No Girls Allowed, by Natalie Corbett Sampson, follows ten-year-old Tina Marie Forbes and her family as they fight for her right to play hockey. The Forbes family moves from Toronto to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and are excited to get settled in the town. Early on, Tina reflects, “all you need to do to make friends is play sports. Join a team and there’s a bunch of them ready to meet .…
Award-winning author Sonia Saikely’s newest novel, The Allspice Bath is an enjoyable, yet emotional story (almost like a modern folk tale, now that I think about it) about a Lebanese family living in Ottawa in the 70s-90s. Youssef and Samira Azar have recently immigrated to Canada from Lebanon with their three daughters. Youssef runs a corner grocery store. He speaks little English, so he relies on his daughters to help him with the business.…
Lisa de Nikolits is the author of 2016’s The Nearly Girl, 2015’s Through the Cracks She Fell, and the forthcoming No Fury Like That, (September 15th release date) all published by Inanna Publications of Toronto. As you will discover, Lisa is one busy woman; she not only writes, she designs magazines, blogs and maintains her own websites and social media sites, loves to explore abandoned buildings, has produced a self-help cookbook and claims she is a power reader.…
“Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth
Spin me down the long ages: let them sing the song.” – Ian Anderson
Sylvia Drodge of St. John’s NL (the former Sylvia Bolfe-Carter of Ireland) has been temporarily relegated to a senior’s residence, thanks to failing eyesight and a fall that resulted in a fractured hip.…
Publications of Toronto produces consistently excellent titles– fiction, poetry and non-fiction written with “perspectives that have the potential not just to educate or entertain, but to excite, enhance and motivate your passion for change”. The following two titles are no exception. First is the novella What Happened to Tom, the second is All My Fallen Angelas, a collection of short fiction.…
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 and magical realism, and interrupted by photographs and by the voice of a bear, Bear War-den explores themes of personal and ecological loss, trauma, and of women and non-human animals dealing with oppression within a male-dominated, and often paramilitary-like Parks Management system. …
Back in High School English class, we had to read Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, which I did enjoy reading, although looking back it might have been too mature a book for teenagers to study in depth. At any rate, any book with a strong and overburdened female living back in the late 1800s/early 1900s is fated to be compared with her beleaguered Manawaka heroines.…
