it properly, but it doesn’t have to be. I know that I will learned a thing or two from writing/failing to write that dead book. I know too that I wasn’t in a position to write the book I’m writing now (the fun book, the living book) until I’d spent time going through the final edits of Definitely Thriving, which put me deep into that book and made me realize just how much I want to write another set in the same universe.
Our dead books don’t have to haunt us, is what I’m really saying here. And when they don’t, that only underlines how much they were never meant to be.
October 29, 2025
6:40 to Montreal, by Eva Jurczyk
After establishing herself writing thrillers set in libraries (she’s a librarian by day!), Eva Jurczyk leaves the stacks behind in her third novel, 6:40 to Montreal, a locked room mystery set on a train that comes by its literary allusions honestly—the protagonist is a novelist called Agatha, a character is the first literary Dorcas I’ve encountered since reading The Affair at Styles, the setting of a stopped train during a terrible winter storm has Murder on the Orient Express as its precedent. But don’t think that all this means that Jurczyk’s novel is in any way derivative—instead, it’s a deeply layered work that manages to be dark and twisty, strange and absurd, gross and bloody, and also richly poignant and hilarious at the very same time.
The layers are peeled back over the course of a day that novelist Agatha St. John was supposed to spend sans WiFi on the train from Toronto to Montreal travelling in first class, a writing retreat on wheels that’s a gift from her husband who knows that she’s been struggling to write the follow-up to the runaway bestseller that changed her life. But when a terrible storm strands the train in the wilds outside Cobourg, Ontario, as the snow piles up, and then a passenger dies, Agatha and everybody else in first class—including an unflappable customer service agent, a man who appears to be a lumberjack, a doting mother and the young man who’s her son, and finally Cyanne, the wannabe yoga influencer obsessively stalking Agatha since her book came out who’s convinced that Agatha stole her life for fiction, which she’s not entirely wrong about—is confined to the car with the body and no phone signal, a situation that sends every one of them over the edge, and not all of them are going to get out alive.
And it turns out that Agatha too has something to hide, the plan for her arrival in Montreal not remotely what her husband had in mind, and also that her writer’s block has been courtesy of a harrowing diagnosis that’s sent an current of dread through every aspect of her—in particular her relationship to her young son. And what does it mean that she’s using the carnage around her now for creative fodder? Is Agatha actually the thief that Cyanne accuses her of being, stealing other people’s stories to claim as her own?
6:40 to Montreal is a rollicking ride, wild and a bit nuts, all the while weighted with real emotional heft, and sprinkled with the most wicked and wonderful humour (Blundstones fans, leave your feelings at the door). In a genre too wedded to templates and tropes, Jurczyk’s thrillers read as off-kilter in the very best way, and this latest is no exception.
October 28, 2025
Reading Habits
Saturday happiness is plenty of books coverage in my Toronto Star, and even happier happiness is my own book (WHAT??) mentioned in formidable company—along with 12 copies of the Bible and Archie comics!—as Ann Y.K. Choi shares her reading habits and celebrates the release of her new novel, ALL THINGS UNDER THE MOON. Thanks to Ann for saying lovely things about ASKING FOR A FRIEND and including it in your round-up. And if you know Ann, you’ll know that this kindness and generosity is most characteristic. I’m so looking forward to reading her book!
Read the whole piece here (gift link).
October 24, 2025
The Longest Night, by Lauren Carter
Okay, this book was totally bananas. And also made me very uncomfortable, and disoriented, and I had no idea what trajectory the narrative was going to take, which put me in league with the protagonist, but I also could not put it down, and it was all so fascinatingly mind-bending and satisfying that I think I actually loved it. Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night begins in Minnesota on the winter solstice in 2021 when Ash Hayes finds herself locked out in the frigid cold after escaping another one of her parents’ fights the night before her best friend’s father’s funeral. She’s left her phone inside, her frantic knocking brings no response, and she’s not dressed for the elements, frostbite already setting in, and so it seems like her only choice is to make it to a distant neighbour’s place, and the next thing she knows, she’s waking up in the strangest place.
It’s a house like something out of a time warp, no modern technology, the kitchen appliances are olive green. There are boxes and boxes of stuff, the windows are sealed, her clothes are gone, her hand is bandaged, and the only thing she can find to keep warm is fur stole still with its fox’s head. And it’s here where she meets Lucille and the doctor, the curious people who seem to be holding Ash hostage with especially nefarious intentions that won’t become clear for some time and will culminate in a horrifying act of sexual abuse.
