Seventeen years ago, something came between a group of university friends. This particular weekend though they are reunited as one of the group, Alfred, has bought an old house in their university town. He renovated it into The Hitchcock Hotel, a homage to his favourite director, which is now celebrating its first anniversary.
As she blows out the candles on her thirtieth birthday cake in the opening of Lucid, Charlie Marin reveals herself to be the antagonistic force driving Jenna Boholij’s literary thriller.
Charlie has a successful job, compassionate family and friends, and a boyfriend in Winnipeg, but she cannot move past the death of her twin Cara, who died at age thirteen. The details of how she died are hidden away, but this loss makes Charlie numb to her circumstances and all possibilities for her future.
The daughter finds her mother’s notebook, sewn into her pillow, and begins to investigate a figure from her revolutionary past: a man named Paul Polotsky, who lived in Paris in the 1950s. Back in Paris, she manages to track him down and begins to follow him, her life narrowing on this sole focus. What, exactly, was the relationship between her mother and Polotsky?
Bird Suit’s fictional town of Port Peter could be any number of small towns on a lake, overrun with summer tourists buying ice cream and cheap souvenirs on the boardwalk, filling up the local pubs and motels, knocking up the local girls – before disappearing in September. There are, however, two things that make Port Peter special: its perfect peaches and its Birds. “The women of the town tell one another about the Birds in secret… When a Port Peter girl gets pregnant by a tourist boy, a woman in her life gives her all the information she needs to know.”
While unfortunately we already know what it looks like when those who aren’t men are denied rights, and what it looks like when hard-won rights are being eroded, Autokrator takes the chilling thought experiment in a more extreme direction: what if women had no rights at all?
When Eve, new co-owner of a house on Heritage Lane, number to be determined… opens the door to a sweet family looking to revisit the father’s family home, she desperately wants to say no and worked up the courage, and fake use of her partner, to say it.
She adds a fresh twist on the typical crime fiction novel by adding a vampyr narrative, exploring the dangers of colonization and the bigotry that can sometimes lie inside small-town communities.
It is both a science fiction/dystopian book about poetry, but also includes some classic poetry reimagined. It really is genre defying, and it is necessary to suspend your belief and open your mind while reading this one.
The title The Years Shall Run like Rabbits is from a W.H. Auden poem, but that might be your last connection to Earth as we know it in this outwardly tale.
A fan of dark mysteries, especially when they have good family characters with depth and good conflict, I was eager to dive in.
The Angel of Indian Lake is the third book of the Indian Lake Trilogy, and we can tell that Jones had definite plans for his final installment to go out with a bang.
Grey Dog falls right in line with my current literary obsession: creeping, unsettling, psychological horror. I was ready to be disturbed, and I was, in the best way.
© 2024 | THE Miramichi Reader
Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
