My review copy of The Great Lunenburglary arrived with a handwritten note from the author, “Please enjoy this silly book.” Clearly, author Bryn Pottie has no literary illusions. In fact, on a recent podcast he describes his target reader for his debut novel as anyone who’s “read less than a handful of books since high …
Jami Gant is in her late 20s; she has a degree in early childhood education, teaches yoga, and designs athletic wear. In the past few months, she has lost her fiancé, her yoga studio, and her apartment, thanks to her now former fiancé, all because: “some girl who looked better in yoga pants—pants I designed and sewed, by the way—walked in.”
Astrid, Aghast is the sixth book by Ottawa-area writer Ian Roy, his third collection of short stories. It’s a substantial volume containing thirty stories, a beautiful edition from Gaspereau Press, made to feel all the more substantial by the Zephyr Antique Laid stock it is printed on. The book is given a classic feel, which …
In Billie Builds a RoboCorn, the debut picture book from Toronto filmmaker José Lourenço, Billie and her father must move when her father gets a new job, and Billie must go to a new school, which is “very unfair.” Not to be kept down, the “relentlessly resourceful” Billie has a plan: she will build her …
The title of Jaclyn Desforges’s new book of short fiction, Weird Babies, is absolutely appropriate. These stories are about childhood and motherhood, and they are strange. Strange and delightful, that is: the characters and their experiences are situated to one side of what we might consider normal, ranging from speculative fiction to something close to …
You hear it often enough: the past clings and refuses to let go. Or how it echoes into the present with the crippling fear of repetition. It’s almost like condemnation, scorn and a warning all wrapped in one. Too much reminiscing about the past leaves you blind to the present, but forgetting leaves you susceptible …
Complex female characters? Check. Historical revolution? Check. Challenging themes of race and class? Check. Opera? Check! The World So Wide by Zilla Jones is a beefy read in more ways than one, spanning decades, countries, nationalities, lovers, and stages. It really has everything, but most importantly it has Felicity, the main character. Felicity Alexander, the …
Though utopian fiction is far from uniform, we might modify Tolstoy’s famous dictum about unhappy families to say that every work of post-apocalyptic speculative dystopia must be unhappy, too, in its own way, and that the relationship and power dynamics its author sees persisting in the world after collapse must be particular to their own experience, their privileges, deprivations, and insight into what is unsustainable about the now.
We wandered throughout four seasons of magical short stories, in the landscapes of both Western and Eastern Canada.
As in the piece that provides the book’s title, when Barbara meets her Austrian cousin Freddy as an adult, much has changed in the interim.
The story examines what it means to us to share the same blood with someone, or not, what it means to take it from someone, how we can long to give it to someone, how women are taxed of it their whole lives.
In Stephanie Makes a Scene, we meet her decades later and Rory takes the back seat. It is thrilling to connect the stories and see her develop into a promising older playwright, returning to Landers Cove, Nova Scotia at sixty-seven years old.
How do soldiers and first responders cope with the trauma they have witnessed after they return home? That question lies at the heart of the story for Brent van Staalduinen’s The Peace Thieves.
Heroine Belinda Bishop’s move back home was not under the best of circumstances. When she graduated from high school she left Little Blue Harbour vowing never to step foot in it again.
One of the first things that strike is how novel the literal colour. Every title is blue and the endpapers are blue sky and cumulous clouds continuing from the cover.
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