Bill Arnott’s Beat: Independents’ Day

Independent bookstores shouldn’t exist. Brick-and-mortar bibliophile havens are retail models waiting to be business school case studies, “Why These Can’t Work.” TV narcissi could bleat indefinitely as to why they’d never invest in such ventures. But they do exist. And despite every reason why they shouldn’t, they thrive.

Two Novels of Le Grand Dérangement

The Great Deportation or Le Grand Dérangement, of the Acadian peoples, began in 1755 in the area now called the Bay of Fundy. Homes and farms were burned, and many of the 14,000 inhabitants of Acadia were herded aboard British ships and sent off to the Thirteen Colonies in what is now the New England states. The following two novels, both suitable for mature young readers on up, focus on this time of upheaval and the separation of families.

Black Cop: My 36 years in police work, and my career ending experiences with official racism by Calvin Lawrence, With Miles Howe

The title and subtitle pretty much sum up what this book is about: being black and facing systemic racism in two police organizations in a 36-year career. Calvin Lawrence was born in 1949 in Yarmouth and raised in Halifax. His parents (he was actually raised by his Uncle and Aunt) were a mixed-race couple living …

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Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Note: For the past three summers, Naomi of the Consumed by Ink book review blog and I have been swapping a book review. This year I reviewed The Afrikaner by Arianna Dagnino for her site, and she has written a review of the critically-acclaimed book by Jamaican-Canadian author Zalika Reid-Benta, Frying Plantain (2019, House of …

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Piau: Journey to the Promised Land by Bruce Murray

[dropcap]It [/dropcap]is encouraging to see more books (either fictional or non-fictional) being written about the Acadians and their lives and way of life before and after 1755. That was the year of “Le Grand Dérangement” when they were the victims of cultural genocide by the occupying British command and put on ships to be dispersed …

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Rachel Bryant

The Rachel Bryant Interview

Rachel Bryant is the author of The Homing Place (2017, Wilfred Laurier Press) a book about early settler and Indigenous literature and how we can “listen” to what they have to say today so that we can better understand both distinct groups. Already it has been shortlisted for several awards: Short-listed, New Brunswick Book Awards …

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The Mike Martin Interview

[dropcap]The [/dropcap]Sgt. Windflower Mystery series is a series of cozy mysteries set in the small Newfoundland town of Grand Bank where Sgt. Winston Windflower is the top cop in the RCMP detachment there. The latest instalment in the series, A Tangled Web (2017, Baico Publishing), has just been released. It begins innocuously enough: “Life doesn’t …

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Bear War-den by Vivian Demuth

Inanna Publications always has something different to read, so I often look to them for a book that is a change of pace from the norm. While browsing their website, I noticed Bear War-den (2015) by Vivian Demuth. In the brief description on the Inanna site it stated: “Told in an experimental style that mixes realism …

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The Rick Revelle Interview

Editor’s note: there is a more recent interview with Rick Revelle here. It was by sheer happenstance that I came across Rick Revelle and his two historical novels: I am Algonquin and Algonquin Springs (2013 and 2015, Dundurn Press). I was in Kingston (Ontario) visiting family when an article in that day’s edition of the Kingston …

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