When Ash manages to escape their clutches (although not for long—they’ll come and bring her back again) she discovers that the weird house and its inhabitants are only the beginning of bizarre happenings, for it seems that every time she ventures outside, it’s the morning of September 11, 2001, a day of great importance for the entire world, but for Ash’s life in particular—it’s a day that set events in motion that would lead not only to the death of the baby brother Ash never got to meet (she was born in June of the following year), but also to the death of Ash’s best friend’s father, Frank, who would take his own life after years of PTSD following tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11. So is here her chance to alter fate and save the people she loves? But what about the laws of time travel, which Ash is aware of after years of watching TV with her grandmother, not to mention the beginning of her university studies in astrophysics? Should she adhere to those rules and try not to change future? How does the future still manage to seem so random and unknown even when you have an idea of what happens next? And how did Ash get herself into this time loop? Is there any way that she’ll be able to defeat the evil doctor with his omnipotent powers and get back to her time?
There is tough stuff in this novel, parts of the abuse which Ash is subject to that is difficult to read, and yet Carter balances this with the real love and warmth in her life from her best friend and her grandmother, and also with fascinating questions about fate and destiny, borrowing all kinds of fun time travel tropes from popular culture. (At one point, Lucille and the doctor show up at Ash’s parents’ place with a photo of her, asking, “Has anybody seen this girl?”) At a certain point I was fully invested, buckled in for the wild ride, and I just really hoped that Carter would find a satisfying way to resolve this bonkers story of time loops and quantum leaps—which she absolutely does.
October 22, 2025
Pick a Colour, by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel Pick a Colour—following four poetry collections, and her Giller-winning story collection How to Pronounce Knife—is a short book that packs a real punch, narrated by Ning, an ex-boxer, now proprietor of a nail salon at which all the staff wear the same name-tag, “Susan,” just so that the worker that clients ask for will always be available, and the clients never know the difference anyway. The novel takes place over the course of a workday, Ning treating the narrative as carefully as she engages with her clients, providing just enough extraneous detail, but nothing more than she needs to, her narrative voice guarded and spiky, careful and strategic. The sense that she’s a fighter remains long after she’s put her boxing gloves away, but now she’s fighting to run her business in a tough and competitive environment, where customers need to be brought in and turned over, and the polish has to be watered down in order to make it last.
Pick a Colour is written in English, but there are only a few instances of spoken English in the book, uttered by clients. Otherwise, the dialogue in the novel, while shown in English, actually takes place in Bing’s own language (which I presume to be Lao, though Thammavongsa does not specify), the nail salon’s clients as oblivious to the context as they are to everything else going on around them—although there are a few instances where they nearly twig to the fact that they’re being made fun of, but Bing and her staff will never admit it (and let’s face it, they have it coming).
Pick a Colour is a hardheaded narrative of tough stuff, underlined by fierce love, humour, kindness, and humanity. One day in a nail salon, as crafted by Thammavongsa, is also a meditation on community, beauty, gender, class, and care.
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 17, 2025
Learning
Brunswick Avenue, north of Bloor, has just been resurfaced, which makes flying down the bike lane there there smoothest and most exhilarating experience, and I was doing so not long ago on the most beautiful day (we’ve had a lot of those lately), speeding past the small group gathered at the Little Free Library, perusing the titles available, and there are always people there, a fact which, along with the blue blue sky, underlined me to how just how much the world was beneficent and people were good. And I felt a familiar compulsion to climb up on an online soapbox to declare this fact, because I’m still not entirely over the instinct that a feeling isn’t truly felt until it’s been broadcast on the internet. And thinking about this made me realize how much of my anxiety over the last ten years or more stemmed from me feeling responsible for the world in this way, in proving that hope was reasonable and that we were worth fighting for.
Which is weird, in a way, because doesn’t me feeling like I had to work so hard to make it true suggest I didn’t wholly believe it myself? The other evolution in my thinking since then, in addition to that I’m not responsible for proving the goodness of the world, is that that world actually isn’t good. Or isn’t just good. The way I’d wanted it to be, like managing to get a snapshot, A HA! There, you see, demonstrable evidence! I read a book earlier this year where the author reflected on how she used to think that we were all *this close* to getting on the right track politically, and then everything would be fine after that, and I could so relate to that naivete. And what I understand now is that the world is brutal, terrible, wondrous, perfect, violent, loving, balanced, unfair, beautiful, ugly, predictable, explosive, safe, dangerous, and miraculous all at the same time. The world (and its human inhabitants) are so many things, but “perfectable” isn’t one of them, and maybe I’m learning to accept this? That the world will always be good and bad in equal measure, and we can still love it all the same.
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.
